Chapter 12

Converse, of Ohio, appeared in the Platform Committee representing Randall, and Morrison, of Illinois, and myself, representing Carlisle. I was bent upon making Morrison chairman of the committee. But it was agreed that the chairmanship should be held in abeyance until the platform had been formulated and adopted. The subcommittee to whom the task was delegated sat fifty-one hours without a break before its work was completed. Then Morrison was named chairman. It was arranged thereafter between Converse, Morrison and myself that when the agreed report was made, Converse and I should have each what time he required to say what was desired in explanation, I to close the debate and move the previous question. At this point General Butler sidled up. "Where do I come in?" he asked.

"You don't get in at all, you blasted old sinner," said Morrison.

"I have scriptural warrant," General Butler said. "Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth the corn."

"All right, old man," said Morrison, good-humoredly, "take all the time you want."

In his speech before the convention General Butler was not at his happiest, and in closing he gave me a particularly good opening. "If you adopt this platform of my friend Watterson," he said, "God may help you, but I can't."

I was standing by his side, and, it being my turn, he made way for me, and I said: "During the last few days and nights of agreeable, though rather irksome, intercourse, I have learned to love General Butler, but I must declare that in an option between him and the Almighty I have a prejudice in favor of God."

In his personal intercourse, General Butler was the most genial of men. The subcommittee in charge of the preparation of a platform held its meetings in the drawing-room of his hotel apartment, and he had constituted himself our host as well as our colleague. I had not previously met him. It was not long after we came together before he began to call me by my Christian name. At one stage of the proceedings when by substituting one word for another it looked as though we might reach an agreement, he said to me: "Henry, what is the difference between 'exclusively for public purposes' and 'a tariff for revenue only'?"

"I know of none," I answered.

"Do you think that the committee have found you out?"

"No, I scarcely think so."

"Then I will see that they do," and he proceeded in his peculiarly subtle way to undo all that we had done, prolonging the session twenty-four hours.

He was an able man and a lovable man. The missing ingredient was serious belief. Just after the nomination of the Breckinridge and Lane Presidential ticket in 1860, I heard him make an ultra-Southern speech from Mr. Breckinridge's doorway. "What do you think of that?" I asked Andrew Johnson, who stood by me, and Johnson answered sharply, with an oath: "I never like a man to be for me more than I am for myself." I have been told that even at home General Butler could never acquire the public confidence. In spite of his conceded mentality and manliness he gave the impression of being something of an intellectual sharper.

He was charitable, generous and amiable. The famous New Orleans order which had made him odious to the women of the South he had issued to warn bad women and protect good women. Assuredly he did not foresee the interpretation that would be put upon it. He was personally popular in Congress. When he came to Washington he dispensed a lavish hospitality. Such radical Democrats as Beck and Knott did not disdain his company, became, indeed, his familiars. Yet, curious to relate, a Kentucky Congressman of the period lost his seat because it was charged and proven that he had ridden in a carriage to the White House with the Yankee Boanerges on a public occasion.

III

Mere party issues never counted with me. I have read too much and seen too much. At my present time of life they count not at all. I used to think that there was a principle involved between the dogmas of Free Trade and Protection as they were preached by their respective attorneys. Yet what was either except the ancient, everlasting scheme--

--"_The good old rôle--the simple plan, That they should take who have the power And they should keep who can_."

How little wisdom one man may get from another man's counsels, one nation may get from another nation's history, can be partly computed when we reflect how often our personal experience has failed in warning admonition.

Temperament and circumstance do indeed cut a prodigious figure in life. Traversing the older countries, especially Spain, the most illustrative, the wayfarer is met at all points by what seems not merely the logic of events, but the common law of the inevitable. The Latin of the Sixteenth century was a recrudescence of the Roman of the First. He had not, like the Mongolian, lived long enough to become a stoic. He was mainly a cynic and an adventurer. Thence he flowered into a sybarite. Coming to great wealth with the discoveries of Columbus and the conquests of Pizarro and Cortes, he proceeded to enjoy its fruits according to his fancy and the fashion of the times.

He erected massive shrines to his deities. He reared noble palaces. He built about his cathedrals and his castles what were then thought to be great cities, walled and fortified. He was, for all his self-sufficiency and pride, short-sighted; and yet, until they arrived, how could he foresee the developments of artillery? They were as hidden from him as three centuries later the wonders of electricity were hidden from us.

I was never a Free Trader. I stood for a tariff for revenue as the least oppressive and safest support of Government. The protective system in the United States, responsible for our unequal distribution of wealth, took at least its name from Spain, and the Robber Barons, as I used to call the Protectionists of Pennsylvania, were not of immediate German origin.

Truth to say, both on land and water Spain has made a deal of history, and the front betwixt Gibraltar and the Isle of San Fernando--Tangier on one side and the Straits of Tarifa on the other--Cape Trafalgar, where Nelson fought the famous battle, midway between them--has had its share.

Tarifa! What memories it invokes! In the olden and golden days of primitive man, before corporation lawyers had learned how to frame pillaging statutes, and rascally politicians to bamboozle confiding constituencies--thus I used to put it--the gentle pirates of Tarifa laid broad and deep the foundations for the Protective System in the United States.

It was a fruitful as well as a congenial theme, and I rang all the changes on it. To take by law from one man what is his and give it to another man who has not earned it and has no right to it, I showed to be an invention of the Moors, copied by the Spaniards and elevated thence into political economy by the Americans. Tarifa took its name from Tarif-Ben-Malik, the most enterprising Robber Baron of his day, and thus the Lords of Tarifa were the progenitors of the Robber Barons of the Black Forest, New England and Pittsburgh. Tribute was the name the Moors gave their robbery, which was open and aboveboard. The Coal Kings, the Steel Kings and the Oil Kings of the modern world have contrived to hide the process; but in Spain the palaces of their forefathers rise in lonely and solemn grandeur just as a thousand years hence the palaces upon the Fifth Avenue side of Central Park and along Riverside Drive, not to mention those of the Schuylkill and the Delaware, may become but roosts for bats and owls, and the chronicler of the Anthropophagi, "whose heads do reach the skies," may tell how the voters of the Great Republic were bought and sold with their own money, until "Heaven released the legions north of the North Pole, and they swooped down and crushed the pulpy mass beneath their avenging snowshoes."

The gold that was gathered by the Spaniards and fought over so valiantly is scattered to the four ends of the earth. It may be as potent to-day as then; but it does not seem nearly so heroic. A good deal of it has found its way to London, which a short century and a half ago "had not," according to Adam Smith, "sufficient wealth to compete with Cadiz." We have had our full share without fighting for it. Thus all things come to him who contrives and waits.

Meanwhile, there are "groups" and "rings." And, likewise, "leaders" and "bosses." What do they know or care about the origins of wealth; about Venice; about Cadiz; about what is said of Wall Street? The Spanish Main was long ago stripped of its pillage. The buccaneers took themselves off to keep company with the Vikings. Yet, away down in those money chests, once filled with what were pieces of eight and ducats and doubloons, who shall say that spirits may not lurk and ghosts walk, one old freebooter wheezing to another old freebooter: "They order these things better in the 'States.'"

IV

I have enjoyed hugely my several sojourns in Spain. The Spaniard is unlike any other European. He may not make you love him. But you are bound to respect him.

There is a mansion in Seville known as The House of Pontius Pilate because part of the remains of the abode of the Roman Governor was brought from Jerusalem and used in a building suited to the dignity of a Spanish grandee who was also a Lord of Tarifa. The Duke of Medina Celi, its present owner, is a lineal scion of the old piratical crew. The mansion is filled with the fruits of many a foray. There are plunder from Naples, where one ancestor was Viceroy, and treasures from the temples of the Aztecs and the Incas, where two other ancestors ruled. Every coping stone and pillar cost some mariner of the Tarifa Straits a pot of money.

Its owner is a pauper. A carekeeper shows it for a peseta a head. To such base uses may we come at last. Yet Seville basks in the sun and smiles on the flashing waters of the Guadalquivir, and Cadiz sits serene upon the green hillsides of San Sebastian, just as if nothing had ever happened; neither the Barber and Carmen, nor Nelson and Byron; the past but a phantom; the present the prosiest of prose-poems.

There are canny Spaniards even as there are canny Scots, who grow rich and prosper; but there is never a Spaniard who does not regard the political fabric, and the laws, as fair game, the rule being always "devil take the hindmost," community of interests nowhere. "The good old vices of Spain," that is, the robbing of the lesser rogue by the greater in regulated gradations all the way from the King to the beggar, are as prevalent and as vital as ever they were. Curiously enough, a tiny stream of Hebraic blood and Moorish blood still trickles through the Spanish coast towns. It may be traced through the nomenclature in spite of its Castilian prefigurations and appendices, which would account for some of the enterprise and activity that show themselves, albeit only by fits and starts.

Chapter the Thirtieth

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.