Slavery the Trouble-Maker—Break-Up of the Whig Party and Rise of the Republican—The Key—Sickle’s Tragedy—Brooks and Sumner—Life at Washington in the Fifties

I

Whether the War of Sections—as it should be called, because, except in Eastern Tennessee and in three of the Border States, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri, it was nowise a civil war—could have been averted must ever remain a question of useless speculation. In recognizing the institution of African slavery, with no provision for its ultimate removal, the Federal Union set out embodying the seeds of certain trouble. The wiser heads of the Constitutional Convention perceived this plainly enough; its dissonance to the logic of their movement; on the sentimental side its repugnancy; on the practical side its doubtful economy; and but for the tobacco growers and the cotton planters it had gone by the board. The North soon found slave labor unprofitable and rid itself of slavery. Thus, restricted to the South, it came to represent in the Southern mind a “right” which the South was bound to defend.

Mr. Slidell told me in Paris that Louis Napoleon had once said to him in answer to his urgency for the recognition of the Southern Confederacy: “I have talked the matter over with Lord Palmerston and we are both of the opinion that as long as African slavery exists at the South, France and England cannot recognize the Confederacy. They do not demand its instant abolition. But if you put it in course of abatement and final abolishment through a term of years—I do not care how many—we can intervene to some purpose. As matters stand we dare not go before a European congress with such a proposition.”

Mr. Slidell passed it up to Richmond. Mr. Davis passed it on to the generals in the field. The response he received on every hand was the statement that it would disorganize and disband the Confederate Armies. Yet we are told, and it is doubtless true, that scarcely one Confederate soldier in ten actually owned a slave.

Thus do imaginings become theories, and theories resolve themselves into claims; and interests, however mistaken, rise to the dignity of prerogatives.

II

The fathers had rather a hazy view of the future. I was witness to the decline and fall of the old Whig Party and the rise of the Republican Party. There was a brief lull in sectional excitement after the Compromise Measures of 1850, but the overwhelming defeat of the Whigs in 1852 and the dominancy of Mr. Jefferson Davis in the cabinet of Mr. Pierce brought the agitation back again. Mr. Davis was a follower of Mr. Calhoun—though it may be doubted whether Mr. Calhoun would ever have been willing to go to the length of secession—and Mr. Pierce being by temperament a Southerner as well as in opinions a pro-slavery Democrat, his Administration fell under the spell of the ultra Southern wing of the party. The Kansas-Nebraska Bill was originally harmless enough, but the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which on Mr. Davis’ insistence was made a part of it, let slip the dogs of war.

In Stephen A. Douglas was found an able and pliant instrument. Like Clay, Webster and Calhoun before him, Judge Douglas had the presidential bee in his bonnet. He thought the South would, as it could, nominate and elect him President.

Personally he was a most lovable man—rather too convivial—and for a while in 1852 it looked as though he might be the Democratic nominee. His candidacy was premature, his backers overconfident and indiscreet.

“I like Douglas and am for him,” said Buck Stone, a member of Congress and delegate to the National Democratic Convention from Kentucky, “though I consider him a good deal of a damn fool.” Pressed for a reason he continued; “Why, think of a man wanting to be President at forty years of age, and obliged to behave himself for the rest of his life! I wouldn’t take the job on any such terms.”

The proposed repeal of the Missouri Compromise opened up the slavery debate anew and gave it increased vitality. Hell literally broke loose among the political elements. The issues which had divided Whigs and Democrats went to the rear, while this one paramount issue took possession of the stage. It was welcomed by the extremists of both sections, a very godsend to the beaten politicians led by Mr. Seward. Rampant sectionalism was at first kept a little in the background. There were on either side concealments and reserves. Many patriotic men put the Union above slavery or antislavery. But the two sets of rival extremists had their will at last, and in seven short years deepened and embittered the contention to the degree that disunion and war seemed, certainly proved, the only way out of it.

The extravagance of the debates of those years amazes the modern reader. Occasionally when I have occasion to recur to them I am myself nonplussed, for they did not sound so terrible at the time. My father was a leader of the Union wing of the Democratic Party—headed in 1860 the Douglas presidential ticket in Tennessee—and remained a Unionist during the War of Sections. He broke away from Pierce and retired from the editorship of the Washington Union upon the issue of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, to which he was opposed, refusing the appointment of Governor of Oregon, with which the President sought to placate him, though it meant his return to the Senate of the United States in a year or two, when he and Oregon’s delegate in Congress, Gen. Joseph Lane—the Lane of the Breckenridge and Lane ticket of 1860—had brought the territory of Oregon in as a state.

I have often thought just where I would have come in and what might have happened to me if he had accepted the appointment and I had grown to manhood on the Pacific Coast. As it was I attended a school in Philadelphia—the Protestant Episcopal Academy—came home to Tennessee in 1856, and after a season with private tutors found myself back in the national capital in 1858.

It was then that I began to nurse some ambitions of my own. I was going to be a great man of letters. I was going to write histories and dramas and romances and poetry. But as I had set up for myself I felt in honor bound meanwhile to earn my own living.

III

I take it that the early steps of every man to get a footing may be of interest when fairly told. I sought work in New York with indifferent success. Mr. Raymond of the Times, hearing me play the piano at which from childhood I had received careful instruction, gave me a job as “musical critic” during the absence of Mr. Seymour, the regular critic. I must have done my work acceptably, since I was not fired. It included a report of the debut of my boy-and-girl companion, Adelina Patti, when she made her first appearance in opera at the Academy of Music. But, as the saying is, I did not “catch on.” There might be a more promising opening in Washington, and thither I repaired.

The Daily States had been established there by John P. Heiss, who with Thomas Ritchie had years before established the Washington Union. Roger A. Pryor was its nominal editor. But he soon took himself home to his beloved Virginia and came to Congress, and the editorial writing on the States was being done by Col. A. Dudley Mann, later along Confederate commissioner to France, preceding Mr. Slidell.

Colonel Mann wished to work incognito. I was taken on as a kind of go-between and, as I may say, figurehead, on the strength of being my father’s son and a very self-confident young gentleman, and began to get my newspaper education in point of fact as a kind of fetch-and-carry for Major Heiss. He was a practical newspaper man who had started the Union at Nashville as well as the Union at Washington and the Crescent—maybe it was the Delta—at New Orleans; and for the rudiments of newspaper work I could scarcely have had a better teacher.

Back of Colonel Mann as a leader writer on the States was a remarkable woman. She was Mrs. Jane Casneau, the wife of Gen. George Casneau, of Texas, who had a claim before Congress. Though she was unknown to fame, Thomas A. Benton used to say that she had more to do with making and ending the Mexican War than anybody else.

Somewhere in the early thirties she had gone with her newly wedded husband, an adventurous Yankee by the name of Storm, to the Rio Grande and started a settlement they called Eagle Pass. Storm died, the Texas outbreak began, and the young widow was driven back to San Antonio, where she met and married Casneau, one of Houston’s lieutenants, like herself a New Yorker. She was sent by Polk with Pillow and Trist to the City of Mexico and actually wrote the final treaty. It was she who dubbed William Walker “the little gray-eyed man of destiny,” and put the nickname “Old Fuss and Feathers” on General Scott, whom she heartily disliked.

A braver, more intellectual woman never lived. She must have been a beauty in her youth; was still very comely at fifty; but a born insurrecto and a terror with her pen. God made and equipped her for a filibuster. She possessed infinite knowledge of Spanish-American affairs, looked like a Spanish woman, and wrote and spoke the Spanish language fluently. Her obsession was the bringing of Central America into the Federal Union. But she was not without literary aspirations and had some literary friends. Among these was Mrs. Southworth, the novelist, who had a lovely home in Georgetown, and, whatever may be said of her works and articles, was a lovely woman. She used to take me to visit this lady. With Major Heiss she divided my newspaper education, her part of it being the writing part. Whatever I may have attained in that line I largely owe to her. She took great pains with me and mothered me in the absence of my own mother, who had long been her very dear friend. To get rid of her, or rather her pen, Mr. Buchanan gave General Casneau, when the Douglas schism was breaking out, a Central American mission, and she and he were lost by shipwreck on their way to this post, somewhere in Caribbean waters.

My immediate yokemate on the States was John Savage, “Jack,” as he was commonly called; a brilliant Irishman, who with Devin Reilley and John Mitchel and Thomas Francis Meagher, his intimates, and Joseph Brennan, his brother-in-law, made a pretty good Irishman of me. They were 48 men, with literary gifts of one sort and another, who certainly helped me along with my writing, but, as matters fell out, did not go far enough to influence my character, for they were a wild lot, full of taking enthusiasm and juvenile decrepitude of judgment, ripe for adventures and ready for any enterprise that promised fun and fighting.

Between John Savage and Mrs. Casneau I had the constant spur of commendation and assistance as well as affection. I passed all my spare time in the Library of Congress and knew its arrangements at least as well as Mr. Meehan, the librarian, and Robert Kearon, the assistant, much to the surprise of Mr. Spofford, who in 1861 succeeded Mr. Meehan as librarian.

Not long after my return to Washington Col. John W. Forney picked me up, and I was employed in addition to my not very arduous duties on the States to write occasional letters from Washington to the Philadelphia Press. Good fortune like ill fortune rarely comes singly. Without anybody’s interposition I was appointed to a clerkship, a real “sinecure,” in the Interior Department by Jacob Thompson, the secretary, my father’s old colleague in Congress. When the troubles of 1860-61 rose I was literally doing “a land-office business,” with money galore and to spare. Somehow, I don’t know how, I contrived to spend it, though I had no vices, and worked like a hired man upon my literary hopes and newspaper obligations.

Life in Washington under these conditions was delightful. I did not know how my heart was wrapped up in it until I had to part from it. My father stood high in public esteem. My mother was a leader in society. All doors were open to me. I had many friends. Going back to Tennessee in the midsummer of 1861, via Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, there happened a railway break and a halt of several hours at a village on the Ohio. I strolled down to the river and sat myself upon the brink, almost despairing—nigh heartbroken—when I began to feel an irresistible fascination about the swift-flowing stream. I leaped to my feet and ran away; and that is the only thought of suicide that I can recall.

IV

Mrs. Clay, of Alabama, in her “Belle of the Fifties” has given a graphic picture of life in the national capital during the administrations of Pierce and Buchanan. The South was very much in the saddle. Pierce, as I have said, was Southern in temperament, and Buchanan, who to those he did not like or approve had, as Arnold Harris said, “a winning way of making himself hateful,” was an aristocrat under Southern and feminine influence.

I was fond of Mr. Pierce, but I could never endure Mr. Buchanan. His very voice gave offense to me. Directed by a periodical publication to make a sketch of him to accompany an engraving, I did my best on it.

Jacob Thompson, the Secretary of the Interior, said to me: “Now, Henry, here’s your chance for a foreign appointment.”

I now know that my writing was clumsy enough and my attempt to play the courtier clumsier still. Nevertheless, as a friend of my father and mother “Old Buck” might have been a little more considerate than he was with a lad trying to please and do him honor. I came away from the White House my amour propre wounded, and though I had not far to go went straight into the Douglas camp.

Taking nearly sixty years to think it over I have reached the conclusion that Mr. Buchanan was the victim of both personal and historic injustice. With secession in sight his one aim was to get out of the White House before the scrap began. He was of course on terms of intimacy with all the secession leaders, especially Mr. Slidell, of Louisiana, like himself a Northerner by birth, and Mr. Mason, a thick-skulled, ruffle-shirted Virginian. It was not in him or in Mr. Pierce, with their antecedents and associations, to be uncompromising Federalists. There was no clear law to go on. Moderate men were in a muck of doubt just what to do. With Horace Greeley Mr. Buchanan was ready to say “Let the erring sisters go.” This indeed was the extent of Mr. Pierce’s pacifism during the War of Sections.

A new party risen upon the remains of the Whig Party—the Republican Party—was at the door and coming into power. Lifelong pro-slavery Democrats could not look on with equanimity, still less with complaisance, and doubtless Pierce and Buchanan to the end of their days thought less of the Republicans than of the Confederates. As a consequence Republican writers have given quarter to neither of them.

It will not do to go too deeply into the account of those days. The times were out of joint. I knew of two Confederate generals who first tried for commissions in the Union Army; gallant and good fellows too; but they are both dead and their secret shall die with me. I knew likewise a famous Union general who was about to resign his commission in the army to go with the South but was prevented by his wife, a Northern woman, who had obtained of Mr. Lincoln a brigadier’s commission.

V

In 1858 a wonderful affair came to pass. It was Mrs. Senator Gwin’s fancy dress ball, written of, talked of, far and wide. I did not get to attend this. My costume was prepared—a Spanish cavalier, Mrs. Casneau’s doing—when I fell ill and had with bitter disappointment to read about it next day in the papers. I was living at Willard’s Hotel, and one of my volunteer nurses was Mrs. Daniel E. Sickles, a pretty young thing who was soon to become the victim of a murder and world scandal. Her husband was a member of the House from New York, and during his frequent absences I used to take her to dinner. Mr. Sickles had been Mr. Buchanan’s Secretary of Legation in London, and both she and he were at home in the White House.

She was an innocent child. She never knew what she was doing, and when a year later Sickles, having killed her seducer—a handsome, unscrupulous fellow who understood how to take advantage of a husband’s neglect—forgave her and brought her home in the face of much obloquy, in my heart of hearts I did homage to his courage and generosity, for she was then as he and I both knew a dying woman. She did die but a few months later. He was by no means a politician after my fancy or approval, but to the end of his days I was his friend and could never bring myself to join in the repeated public outcries against him.

Early in the fifties Willard’s Hotel became a kind of headquarters for the two political extremes. During a long time their social intercourse was unrestrained—often joyous. They were too far apart, figuratively speaking, to come to blows. Truth to say, their aims were after all not so far apart. They played to one another’s lead. Many a time have I seen Keitt, of South Carolina, and Burlingame, of Massachusetts, hobnob in the liveliest manner and most public places.

It is certainly true that Brooks was not himself when he attacked Sumner. The Northern radicals were wont to say, “Let the South go,” the more profane among them interjecting “to hell!” The Secessionists liked to prod the New Englanders with what the South was going to do when they got to Boston. None of them really meant it—not even Toombs when he talked about calling the muster roll of his slaves beneath Bunker Hill Monument; nor Hammond, the son of a New England schoolmaster, when he spoke of the “mudsills of the North,” meaning to illustrate what he was saying by the underpinning of a house built on marshy ground, and not the Northern work people.

Toombs, who was a rich man, not quite impoverished by the war, banished himself in Europe for a number of years. At length he came home, and passing the White House at Washington he called and sent his card to the President. General Grant, the most genial and generous of men, had him come directly up.

W. P. Hardee, Lieutenant General C.S.A.

“Mr. President,” said Toombs, “in my European migrations I have made it a rule when arriving in a city to call first and pay my respects to the Chief of Police.”

The result was a most agreeable hour and an invitation to dinner. Not long after this at the hospitable board of a Confederate general, then an American senator, Toombs began to prod Lamar about his speech in the House upon the occasion of the death of Charles Sumner. Lamar was not quick to quarrel, though when aroused a man of devilish temper and courage. The subject had become distasteful to him. He was growing obviously restive under Toombs’ banter. The ladies of the household apprehending what was coming left the table.

Then Lamar broke forth. He put Toombs’ visit to Grant, “crawling at the seat of power,” against his eulogy of a dead enemy. I have never heard such a scoring from one man to another. It was magisterial in its dignity, deadly in its diction. Nothing short of a duel could have settled it in the olden time. But when Lamar, white with rage, had finished, Toombs without a ruffle said, “Lamar, you surprise me,” and the host, with the rest of us, took it as a signal to rise from table and rejoin the ladies in the drawing-room. Of course nothing came of it.

Toombs was as much a humorist as an extremist. I have ridden with him under fire and heard him crack jokes with MiniÉ balls flying uncomfortably about. Some one spoke kindly of him to old Ben Wade. “Yes, yes,” said Wade; “I never did believe in the doctrine of total depravity.”

But I am running ahead in advance of events.

VI

There came in 1853 to the Thirty-third Congress a youngish, dapper and graceful man notable as the only Democrat in the Massachusetts delegation. It was said that he had been a dancing master, his wife a work girl. They brought with them a baby in arms with the wife’s sister for its nurse—a mis-step which was quickly corrected. I cannot now tell just how I came to be very intimate with them except that they lived at Willard’s Hotel. His name had a pretty sound to it—Nathaniel Prentiss Banks.

A schoolmate of mine and myself, greatly to the mirth of those about us, undertook Mr. Banks’ career. We were going to elect him Speaker of the next House and then President of the United States. This was particularly laughable to my mother and Mrs. Linn Boyd, the wife of the contemporary Speaker, who had very solid presidential aspirations of his own.

The suggestion perhaps originated with Mrs. Banks, to whom we two were ardently devoted. I have not seen her since those days, more than sixty years ago. But her beauty, which then charmed me, still lingers in my memory—a gentle, sweet creature who made much of us boys—and two years later when Mr. Banks was actually elected Speaker I was greatly elated and took some of the credit to myself. Twenty years afterwards General Banks and I had our seats close together in the Forty-fourth Congress, and he did not recall me at all or the episode of 1853. Nevertheless I warmed to him, and when during Cleveland’s first term he came to me with a hard-luck story I was glad to throw myself into the breach. He had been a Speaker of the House, a general in the field and a Governor of Massachusetts, but was a faded old man, very commonplace, and except for the little post he held under Government pitiably helpless.

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.