Chapter 15

There was some chaffing as to what right I had there and how I got in, when with great earnestness Governor Dennison, who had been the bearer of a letter from Mr. Hayes, which he had read to us, put his hand on my shoulder and said: “As a matter of course the Southern policy to which Mr. Hayes has here pledged himself embraces South Carolina as well as Louisiana.”

Mr. Sherman, Mr. Garfield and Mr. Evarts concurred warmly in this, and immediately after we separated I communicated the fact to General Butler.

In the acrimonious discussion which subsequently sought to make “bargain, intrigue and corruption” of this Wormley Conference, and to involve certain Democratic members of the House who were nowise party to it but had sympathized with the purpose of Louisiana and South Carolina to obtain some measure of relief from intolerable local conditions, I never was questioned or assailed. No one doubted my fidelity to Mr. Tilden, who had been promptly advised of all that passed and who approved what I had done.

Though “conscripted,” as it were, and rather a passive agent, I could see no wrong in the proceeding. I had spoken and voted in favor of the Electoral Tribunal Bill, and losing, had no thought of repudiating its conclusions. Hayes was already as good as seated. If the States of Louisiana and South Carolina could save their local autonomy out of the general wreck there seemed no good reason to forbid.

On the other hand, the Republican leaders were glad of an opportunity to make an end of the corrupt and tragic farce of Reconstruction; to unload their party of a dead weight which had been burdensome and was growing dangerous; mayhap to punish their Southern agents, who had demanded so much for doctoring the returns and making an exhibit in favor of Hayes.

X

Mr. Tilden accepted the result with equanimity.

“I was at his house,” says John Bigelow, “when his exclusion was announced to him, and also on the fourth of March when Mr. Hayes was inaugurated, and it was impossible to remark any change in his manner, except perhaps that he was less absorbed than usual and more interested in current affairs.”

His was an intensely serious mind; and he had come to regard the presidency as rather a burden to be borne—an opportunity for public usefulness—involving a life of constant toil and care, than as an occasion for personal exploitation and rejoicing.

How much of captivation the idea of the presidency may have had for him when he was first named for the office I cannot say, for he was as unexultant in the moment of victory as he was unsubdued in the hour of defeat; but it is certainly true that he gave no sign of disappointment to any of his friends.

He lived nearly ten years longer, at Greystone, in a noble homestead he had purchased for himself overlooking the Hudson River, the same ideal life of the scholar and gentleman that he had passed in Gramercy Park.

Looking back over these untoward and sometimes mystifying events, I have often asked myself: Was it possible, with the elements what they were, and he himself what he was, to seat Mr. Tilden in the office to which he had been elected? The missing ingredient in a character intellectually and morally great and a personality far from unimpressive, was the touch of the dramatic discoverable in most of the leaders of men; even in such leaders as William of Orange and Louis XI; as Cromwell and Washington.

There was nothing spectacular about Mr. Tilden. Not wanting the sense of humor, he seldom indulged it. In spite of his positiveness of opinion and amplitude of knowledge he was always courteous and deferential in debate. He had none of the audacious daring, let us say, of Mr. Elaine, the energetic self-assertion of Mr. Roosevelt. Either in his place would have carried all before him.

I repeat that he was never a subtle schemer—sitting behind the screen and pulling his wires—which his political and party enemies discovered him to be as soon as he began to get in the way of the machine and obstruct the march of the self-elect. His confidences were not effusive, nor their subjects numerous. His deliberation was unfailing and sometimes it carried the idea of indecision, not to say actual love of procrastination. But in my experience with him I found that he usually ended where he began, and it was nowise difficult for those whom he trusted to divine the bias of his mind where he thought it best to reserve its conclusions.

I do not think in any great affair he ever hesitated longer than the gravity of the case required of a prudent man or that he had a preference for delays or that he clung tenaciously to both horns of the dilemma, as his training and instinct might lead him to do, and did certainly expose him to the accusation of doing.

He was a philosopher and took the world as he found it. He rarely complained and never inveighed. He had a discriminating way of balancing men’s good and bad qualities and of giving each the benefit of a generous accounting, and a just way of expecting no more of a man than it was in him to yield. As he got into deeper water his stature rose to its level, and from his exclusion from the presidency in 1877 to his renunciation of public affairs in 1884 and his death in 1886 his walks and ways might have been a study for all who would learn life’s truest lessons and know the real sources of honor, happiness and fame.

Chapter the Thirteenth

Charles Eames and Charles Sumner-Schurzand Lamar—I Go to Congress—A Heroic Kentuckian—Stephen Foster and His Songs—Music and Theodore Thomas

I

Swift’s definition of “conversation” did not preside over or direct the daily intercourse between Charles Sumner, Charles Eames and Robert J. Walker in the old days in the National Capital. They did not converse. They discoursed. They talked sententiously in portentous essays and learned dissertations. I used to think it great, though I nursed no little dislike of Sumner.

Charles Eames was at the outset of his career a ne’er-do-well New Englander—a Yankee Jack-of-all-trades—kept at the front by an exceedingly clever wife. Through the favor she enjoyed at court he received from Pierce and Buchanan unimportant diplomatic appointments. During their sojourns in Washington their home was a kind of political and literary headquarters. Mrs. Eames had established a salon—the first attempt of the kind made there; and it was altogether a success. Her Sundays evenings were notable, indeed. Whoever was worth seeing, if in town, might usually be found there. Charles Sumner led the procession. He was a most imposing person. Both handsome and distinguished in appearance, he possessed in an eminent degree the Harvard pragmatism—or, shall I say, affectation?—and seemed never happy except on exhibition. He had made a profitable political and personal issue of the Preston Brooks attack. Brooks was an exceeding light weight, but he did for Sumner more than Sumner could ever have done for himself.

In the Charles Eames days Sumner was exceedingly disagreeable to me. Many people, indeed, thought him so. Many years later, in the Greeley campaign of 1872, Schurz brought us together—they had become as very brothers in the Senate—and I found him the reverse of my boyish ill conceptions.

He was a great old man. He was a delightful old man, every inch a statesman, much of a scholar, and something of a hero. I grew in time to be actually fond of him, passed with him entire afternoons and evenings in his library, mourned sincerely when he died, and went with Schurz to Boston, on the occasion when that great German-American delivered the memorial address in honor of the dead Abolitionist.

Of all the public men of that period Carl Schurz most captivated me. When we first came into personal relations, at the Liberal Convention, which assembled at Cincinnati and nominated Greeley and Brown as a presidential ticket, he was just turned forty-three; I, two and thirty. The closest intimacy followed. Our tastes were much alike. Both of us had been educated in music. He played the piano with intelligence and feeling—especially Schumann, Brahms and Mendelssohn, neither of us ever having quite reached the “high jinks” of Wagner.

To me his oratory was wonderful. He spoke to an audience of five or ten thousand as he would have talked to a party of three or six. His style was simple, natural, unstrained; the lucid statement and cogent argument now and again irradiated by a salient passage of satire or a burst of not too eloquent rhetoric.

He was quite knocked out by the nomination of Horace Greeley. For a long time he could not reconcile himself to support the ticket. Horace White and I addressed ourselves to the task of “fetching him into camp”—there being in point of fact nowhere else for him to go—though we had to get up what was called The Fifth Avenue Conference to make a bridge.

Truth to say, Schurz never wholly adjusted himself to political conditions in the United States. He once said to me in one of the querulous moods that sometimes overcame him: “If I should live a hundred years my enemies would still call me a—Dutchman!”

It was Schurz, as I have said, who brought Lamar and me together. The Mississippian had been a Secession Member of Congress when I was a Unionist scribe in the reporters’ gallery. I was a furious partisan in those days and disliked the Secessionists intensely. Of them, Lamar was most aggressive. I later learned that he was very many-sided and accomplished, the most interesting and lovable of men. He and Schurz “froze together,” as, brought together by Schurz, he and I “froze together.” On one side he was a sentimentalist and on the other a philosopher, but on all sides a fighter.

They called him a dreamer. He sprang from a race of chevaliers and scholars. Oddly enough, albeit in his moods a recluse, he was a man of the world; a favorite in society; very much at home in European courts, especially in that of England; the friend of Thackeray, at whose house, when in London, he made his abode. Lady Ritchie—Anne Thackeray—told me many amusing stories of his whimsies. He was a man among brainy men and a lion among clever women.

We had already come to be good friends and constant comrades when the whirligig of time threw us together for a little while in the lower house of Congress. One day he beckoned me over to his seat. He was leaning backward with his hands crossed behind his head.

As I stood in front of him he said: “On the eighth of February, 1858, Mrs. Gwin, of California, gave a fancy dress ball. Mr. Lamar, of Mississippi, a member of Congress, was there. Also a glorious young woman—a vision of beauty and grace—with whom the handsome and distinguished young statesman danced—danced once, twice, thrice, taking her likewise down to supper. He went to bed, turned his face to the wall and dreamed of her. That was twenty years ago. To-day this same Mr. Lamar, after an obscure interregnum, was with Mrs. Lamar looking over Washington for an apartment. In quest of cheap lodging they came to a mean house in a mean quarter, where a poor, wizened, ill-clad woman showed them through the meanly furnished rooms. Of course they would not suffice.

“As they were coming away the great Mr. Lamar said to the poor landlady, ‘Madam, have you lived long in Washington?’ She said all her life. ‘Madam,’ he continued, ‘were you at a fancy dress ball given by Mrs. Senator Gwin of California, the eighth of February, 1858?’ She said she was. ‘Do you remember,’ the statesman, soldier and orator continued, ‘a young and handsome Mississippian, a member of Congress, by the name of Lamar?’ She said she didn’t.”

I rather think that Lamar was the biggest brained of all the men I have met in Washington. He possessed the courage of his convictions. A doctrinaire, there was nothing of the typical doctrinaire, or theorist, about him. He really believed that cotton was king and would compel England to espouse the cause of the South.

Despite his wealth of experience and travel he was not overmuch of a raconteur, but he once told me a good story about his friend Thackeray. The two were driving to a banquet of the Literary Fund, where Dickens was to preside. “Lamar,” said Thackeray, “they say I can’t speak. But if I want to I can speak. I can speak every bit as good as Dickens, and I am going to show you to-night that I can speak almost as good as you.” When the moment arrived Thackeray said never a word. Returning in the cab, both silent, Thackeray suddenly broke forth. “Lamar,” he exclaimed, “don’t you think you have heard the greatest speech to-night that was never delivered?”

II

Holding office, especially going to Congress, had never entered any wish or scheme of mine. Office seemed to me ever a badge of bondage. I knew too much of the national capital to be allured by its evanescent and lightsome honors. When the opportunity sought me out none of its illusions appealed to me. But after a long uphill fight for personal and political recognition in Kentucky an election put a kind of seal upon the victory I had won and enabled me in a way to triumph over my enemies. I knew that if I accepted the nomination offered me I would get a big popular vote—as I did—and so, one full term, and half a term, incident to the death of the sitting member for the Louisville district being open to me, I took the short term, refusing the long term.

Though it was midsummer and Congress was about to adjourn I went to Washington and was sworn in. A friend of mine, Col. Wake Holman, had made a bet with one of our pals I would be under arrest before I had been twenty-four hours in town, and won it. It happened in this wise: The night of the day when I took my seat there was an all-night session. I knew too well what that meant, and, just from a long tiresome journey, I went to bed and slept soundly till sunrise. Just as I was up and dressing for a stroll about the old, familiar, dearly loved quarter of the town there came an imperative rap upon the door and a voice said: “Get up, colonel, quick! This is a sergeant at arms. There has been a call of the House and I am after you. Everybody is drunk, more or less, and they are noisy to have some fun with you.”

It was even as he said. Everybody, more or less, was drunk—especially the provisional speaker whom Mr. Randall had placed in the chair—and when we arrived and I was led a prisoner down the center aisle pandemonium broke loose.

They had all sorts of fun with me, such as it was. It was moved that I be fined the full amount of my mileage. Then a resolution was offered suspending my membership and sending me under guard to the old Capitol prison. Finally two or three of my friends rescued me and business was allowed to proceed. It was the last day of a very long session and those who were not drunk were worn out.

When I returned home there was a celebration in honor of the bet Wake Holman had won at my expense. Wake was the most attractive and lovable of men, by nature a hero, by profession a “filibuster” and soldier of fortune. At two and twenty he was a private in Col. Humphrey Marshall’s Regiment of Kentucky Riflemen, which reached the scene of hostilities upon the Rio Grande in the midsummer of 1846. He had enlisted from Owen county—“Sweet Owen,” as it used to be called—and came of good stock, his father, Col. Harry Holman, in the days of aboriginal fighting and journalism, a frontier celebrity. Wake’s company, out on a scout, was picked off by the Mexicans, and the distinction between United States soldiers and Texan rebels not being yet clearly established, a drumhead court-martial ordered “the decimation.”

This was a decree that one of every ten of the Yankee captives should be shot. There being a hundred of Marshall’s men, one hundred beans—ninety white and ten black—were put in a hat. Then the company was mustered as on dress parade. Whoso drew a white bean was to be held prisoner of war; whoso drew a black bean was to die.

In the early part of the drawing Wake drew a white bean. Toward the close the turn of a neighbor and comrade from Owen county who had left a wife and baby at home was called. He and Wake were standing together, Holman brushed him aside, walked out in his place and drew his bean. It turned out to be a white one. Twice within the half hour death had looked him in the eye and found no blinking there.

I have seen quite a deal of hardihood, endurance, suffering, in both women and men; splendid courage on the field of action; perfect self-possession in the face of danger; but I rather think that Wake Holman’s exploit that day—next to actually dying for a friend, what can be nobler than being willing to die for him?—is the bravest thing I know or have ever been told of mortal man.

Wake Holman went to Cuba in the Lopez Rebellion of 1851, and fought under Pickett at the Battle of Cardenas. In 1855-56 he was in Nicaragua, with Walker. He commanded a Kentucky regiment of cavalry on the Union side in our War of Sections. After the war he lived the life of a hunter and fisher at his home in Kentucky; a cheery, unambitious, big-brained and big-hearted cherub, whom it would not do to “projeck” with, albeit with entire safety you could pick his pocket; the soul of simplicity and amiability.

To have known him was an education in primal manhood. To sit at his hospitable board, with him at the head of the table, was an inspiration in the genius of life and the art of living. One of his familiars started the joke that when Wake drew the second white bean “he got a peep.” He took it kindly; though in my intimacy with him, extending over thirty years, I never heard him refer to any of his adventures as a soldier.

It was not possible that such a man should provide for his old age. He had little forecast. He knew not the value of money. He had humor, affection and courage. I held him in real love and honor. When the Mexican War Pension Act was passed by Congress I took his papers to General Black, the Commissioner of Pensions, and related this story.

“I have promised Gen. Cerro Gordo Williams,” said General Black, referring to the then senior United States Senator from Kentucky, “that his name shall go first on the roll of these Mexican pensioners. But”—and the General looked beamingly in my face, a bit tearful, and says he: “Wake Holman’s name shall come right after.” And there it is.

III

I was very carefully and for those times not ignorantly taught in music. Schell, his name was, and they called him “Professor.” He lived over in Georgetown, where he had organized a little group of Prussian refugees into a German club, and from my tenth to my fifteenth year—at first regularly, and then in a desultory way as I came back to Washington City from my school in Philadelphia, he hammered Bach and Handel and Mozart—nothing so modern as Mendelssohn—into my not unwilling nor unreceptive mind, for my bent was in the beginning to compose dramas, and in the end operas.

Adelina Patti was among my child companions. Once in the national capital, when I was 12 years old and Adelina 9, we played together at a charity concert. She had sung “The Last Rose of Summer,” and I had played her brother-in-law’s variation upon “Home, Sweet Home.” The audience was enthusiastic. We were called out again and again. Then we came on the stage together, and the applause increasing I sat down at the keyboard and played an accompaniment with my own interpolations upon “Old Folks At Home,” which I had taught Adelina, and she sang the words. Then they fairly took the roof off.

Once during a sojourn in Paris I was thrown with Christine Nilsson. She was in the heyday of her success at the Theater Lyrique under the patronage of Madame Miolan-Carvalho. One day I said to her: “The time may come when you will be giving concerts.” She was indignant. “Nevertheless,” I continued, “let me teach you a sure encore.” I played her Stephen Foster’s immortal ditty. She was delighted. The sequel was that it served her even a better turn than it had served Adelina Patti.

I played and transposed for the piano most of the melodies of Foster as they were published, they being first produced in public by Christy’s Minstrels.

IV

Stephen Foster was the ne’er-do-well of a good Pennsylvania family. A sister of his had married a brother of James Buchanan. There were two daughters of this marriage, nieces of the President, and when they were visiting the White House we had—shall I dare write it?—high jinks with our nigger-minstrel concerts on the sly.

Will S. Hays, the rival of Foster as a song writer and one of my reporters on the Courier-Journal, told me this story: “Foster,” said he, “was a good deal of what you might call a barroom loafer. He possessed a sweet tenor voice before it was spoiled by drink, and was fond of music, though technically he knew nothing about it. He had a German friend who when he died left him a musical scrapbook, of all sorts of odds and ends of original text. There is where Foster got his melodies. When the scrapbook gave out he gave out.”

I took it as merely the spleen of a rival composer. But many years after in Vienna I heard a concert given over exclusively to the performance of certain posthumous manuscripts of Schubert. Among the rest were selections from an unfinished opera—“Rosemonde,” I think it was called—in which the whole rhythm and movements and parts of the score of Old Folks at Home were the feature.

It was something to have grown up contemporary, as it were, with these songs. Many of them were written in the old Rowan homestead, just outside of Bardstown, Ky., where Louis Philippe lived and taught, and for a season Talleyrand made his abode. The Rowans were notable people. John Rowan, the elder, head of the house, was a famous lawyer, who divided oratorical honors with Henry Clay, and like Clay, was a Senator in Congress; his son, “young John,” as he was called, Stephen Foster’s pal, went as minister to Naples, and fought duels, and was as Bob Acres wanted to be, “a devil of a fellow.” He once told me he had been intimate with Thackeray when they were wild young men in Paris, and that they had both of them known the woman whom Thackeray had taken for the original of Becky Sharp.

The Foster songs quite captivated my boyhood. I could sing a little, as well as play, and learned each of them—especially Old Folks at Home and My Old Kentucky Home—as they appeared. Their contemporary vogue was tremendous. Nothing has since rivalled the popular impression they made, except perhaps the Arthur Sullivan melodies.

Among my ambitions to be a great historian, dramatist, soldier and writer of romance I desired also to be a great musician, especially a great pianist. The bone-felon did the business for this later. But all my life I have been able to thumb the keyboard at least for the children to dance, and it has been a recourse and solace sometimes during intervals of embittered journalism and unprosperous statesmanship.

V

Theodore Thomas and I used to play duos together. He was a master of the violin before he took to orchestration. We remained the best of friends to the end of his days.

On the slightest provocation, or none, we passed entire nights together. Once after a concert he suddenly exclaimed: “Don’t you think Wagner was a —— fraud?”

A little surprised even by one of his outbreaks, I said: “Wagner may have written some trick music but I hardly think that he was a fraud.”

He reflected a moment. “Well,” he continued, “it may not lie in my mouth to say it—and perhaps I ought not to say it—I know I am most responsible for the Wagner craze—but I consider him a —— fraud.”

He had just come from a long “classic entertainment,” was worn out with travel and worry, and meant nothing of the sort.