Part 5

During one of many pleasant afternoons in the old Grand Pacific Hotel he began to tell us something about the chronic office holders to be found in the capital of his state, as in most states, and said: “If God in a moment of enthusiasm should see fit to snatch them to His bosom I should regard it as a dispensation of divine providence in which I could acquiesce with a fervor that would be turbulent and even riotous.” It was in this stream of exaggeration and hyperbole that he talked all the time, but with the coming of the winter of that year my opportunities of listening to him were cut off. I was sent to Springfield to report the sessions of the legislature. In the spring a bill was under discussion for the appropriation of a large sum in aid of the World’s Fair, and when the usual opposition developed among those country members who have so long governed our cities in dislike and distrust of the people in them, a delegation came down from Chicago to lobby for the measure. It was not long until it was evident that they were not making much headway; the difference, the distinction in their dress and manner, their somewhat too lofty style were only making matters worse. I took it upon myself to telegraph to James W. Scott, the publisher of _The Herald_, apprising him of the situation, and suggesting that Colonel McKenzie be sent down to reënforce them. I felt that he would perhaps understand the country members better because he understood humanity better, and besides, I wished to see him again and hear his stories and funny sayings. He came, and after he had associated with the members a day or so, and they had seen him draw Kentucky “twist” from the deep pocket of the long tails of his coat, and on one or two occasions had watched him gently pinch into a julep the tender sprigs of mint the spring had brought to Springfield, the appropriation for some reason was made. While he was there he said he wished to visit the tomb of Lincoln, and it was with pride that I got an open carriage and drove him, on an incomparable morning in June, out to Oak Ridge cemetery. He was in a solemn mood that morning; the visit had a meaning for him; he had fought on the other side in the great war, but he had a better conception of the character of the noble martyr than many a northerner, especially of the day when that tomb was built, certainly a nobler conception of that lofty character than is expressed in Mead’s cruel war groups--as though Lincoln had been merely some shoulder-strapped murderer of his fellow men! The Colonel had never been there before, and it was an occasion for him, and for me, too, though every time I went there it was for me an occasion, as my sojourn in Springfield was an opportunity, to induce those who had known Lincoln to talk about him.

The tomb has a chamber in its base where there were stored a number of things; the place, indeed, was a sort of cheap museum, and you paid to enter there and listen to an aged custodian lecture on the “relics,” and thrill the gaping onlooker with the details of the attempt to steal the body, and buy a book about it, if you were morbid and silly enough. The custodian began his lecture in that chamber, and then led you out into the sunlight again, and up on the base of the monument, and showed you the bronze fighters, and at last, took you down into the crypt, on the brow of the little down that overlooks the cemetery.

There at last Colonel McKenzie stood beside the sarcophagus and after a while the custodian came to the end of his rigmarole, and, by some mercy, was still. And I stood aside and looked at the old Confederate officer, standing there in that cool entrance, beside the very tomb of Lincoln. He stood with his arms folded on his breast, his tall form slightly bent, his big hat in his hand, and his white head bowed; he stood there a long time, in the perfect silence of that June morning, with thoughts, I suppose, that might have made an epic.

When at last he turned away and went around to the front of the monument, and we were about to enter our carriage, he turned, and still uncovered, over the little gate in the low fence that enclosed the spot, he paused and gave his hand to the old custodian, and said:

“Colonel, I wish to express to you my appreciation of the privilege I have had this morning of paying my respects at the shrine of the greatest American that ever lived.”

He said it solemnly and sincerely, and then, still holding the delighted old fellow’s hand, he went on in profound gravity:

“And I cannot go away without expressing my sense of satisfaction in the eloquent oration you have delivered on this occasion. I was particularly impressed, sir, by its evident lack of previous thought and preparation.”

XI

That was the legislature which elected John M. Palmer to the United States Senate from Illinois. The election was accomplished only after a memorable deadlock of two months in which the Democrats of the general assembly stood so nobly, shoulder to shoulder, that they were called “The Immortal 101.” When they were finally reënforced by the votes of two members elected as representatives of the Farmers’ Alliance, and elected their man, they had a gold medal struck to commemorate their own heroism. They were not, perhaps, exactly immortal, but they did stand for their principles so stanchly that when they came to celebrate their victory, some of their orators compared them to those other immortals who held Thermopylæ.

Their principle was the popular election of United States senators, and they had a fine exemplar of democracy in their candidate. He had been nominated by a state convention, as had Lincoln, whom General Palmer had known intimately and had supported both for senator and president. He was the last of those great figures of Illinois whom the times immediately preceding the Civil War had so abundantly brought forth. He had commanded an army corps, he had been governor of his state, and in 1872 a presidential possibility in the Republican party. But he had turned to the Democrats, and after he became their senator, the first Illinois had known since Douglas, he became a presidential possibility in the Democratic party; that was in 1892, and whatever chances he had he destroyed himself by coming on from Washington and declaring for Grover Cleveland.

Four years later he was nominated for the presidency by the conservative faction of his party. He told me, when I was finishing my law studies under him, that he had never lost anything politically by bolting any of the several parties he had been in, but had usually gained in self respect by doing so; and if to the politician his whole career presented inconsistencies, to the man of principle he must seem wholly consistent and sincere. Certain it is that he followed that inward spirit which alone can guide a man through the perplexities of life, and so the principle with him came ever before the party.

He was a simple man with simple tastes, and his very simplicity was an element of that dignity which seemed to belong to other times than ours. The familiar figure of him along the quiet streets of Springfield was pleasing to men and to children alike; he would go along erectly and slowly under his great broad hat, a striking figure with his plentiful white hair, his closely trimmed chin whiskers, the broad, smoothly shaven upper lip distinguishing a countenance that was of a type associated with the earlier ideals of the republic, and the market basket he carried on his arm helped this effect. At home he was delightful; he had a viol, and used to play it, if there were not too many about to hear him, and if he were alone, sing a few staves of old songs, like “Darling Nelly Gray,” and “Rosie Lee, Courting Down in Tennessee,” and some of the old tunes he had learned in Kentucky as a boy. He liked poetry, if it were not of the introspective modern mood, and while I have heard of such extraordinary characters, I never believed the stories of their endurance, until I was able to discover in him one man who actually did read Sir Walter Scott’s novels through every year. For the most part he had some member of his family read them to him, and he found in them the naïve pleasure of a child. I used to think I would remember the things he was always saying, and the stories he was always telling about Lincoln or Douglas or Grant, but I never could keep note-books and the more imposing sayings have departed. Yet there flashes before the memory with the detail of a cinematograph that scene of a winter’s evening when I entered the big living-room in his home and there found him with his wife before the great open fire. She was reading aloud to him from “Ivanhoe.”

“Come in, Mr. Brand,” he always addressed me by prefixing “Mr.” to my Christian name. “Come in,” he called in his hearty voice. “We are just storming a castle.”

He lived on to the century’s end, with a sort of gusto in life that never failed, I think, until that day when he attended the funeral of the last of his old contemporaries, General John M. McClernand, that fierce old warrior who had quarreled with Grant and lived on in Springfield until he could fight no more with anyone. Senator Palmer came home from his funeral amused by the fact that McClernand had been buried in the full uniform of a major-general, which he had not worn, I suppose, since Vicksburg. When some member of Senator Palmer’s household asked him if he should like to be buried in his uniform, he shook his head against it, but added:

“It was all right for Mac; it was like him.”

But the end was in his thoughts; Oglesby was gone, and now McClernand as the last of the men with whom he had fought in the great crisis, and he went, pretty soon after that, himself. He had participated in two great revolutionary epochs of his nation, going through the one and penetrating though not so far into the second, a long span of life and experience.

It was perhaps natural that he should not have divined the implications of the second phase as clearly as he did those of the first; and though he had helped to inaugurate the new movement, the latest urge toward democracy in this land, he could not go so far. He was young in ’56 and old in ’96, and as we grow old we grow conservative, whether we would or not, and much, I suppose, in the same way.

XII

Senator Palmer’s victory in 1891, however, had raised the hopes of the Illinois Democracy for 1892, and it was early in that year that I came to know one of the most daring pioneers of the neo-democratic movement in America, and the most courageous spirit of our times.

It was on a cold raw morning that I met Joseph P. Mahony, then a Democratic member of the State Senate, who said:

“Come with me and I’ll introduce you to the next governor of Illinois.”

It was the time of year when one was meeting the next governor of Illinois in most of the hotel corridors, or men who were trying to look like potential governors of Illinois, so that such a remark was not to be taken too literally; but I went, and after ascending to an upper floor of a narrow little building in Adams Street, we entered a suite of law offices, and there in a very much crowded, a very much littered and a rather dingy little private room, at an odd little walnut desk, sat John P. Altgeld.

The figure was not prepossessing; he wore his hair close-clipped in ultimate surrender to an obstinate cowlick; his beard was closely trimmed, too, and altogether the countenance was one made for the hands of the cartoonists, who in the brutal fury that was so soon to blaze upon him and to continue to blaze until it had consumed him quite, could easily contort the features to the various purposes of an ugly partizanship; they gave it a peculiarly sinister quality, and it is one of the countless ironies of life that a face, sad with all the utter woe of humanity, should have become for a season, and in some minds remained forever, the type and symbol of all that is most abhorrent. There was a peculiar pallor in the countenance, and the face was such a blank mask of suffering and despair that, had it not been for the high intelligence that shone from his eyes, it must have impressed many as altogether lacking in expression. Certainly it seldom or never expressed enthusiasm, or joy, or humor, though he had humor of a certain mordant kind, as many a political opponent was to know.

He had been a judge of the Circuit Court, and was known by his occasional addresses, his interviews and articles, as a publicist of radical and humanitarian tendencies. He was known especially to the laboring classes and to the poor, who, by that acute sympathy they possess, divined in him a friend, and in the circles of sociological workers and students, then so small and obscure as to make their views esoteric, he was recognized as one who understood and sympathized with their tendencies and ideals. He was accounted in those days a wealthy man,--he was just then building one of those tall and ugly structures of steel called “sky-scrapers,”--and now that he was spoken of for governor this fact made him seem “available” to the politicians. Also he had a German name, another asset in Illinois just then, when Germans all over the state felt themselves outraged by legislation concerning the “little red school-house,” which the Republicans had enacted when they were in full power in the state.

But my paper did not share this enthusiasm about him; it happened to be owned by John R. Walsh, and between Walsh and Altgeld there was a feud, a feud that cost Altgeld his fortune, and lasted until the day that death found him poor and crushed by all the tragedy which a closer observer, one with a keener prescience of destiny than I, might have read in his face from the first.

The feeling of the paper, if one may so personalize a corporation as to endow it with emotion, was not corrected by his nomination, and _The Herald_ had little to say of him, and what it did say was given out in the perfunctory tone of a party organ. But as the summer wore on, and I was able to report to my editors that all the signs pointed to Altgeld’s election, I was permitted to write an article in which I tried to describe his personality and to give some impression of the able campaign he was making. Horace Taylor drew some pictures to illustrate it, and I had the satisfaction of knowing that it gave Altgeld pleasure, while at the same time to me at least it revealed for an instant the humanness of the man.

He sent for me--he was then in offices in his new sky-scraper--and asked if I could procure for him Horace Taylor’s pictures; he hesitated a moment, and then, as though it were a weakness his Spartan nature was reluctant to reveal, he told me that he intended to have my article republished in a newspaper in Mansfield, Ohio, the town whence he had come, where he had taught school, and where he had met the gracious lady who was his wife. He talked for a while that afternoon about his youth, about his poverty and his struggles, and then suddenly lapsed into a silence, with his eyes fastened on me. I wondered what he was looking at; his gaze was disconcerting, and it made me self-conscious and uneasy, till he said:

“Where could one get a cravat like the one you have on?”

It was, I remember--because of the odd incident--an English scarf of blue, quite new. I had tried to knot it as Ben Cable of the Democratic National Committee knotted his, and it seemed that such a little thing should not be wanting to the happiness of a man who, by all the outward standards, had so much to gratify him as Altgeld had, and I said--with some embarrassment, and some doubt as to the taste I was exhibiting--“Why, you may have this one.”

In a moment his face changed, the mask fell, and he shook his head and said: “No, it would not look like that on me.”

After his election it was suggested to me that I might become his secretary, but I declined; in my travels over the state as a political correspondent I was always meeting aged men, seemingly quite respectable and worthy and entirely well meaning, who were introduced not so much by name as such and such a former governor’s private secretary; though like the moor which Browning crossed, they had

... names of their own, And a certain use in the world, no doubt.

But I did take a position in the office of the secretary of state that offered the opportunity I had been longing for; I wished to finish my law studies, and, deeper down than any ambition for the bar, I was nourishing a desire to write, or if it does not seem too pretentious, an ambition in literature; and neither of these aims could well be accomplished, say from midnight on, after working all day on a morning newspaper.

It was a pleasant change. Springfield was lovely in the spring, which came to it earlier than it visited Chicago, and it was a relief to escape the horrid atmosphere of a great brutal city which as a reporter it had seemed my fate to behold for the most part at night. There was a sense of spaciousness in the green avenues of the quiet town, and there was pleasant society, and better perhaps than all there were two big libraries in the Capitol, the law library of the Supreme Court and the state library; and after the noisy legislature had adjourned a peace fell on the great, cool stone pile that was almost academic.

Twice or thrice a day Governor Altgeld was to be seen passing through its vast corridors, his head bent thoughtfully, rapt afar from the things about him in those dreams of social amelioration which had visited him so much earlier than they came to most of his contemporaries. He had read much, and during his residence there the executive mansion had the atmosphere of intellectual culture. Whenever I went over there, which I did now and then with his secretary for luncheon or for an evening at cards, our talk was almost always of books.

We were all reading George Meredith in those days, and Meredith’s greater contemporary, Thomas Hardy. “Tess” had just appeared, and it would be about that time that “Jude” was running as a serial in _Harper’s Magazine_, though with many elisions and under its tentative titles of “The Simpleton” and “Hearts Insurgent”; and we all fell completely under a fascination which has never failed of its weird and mysterious charm, so that I have read all his works, down to his latest poems, over and over again. Hardy is, perhaps, the greatest intelligence on our planet now that Tolstoy, from whom he so vastly differed, is gone, and Altgeld’s whole career might have served him, had he ever chosen to write of those experiences that are less implicit in human nature, and more explicit in the superficial aspects of public careers, as an example of his own pagan theory of the contrariety of human affairs and the spite of the Ironic Spirits.

I was reading, too, the novels of Mr. William Dean Howells, as I always have been whenever there was a moment to spare, and it was with a shock of peculiar delight and a sense of corroboration almost authoritative that I learned that Mr. Howells also had given voice to those very same profound and troubling convictions which Charlie R---- had set me on the track of two years before.

XIII

It was not in any one of Mr. Howells’s novels or essays, except inferentially, that I learned this, but among some musty documents the worms were eating up away down in the foundations of the State House.

My work in the office of the secretary of state involved the care of the state’s archives. The oldest of these were stored in a vault in the cellar of the huge pile, and the discovery had just been made that some kind of insect, which the state entomologist knew all about, was riddling those records with little holes,--piercing them through and through. In consequence a new vault was prepared, and steel filing cases were set up in it, and the records removed to this safer sanctuary.

It was a tedious and stupid task, until we came one day to file what were called the papers in the anarchist case. Officially they related to the application for the commutation of the sentences of the four men, Spies, Engel, Fischer, and Parsons, who had been hanged, and for the pardon of the three who were then confined in the penitentiary at Joliet, Fielden and Schwab for life, and old Oscar Neebe for fifteen years. Fielden and Schwab had been sentenced to death with the four who had been killed, but Governor Oglesby had commuted their sentences to imprisonment for life; Neebe’s original sentence had been for the fifteen years he was then serving. The papers consisted of communications to the governor, great petitions, and letters and telegrams, many sent in mercy, and some in the spirit of reason, asking for clemency, many in a wild hysteria of fear, and the hideous hate that is born of fear, begging the governor to let “justice” take its course.

There were the names of many prominent men and women signed to these communications; among them was a request signed by many authors in England requesting clemency, but there was no appeal stronger, and no protest braver, than that in the letter which Mr. Howells had written to a New York newspaper analyzing the case and showing the amazing injustice of the whole proceeding. Mr. Howells had first gone, so he told me in after years, to the aged poet Whittier, whose gentle philosophy might have moved him to a mood against that public wrong, and then to George William Curtis, but they had advised him to write the protest himself, and he had done so, and he had done it better and more bravely than either of them could have done out of the great conscience and the great heart that have always been on the side of the weak and the oppressed, with a mercy which when it is practised by mankind is always so much nearer the right and the divine than our crude and generally cruel attempts at justice can ever be.

But all these prayers had fallen on official ears that--to use a grotesque figure--were so closely pressed to the ground that they could not hear; and there was nothing to do, since they were so many and so bulky that no latest-improved and patented steel filing-case could hold them, but to have a big box made and lock them up in that for all time, forgotten, like so many other records of injustice, out of the minds of men.

But not entirely; injustice was never for long out of the mind of John P. Altgeld, and during all those first months of his administration he had been brooding over this notable instance of injustice, and he had come to his decision. He knew the cost to him; he had just come to the governorship of his state, and to the leadership of his party, after its thirty years of defeat, and he realized what powerful interests would be frightened and offended if he were to turn three forgotten men out of prison; he understood how partizanship would turn the action to its advantage.

It mattered not that most of the thoughtful men in Illinois would tell you that the “anarchists” had been improperly convicted, that they were not only entirely innocent of the murder of which they had been accused, but were not even anarchists; it was simply that the mob had convicted them in one of the strangest frenzies of fear that ever distracted a whole community, a case which all the psychologists of all the universities in the world might have tried, without getting at the truth of it--much less a jury in a criminal court.

And so, one morning in June, very early, I was called to the governor’s office, and told to make out pardons for Fielden, Neebe, and Schwab. “And do it yourself,” said the governor’s secretary, “and don’t say anything about it to anybody.”