The Makers of the Republic—Lincoln, Jefferson, Clay and Webster—The Proposed League of Nations—The Wilsonian Incertitude—The “New Freedom”

I

The makers of the American Republic range themselves in two groups—Washington, Franklin and Jefferson—Clay, Webster and Lincoln—each of whom, having a genius peculiarly his own, gave himself and his best to the cause of national unity and independence.

In a general way it may be said that Washington created and Lincoln saved the Union. But along with Washington and Lincoln, Clay makes a good historic third, for it was the masterful Kentuckian who, joining rare foresight to surpassing eloquence and leading many eminent men, including Webster, was able to hold the legions of unrest at bay during the formative period.

There are those who call these great men “back numbers,” who tell us we have left the past behind us and entered an epoch of more enlightened progress—who would displace the example of the simple lives they led and the homely truths they told, to set up a school of philosophy which had made Athens stare and Rome howl, and, I dare say, is causing the Old Continentals to turn over in their graves. The self-exploiting spectacle and bizarre teaching of this school passes the wit of man to fathom. Professing the ideal and proposing to recreate the Universe, the New Freedom, as it calls itself, would standardize it. The effect of that would be to desiccate the human species in human conceit. It would cheapen the very harps and halos in Heaven and convert the Day of Judgment into a moving picture show.

I protest that I am not of its kidney. In point of fact, its platitudes “stick in my gizzard.” I belong the rather to those old-fashioned ones—

“Who love their land because it is their own,
And scorn to give aught other reason why;
Who’d shake hands with a king upon his throne,
And think it kindness to his majesty.”

I have many rights—birthrights—to speak of Kentucky as a Kentuckian, beside that of more than fifty years’ service upon what may be fairly called the battle-line of the Dark and Bloody Ground.

My grandmother’s father, William Mitchell Morrison, had raised a company of riflemen in the War of the Revolution, and, after the War, marched it westward. He commanded the troops in the old fort at Harrodsburg, where my grandmother was born in 1784. He died a general. My grandfather, James Black’s father, the Rev. James Black, was chaplain of the fort. He remembered the birth of the baby girl who was to become his wife. He was a noble stalwart—a perfect type of the hunters of Kentucky—who could bring down a squirrel from the highest bough and hit a bull’s eye at a hundred yards after he was three score and ten.

It was he who delighted my childhood with bear stories and properly lurid narrations of the braves in buckskin and the bucks in paint and feathers, with now and then a red-coat to give pungency and variety to the tale. He would sing me to sleep with hunting songs. He would take me with him afield to carry the game bag, and I was the only one of many grandchildren to be named in his will. In my thoughts and in my dreams he has been with me all my life, a memory and an example, and an ever glorious inspiration.

Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton were among my earliest heroes.

II

Born in a Democratic camp, and growing to manhood on the Democratic side of a political battlefield, I did not accept, as I came later to realize, the transcendent personal merit and public service of Henry Clay. Being of Tennessee parentage, perhaps the figure of Andrew Jackson came between; perhaps the rhetoric of Daniel Webster. Once hearing me make some slighting remark of the Great Commoner, my father, a life-long Democrat, who, on opposing sides, had served in Congress with Mr. Clay, gently rebuked me. “Do not express such opinions, my son,” he said, “they discredit yourself. Mr. Clay was a very great man—a born leader of men.”

It was certainly he, more than any other man, who held the Union together until the time arrived for Lincoln to save it.

I made no such mistake, however, with respect to Abraham Lincoln. From the first he appeared to me a great man, a born leader of men. His death proved a blow to the whole country—most of all to the Southern section of it. If he had lived there would have been no Era of Reconstruction, with its repressive agencies and oppressive legislation; there would have been wanting to the extremism of the time the bloody cue of his taking off to mount the steeds and spur the flanks of vengeance. For Lincoln entertained, with respect to the rehabilitation of the Union, the single wish that the Southern States—to use his homely phraseology—“should come back home and behave themselves,” and if he had lived he would have made this wish effectual as he made everything else effectual to which he addressed himself.

His was the genius of common sense. Of perfect intellectual acuteness and aplomb, he sprang from a Virginia pedigree and was born in Kentucky. He knew all about the South, its institutions, its traditions and its peculiarities. He was an old-line Whig of the school of Henry Clay, with strong Emancipation leaning, never an Abolitionist. “If slavery be not wrong,” he said, “nothing is wrong,” but he also said and reiterated it time and again, “I have no prejudice against the Southern people. They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist among them they would not introduce it. If it did now exist among us, we would not instantly give it up.”

From first to last throughout the angry debates preceding the War of Sections, amid the passions of the War itself, not one vindictive, prescriptive word fell from his tongue or pen, whilst during its progress there was scarcely a day when he did not project his great personality between some Southern man or woman and danger.

III

There has been much discussion about what did and what did not occur at the famous Hampton Roads Conference. That Mr. Lincoln met and conferred with the official representatives of the Confederate Government, led by the Vice President of the Confederate States, when it must have been known to him that the Confederacy was nearing the end of its resources, is sufficient proof of the breadth both of his humanity and his patriotism. Yet he went to Fortress Monroe prepared not only to make whatever concessions toward the restoration of Union and Peace he had the lawful authority to make, but to offer some concessions which could in the nature of the case go no further at that time than his personal assurance. His constitutional powers were limited. But he was in himself the embodiment of great moral power.

The story that he offered payment for the slaves—so often affirmed and denied—is in either case but a quibble with the actual facts. He could not have made such an offer except tentatively, lacking the means to carry it out. He was not given the opportunity to make it, because the Confederate Commissioners were under instructions to treat solely on the basis of the recognition of the independence of the Confederacy. The conference came to nought. It ended where it began. But there is ample evidence that he went to Hampton Roads resolved to commit himself to that proposition. He did, according to the official reports, refer to it in specific terms, having already formulated a plan of procedure. This plan exists and may be seen in his own handwriting. It embraced a joint resolution to be submitted by the President to the two Houses of Congress appropriating $400,000,000 to be distributed among the Southern States on the basis of the slave population of each according to the Census of 1860, and a proclamation to be issued by himself, as President, when the joint resolution had been passed by Congress.

There can be no controversy among honest students of history on this point. That Mr. Lincoln said to Mr. Stephens, “Let me write Union at the top of this page and you may write below it whatever else you please,” is referable to Mr. Stephens’ statement made to many friends and attested by a number of reliable persons. But that he meditated the most liberal terms, including payment for the slaves, rests neither upon conjecture nor hearsay, but on documentary proof. It may be argued that he could not have secured the adoption of any such plan; but of his purpose, and its genuineness, there can be no question and there ought to be no equivocation.

Indeed, payment for the slaves had been all along in his mind. He believed the North equally guilty with the South for the original existence of slavery. He clearly understood that the Irrepressible Conflict was a Conflict of systems, not a merely sectional and partisan quarrel. He was a just man, abhorring proscription: an old Conscience Whig, indeed, who stood in awe of the Constitution and his oath of office. He wanted to leave the South no right to claim that the North, finding slave labor unremunerative, had sold its negroes to the South and then turned about and by force of arms confiscated what it had unloaded at a profit. He fully recognized slavery as property. The Proclamation of Emancipation was issued as a war measure. In his message to Congress of December, 1862, he proposed payment for the slaves, elaborating a scheme in detail and urging it with copious and cogent argument. “The people of the South,” said he, addressing a Congress at that moment in the throes of a bloody war with the South, “are not more responsible for the original introduction of this property than are the people of the North, and, when it is remembered how unhesitatingly we all use cotton and sugar and share the profits of dealing in them, it may not be quite safe to say that the South has been more responsible than the North for its continuance.”

IV

It has been my rule, aim and effort in my newspaper career to print nothing of a man which I would not say to his face; to print nothing of a man in malice; to look well and think twice before consigning a suspect to the ruin of printer’s ink; to respect the old and defend the weak; and, lastly, at work and at play, daytime and nighttime, to be good to the girls and square with the boys, for hath it not been written of such is the kingdom of Heaven?

There will always be in a democracy two or more sets of rival leaders to two or more differing groups of followers. Hitherto history has classified these as conservatives and radicals. But as society has become more and more complex the groups have had their subdivisions. As a consequence speculative doctrinaries and adventurous politicians are enabled to get in their work of confusing the issues and exploiting themselves.

“‘What are these fireworks for?’ asks the rustic in the parable. ‘To blind the eyes of the people,’ answers the cynic.”

I would not say aught in a spirit of hostility to the President of the United States. Woodrow Wilson is a clever speaker and writer. Yet the usual trend and phrase of his observations seem to be those of a special pleader, rather than those of a statesman. Every man, each of the nations, is for peace as an abstract proposition. That much goes without saying. But Mr. Wilson proposes to bind the hands of a giant and take lottery chances on the future. This, I think, the country will contest.

He is obsessed by the idea of a League of Nations. If not his own discovery he has yet made himself its leader. He talks flippantly about “American ideals” that have won the war against Germany, as if there were no English ideals and French ideals.

“In all that he does we can descry the school-master who arrived at the front rather late in life. One needs only to go over the record and mark how often he has reversed himself to detect a certain mental and temperamental instability clearly indicating a lack of fixed or resolute intellectual purpose. This is characteristic of an excess in education; of the half baked mind overtrained. The overeducated mind fancies himself a doctrinaire when he is in point of fact only a disciple.”

Woodrow Wilson was born to the rather sophisticated culture of the too, too solid South. Had he grown up in England a hundred years ago he would have been a follower of the Della Cruscans. He has what is called a facile pen, though it sometimes runs away with him. It seems to have done so in the matter of the League of Nations. Inevitably such a scheme would catch the fancy of one ever on the alert for the fanciful.

I cannot too often repeat that the world we inhabit is a world of sin, disease and death. Men will fight whenever they want to fight, and no artificial scheme or process is likely to restrain them. It is mainly the costliness of war that makes most against it. But, as we have seen the last four years, it will not quell the passions of men or dull national and racial ambitions.

All that Mr. Wilson and his proposed League of Nations can do will be to revamp, and maybe for a while to reimpress the minds of the rank and file, until the bellowing followers of Bellona are ready to spring.

Eternal peace, universal peace, was not the purpose of the Deity in the creation of the universe.

Nevertheless, it would seem to be the duty of men in great place, as of us all, to proclaim the gospel of good will and cultivate the arts of fraternity. I have no quarrel with the President on this score. What I contest is the self-exploitation to which he is prone, so lacking in dignity and open to animadversion.

V

Thus it was that instant upon the appearance of the proposed League of Nations I made bold to challenge it, as but a pretty conceit having no real value, a serious assault upon our national sovereignty.

Its argument seemed to me full of copybook maxims, easier recited than applied. As what I wrote preceded the debates and events of the last six months, I may not improperly make the following quotation from a screed of mine appearing in The Courier-Journal of the 5th of March, 1919:

“The League of Nations is a fad. Politics, like society and letters, has its fads. In society they call them fashion and in literature originality. Politics gives the name of ‘issues’ to its fads. A taking issue is as a stunning gown, or ‘a best seller.’ The President’s mind wears a coat of many colors, and he can change it at will, his mood being the objective point, not always too far ahead, or clear of vision. Carl Schurz was wont to speak of Gratz Brown as ‘a man of thoughts rather than of ideas.’ I wonder if that can be justly said of the President? ‘Gentlemen will please not shoot at the pianiste,’ adjured the superscription over the music stand in the Dakota dive; ‘she is doing the best that she knows how.’

“Already it is being proclaimed that Woodrow Wilson can have a third nomination for the presidency if he wants it, and nobody seems shocked by it, which proves that the people grow degenerate and foreshadows that one of these nights some fool with a spyglass will break into Mars and let loose the myriads of warlike gyascutes who inhabit that freak luminary, thence to slide down the willing moonbeam and swallow us every one!

“In a sense the Monroe Doctrine was a fad. Oblivious to Canada, and British Columbia and the Spanish provinces, it warned the despots of Europe off the grass in America. We actually went to war with Mexico, having enjoyed two wars with England, and again and again we threatened to annex the Dominion. Everything betwixt hell and Halifax was Yankee preËmpted.

“Truth to say, your Uncle Samuel was ever a jingo. But your Cousin Woodrow, enlarging on the original plan, would stretch our spiritual boundaries to the ends of the earth and make of us the moral custodian of the universe. This much, no less, he got of the school of sweetness and light in which he grew up.

“I am a jingo myself. But a wicked material jingo, who wants facts, not theories. If I thought it possible and that it would pay, I would annex the North Pole and colonize the Equator. It is, after the manner of the lady in the play, that the President ‘doth protest too much,’ which displeases me and where, in point of fact, I ‘get off the reservation.’

“That, being a politician and maybe a candidate, he is keenly alive to votes goes without saying. On the surface this League of Nations having the word ‘peace’ in big letters emblazoned both upon its forehead and the seat of its trousers—or, should I say, woven into the hem of its petticoat?—seems an appeal for votes. I do not believe it will bear discussion. In a way, it tickles the ear without convincing the sense. There is nothing sentimental about the actualities of Government, much as public men seek to profit by arousing the passions of the people. Government is a hard and fast and dry reality. At best statesmanship can only half do the things it would. Its aims are most assured when tending a little landward; its footing safest on its native heath. We have plenty to do on our own continent without seeking to right things on other continents. Too many of us—the President among the rest, I fear—miscalculate the distance between contingency and desire.

“‘We figure to ourselves
The thing we like: and then we build it up:
As chance will have it on the rock or sand—
When thought grows tired of wandering o’er the world,
And homebound Fancy runs her bark ashore.’”

I am sorry to see the New York World fly off at a tangent about this latest of the Wilsonian hobbies. Frank Irving Cobb, the editor of the World, is, as I have often said, the strongest writer on the New York press since Horace Greeley. But he can hardly be called a sentimentalist, as Greeley was, and there is nothing but sentiment—gush and gammon—in the proposed League of Nations.

It may be all right for England. There are certainly no flies on it for France. But we don’t need it. Its effects can only be to tie our hands, not keep the dogs away, and even at the worst, in stress of weather, we are strong enough to keep the dogs away ourselves.

We should say to Europe: “Shinny on your own side of the water and we will shinny on our side.” It may be that Napoleon’s opinion will come true that ultimately Europe will be “all Cossack or all republican.” Part of it has come true already. Meanwhile it looks as though the United States, having exhausted the reasonable possibilities of democracy, is beginning to turn crank. Look at woman suffrage by Federal edict; look at prohibition by act of Congress and constitutional amendment; tobacco next to walk on the plank; and then!—Lord, how glad I feel that I am nearly a hundred years old and shall not live to see it!