The Writing of Memoirs—Some Characteristics of Carl Shurz—Sam Bowles—Horace White and the Mugwumps

I

Talleyrand was so impressed by the world-compelling character of the memoirs he had prepared for posterity that he fixed an interdict of more than fifty years upon the date set for their publication, and when at last the bulky tomes made their appearance, they excited no especial interest—certainly created no sensation—and lie for the most part dusty upon the shelves of the libraries that contain them. For a different reason, Henry Ward Beecher put a time limit upon the volume, or volumes, which will tell us, among other things, all about one of the greatest scandals of modern times; and yet how few people now recall it or care anything about the dramatis personÆ and the actual facts! Metternich, next after Napoleon and Talleyrand, was an important figure in a stirring epoch. He, too, indicted an autobiography, which is equally neglected among the books that are sometimes quoted and extolled, but rarely read. Rousseau, the half insane, and Barras, the wholly vicious, have twenty readers where Talleyrand and Metternich have one.

From this point of view, the writing of memoirs, excepting those of the trivial French School or gossiping letters and diaries of the Pepys-Walpole variety, would seem an unprofitable task for a great man’s undertaking. Boswell certainly did for Johnson what the thunderous old doctor could not have done for himself. Nevertheless, from the days of CÆsar to the days of Sherman and Lee, the captains of military and senatorial and literary industry have regaled themselves, if they have not edified the public, by the narration of their own stories; and, I dare say, to the end of time, interest in one’s self, and the mortal desire to linger yet a little longer on the scene—now and again, as in the case of General Grant, the assurance of honorable remuneration making needful provision for others—will move those who have cut some figure in the world to follow the wandering Celt in the wistful hope—

Around my fire an evening group to draw,
And tell of all I felt and all I saw.

Something like this occurs to me upon a reperusal of the unfinished memoirs of my old and dear friend, Carl Schurz. Assuredly few men had better warrant for writing about themselves or a livelier tale to tell than the famous German-American, who died leaving that tale unfinished. No man in life was more misunderstood and maligned. There was nothing either erratic or conceited about Schurz, nor was he more pragmatic than is common to the possessor of positive opinions along with the power to make their expression effectual.

The actual facts of his public life do not anywhere show that his politics shifted with his own interests. On the contrary, he was singularly regardless of his interests where his convictions interposed. Though an alien, and always an alien, he possessed none of the shifty traits of the soldier of fortune. Never in his career did he crook the pregnant hinges of the knee before any worldly throne of grace or flatter any mob that place might follow fawning. His great talents had only to lend themselves to party uses to get their full requital. He refused them equally to Grant in the White House and the multitude in Missouri, going his own gait, which could be called erratic only by the conventional, to whom regularity is everything and individuality nothing.

Schurz was first of all and above all an orator. His achievements on the platform and in the Senate were undeniable. He was unsurpassed in debate. He had no need to exploit himself. The single chapter in his life on which light was desirable was the military episode. The cruel and false saying, “I fight mit Sigel und runs mit Schurz,” obviously the offspring of malignity, did mislead many people, reËnforced by the knowledge that Schurz was not an educated soldier. How thoroughly he disposes of this calumny his memoirs attest. Fuller, more convincing vindication could not be asked of any man; albeit by those familiar with the man himself it could not be doubted that he had both courage and aptitude for military employment.

II

A philosopher and an artist, he was drawn by circumstance into the vortex of affairs. Except for the stirring events of 1848, he might have lived and died a professor at Bonn or Heidelberg. If he had pursued his musical studies at Leipsic he must have become a master of the piano keyboard. As it was, he played Schumann and Chopin creditably. The rescue of Kinkel, the flight from the fatherland, the mild Bohemianizing in Paris and London awakened within him the spirit of action rather than of adventure.

There was nothing of the Dalgetty about him; too reflective and too accomplished. His early marriage attests a domestic trend, from which he never departed; though an idealist in his public aspirations and aims he was a sentimentalist in his home life and affections. Genial in temperament and disposition, his personal habit was moderation itself.

He was a German. Never did a man live so long in a foreign country and take on so few of its thoughts and ways. He threw himself into the anti-slavery movement upon the crest of the wave; the flowing sea carried him quickly from one distinction to another; the ebb tide, which found him in the Senate of the United States, revealed to his startled senses the creeping, crawling things beneath the surface; partyism rampant, tyrannous and corrupt; a self-willed soldier in the White House; a Blaine, a Butler and a Garfield leading the Representatives, a Cameron and a Conkling leading the Senate; single-minded disinterestedness, pure unadulterated conviction, nowhere.

Jobs and jobbing flourished on every side. An impossible scheme of reconstruction was trailing its slow, putrescent length along. The revenue service was thick with thieves, the committees of Congress were packed with mercenaries. Money-making in high places had become the order of the day. Was it for this that oceans of patriotism, of treasure and of blood had been poured out? Was it for this that he had fought with tongue and pen and sword?

There was Sumner—the great Sumner—who had quarreled with Grant and Fish, to keep him company and urge him on. There was the Tribune, the puissant Tribune—two of them, one in New York and the other in Chicago—to give him countenance. There was need of liberalizing and loosening things in Missouri, for which he sat in the Senate—they could not go on forever half the best elements in the State disfranchised.

Thus the Liberal Movement of 1872.

Schurz went to Cincinnati elate with hope. He was an idealist—not quite yet a philosopher. He had his friends about him. Sam Bowles—the first newspaper politician of his day, with none of the handicaps carried by Raymond and Forney—a man keen of insight and foresight, fertile of resources, and not afraid—stood foremost among them. Next came Horace White. Doric in his simplicity like a marble shaft, and to the outer eye as cold as marble, but below a man of feeling, conviction and tenacity, a working journalist and a doughty doctrinaire. A little group of such men formed itself about Schurz—then only forty-three years old—to what end? Why, Greeley, Horace Greeley, the bellwether of abolitionism, the king bee of protectionism, the man of fads and isms and the famous “old white hat.”

To some of us it was laughable. To Schurz it was tragical. A bridge had to be constructed for him to pass—for retrace his steps he could not—and, as it were, blindfolded, he had to be backed upon this like a mule aboard a train of cars. I sometimes wonder what might have happened if Schurz had then and there resigned his seat in the Senate, got his brood together and returned to Germany. I dare say he would have been welcomed by Bismarck.

Certainly there was no lodgment for him thenceforward in American politics. The exigencies of 1876-77 made him a provisional place in the Hayes Administration; but, precisely as the Democrats of Missouri could put such a man to no use, the Republicans at large could find no use for him. He seemed a bull in a china shop to the political organization he honored with a preference wholly intellectual, and having no stomach for either extreme, he became a Mugwump.

III

He was a German. He was an artist. By nature a doctrinaire, he had become a philosopher. He could never wholly adjust himself to his environment. He lectured Lincoln, and Lincoln, perceiving his earnest truthfulness and genuine qualities, forgave him his impertinence, nor ceased to regard him with the enduring affection one might have for an ardent, aspiring and lovable boy. He was repellant to Grant, who could not and perhaps did not desire to understand him.... To him the Southerners were always the red-faced, swashbuckling slave-drivers he had fancied and pictured them in the days of his abolition oratory. More and more he lived in a rut of his own fancies, wise in books and counsels, gentle in his relations with the few who enjoyed his confidence; to the last a most captivating personality.

Though fastidious, Schurz was not intolerant. Yet he was hard to convince—tenacious of his opinions—courteous but insistent in debate. He was a German; a German Herr Doktor of Music, of Letters and of Common Law. During an intimacy of more than thirty years we scarcely ever wholly agreed about any public matter; differing about even the civil service and the tariff. But I admired him hugely and loved him heartily.

I had once a rather amusing encounter with him. There was a dinner at Delmonico’s, from whose program of post-prandial oratory I had purposely caused my own name to be omitted. Indeed, I had had with a lady a wager I very much wished to win that I would not speak. General Grant and I went in together, and during the repast he said that the only five human beings in the world whom he detested were actually here at table.

Of course, Schurz was one of these. He was the last on the list of speakers and, curiously enough—the occasion being the consideration of certain ways and means for the development of the South—and many leading Southerners present—he composed his speech out of an editorial tour de force he was making in the Evening Post on The Homicidal Side of Southern Life. Before he had proceeded half through General Grant, who knew of my wager, said, “You’ll lose your bet,” and, it being one o’clock in the morning, I thought so too, and did not care whether I won or lost it. When he finished, the call on me was spontaneous and universal. “Now give it to him good,” said General Grant.

And I did; I declared—the reporters were long since gone—that there had not been a man killed amiss in Kentucky since the war; that where one had been killed two should have been; and, amid roars of laughter which gave me time to frame some fresh absurdity, I delivered a prose paean to murder.

Nobody seemed more pleased than Schurz himself, and as we came away—General Grant having disappeared—he put his arm about me like a schoolboy and said: “Well, well, I had no idea you were so bloody-minded.”