Chapter 8

I feel that I should not now deal fairly with the public if I did not give here the letter from Blaine in my possession, that more completely than any published gives expression to his personal bearing when defeated.

LETTER FROM MR. BLAINE TO MR. HALSTEAD.

(Personal.)

AUGUSTA, MAINE, _16th Nov., '84._

DEAR MR. HALSTEAD:--I think there would be no harm to the public and no personal injustice if you should insert the three enclosed items in your editorial columns.

I feel quite serene over the result. As the Lord sent upon us an ass in the shape of a preacher, and a rainstorm, to lessen our vote in New York, I am disposed to feel resigned to the dispensation of defeat, which flowed directly from these agencies.

In missing a great honor I escaped a great and oppressive responsibility. You know--perhaps better than any one--how _much I didn't want_ the nomination; but perhaps, in view of all things, I have not made a loss by the canvass. At least I try to think not. The other candidate would have fared hard in Maine, and would have been utterly broken in Ohio.

Sincerely,

JAMES G. BLAINE.

Of course all this is private.

_P.S._--This note was written before receipt of yours. Pray publish nothing of the kind you intimate unless you first permit me to see the proof. Don't be afraid of the enclosed items. They are rock-ribbed for truth and for a good rendering of public opinion.

Mr. Blaine refers in the closing paragraph to the proposition I made to him to publish the true story of his candidacy--substantially the same pressed upon the attention of General Sherman. Between them they suppressed me, but it is due them that this chapter of history should be known now that they are gone.

I had the privilege of walking with Mr. Blaine in the beautiful and fragrant parks at Homburg, in Southern Germany, in the summer of 1887, and discussing with him the question whether he should be a candidate for the Republican nomination the next spring. He then seemed to be very well, but exertion speedily fatigued him. He was on sight a very striking personage, and always instantly regarded with interest by strangers. His personal appearance was of the utmost refinement and of irreproachable dignity. His absolute cleanliness was something dainty, his dress simple but fitting perfectly and of the best material. His face was very pale, but his sparkling eyes contradicted the pallor.

His form was erect, and his figure that of youth. His hair and beard were exquisitely white. His mouth had the purity of a child's, and he never had tasted tobacco or used spirituous liquors, save when his physician had recommended a little whiskey, and then not enough to color a glass. He drank sparingly of claret and champagne, caring only for the flavor. He was gentle, kindly, genial, and in a manly sense beautiful. There are many distinguished English people at Homburg in the season, and they were gratified to meet Mr. Blaine, and charmed with him. It required no ceremony to announce him as a personage--a man who had made events--and he never posed or gave the slightest hint, in his movements, of conscious celebrity. I never saw him bothered by being aware of himself but once, and that was when, across the street from the Fifth Avenue Hotel, in the dusk of an evening, he shaded his face with his hand, and looked curiously at ten thousand people who were gazing at the house, and shouting madly for him, expecting that he would appear at a window and make acknowledgment of their enthusiasm. Suddenly he saw in the glance of one beside him that he was curiously yet doubtfully regarded, and hastened away in fear of his friends, who in their delight at discovering him would have become a mob.

In Homburg he seemed to care for others' opinions about the proper course for him to take; and the substance of that which I had to say--and he seemed to think me in a way representative--was that he alone must decide for himself, as he only knew all the circumstances and elements that must be considered in a decision. Once we walked the main street of the town in the night--and it is then a very lonely place, for it is the fashion to get up in the morning at six o'clock, and take the waters and the music--and that time I was impressed, and the impression abided, that the inner conviction of Mr. Blaine was he had not the vitality to safely take the Presidency if he held it in his hand; that he believed the office would wear him out--that it was a place of dealing with persons who would worry away his existence; that he felt he could not endure the wear and tear and pressure of the first position, and preferred the Secretaryship of State, with the hope of going on with his South American policy, which he had developed in Garfield's time, brief as that was; and I conjectured that all this had been in his mind when he wanted Sherman and Lincoln to be the ticket in 1884. And it occurred to me with so much force as the logic of many things he said, that I accepted it as true, and was reminded of his weary exclamation once of a good friend whose moods were changeable: "Now that he is right, stay with him. He takes the health out of me with his uncertainties."

The Secretaryship of State he cared for; in that office the world was all before him, and he was fully himself, and was not fretted by a perpetual procession of favor-seekers. The argument his urgent admirers used with him was that it would be easier to make up his mind than to convince a President, and that as the Chief of State he could throw the work on the Cabinet; but he was not satisfied. The Florence letter to me seemed familiar, for it was a reminder of Homburg, and its sincerity was in all the lines and between the lines; and it was addressed to a friend in Pittsburg, that it might not be suppressed in New York. He had very close and influential friends who did not divine his true attitude, or would not admit that they had, and insisted that he was really well and strong and tough, better than he had been, and that he should not be humored in his fancy that he was an invalid. This feeling continued even to 1892, though he had been meantime painfully broken by a protracted illness. It will be remembered that in the correspondence between General Harrison as President-elect and Mr. Blaine, when the Secretaryship of State was offered and accepted, there appeared harmony of views concerning Pan-Americanism; that Mr. Blaine enjoyed the office and that his official labors during the Harrison Administration were of the highest distinction, showing his happiest characteristics. The difference as to duties that arose between the President and the Secretary was forgotten, and their mutual sympathies abounded, when there came upon them, in their households, the gravest, tenderest sorrows.

When Mr. Blaine was for the last time in New York on his way to Washington, stopping as was his habit at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, he asked me to walk with him to his room, fronting on Twenty-third Street, on the parlor floor; and he slowly, as if it were a task, unlocked the door. There was a sparkle of autumnal crispness in the air, and he had a fire, that glittered and threw shadows about fitfully. There was not much to say. It was plain at last that Mr. Blaine was fading, that he had within a few weeks failed fast. His great, bright eyes were greater than ever, but not so bright. His face was awfully white; not that brainy pallor that was familiar--something else! He seated himself in the light of the fire, on an easy-chair. There was a knock at his door, and a servant handed him a card, and he said: "No;" and we were alone. I could not think of a word of consolation; and in a moment he appeared to have forgotten me, and stared in a fixed, rapt dream at the flickering flame in the grate. It occurred to me to get up and go away quietly, as conversation was impossible--for there was too much to say. It came to me that I ought not to leave him alone. Something in him reminded me of the mystical phrases of the transcendent paragraph of his oration on Garfield, picturing the death of the second martyred President, by the ocean, while far off white ships touched the sea and sky, and the fevered face of the dying man felt "the breath of the eternal morning."

Some weeks earlier Mr. Blaine and I had had a deep talk about men and things, and he was very kind, and his boundless generosity of nature never revealed itself with a greater or sadder charm. He now remembered that conversation--as a word disclosed--and said: "I could have endured all things if my boys had not died." The door opened, and his secretary walked in--and I took Mr. Blaine's hand for the last time, saying, "Good-night," and he said, with a look that meant farewell--"Good-by."

His grave is on a slope that when I saw it was goldenly sunny, and the turf was strewn by his wife's hand with lilies--for it was Easter morning! Close at his left was a steep, grassy bank, radiantly blue with violets, and there was in the shining air the murmurous hum of bees, making a slumbrous, restful music. Blaine's monument is a hickory tree whose broken top speaks of storms, and at his feet is a stone white as new snow, and on it only--and they are enough--the initials "J.G.B.," that were the battle-cry of millions, and are and shall be always to memory dear.

[Footnote I: This related to a matter General Sherman had mentioned in another letter, and did not refer to the subject I was trying to get him to consider.]

[Footnote J: General Sherman differed in this judgment with Blaine and many Republicans who were not unfriendly to Arthur.]

THE NEW STATUE OF WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON.

BY FRANK B. GESSNER.

The erection of an equestrian statue of General William Henry Harrison, in Cincinnati, Ohio, is a fitting but also a tardy commemoration of a man who rendered his State and the nation most distinguished services. For fifty years there has been talk of doing him honor in some such fashion, and even the statue which as this Magazine goes to press is being formally dedicated in Cincinnati (in the presence of a grandson of the subject who is himself an ex-President), has been completed for some years, and has been stowed away in dust and darkness because there was not public interest enough in the matter to meet the cost of setting it up.

Although now almost a forgotten figure, General Harrison was one of the ablest and worthiest of our public men. Born in Berkeley, Virginia, February 9, 1773, he grew to manhood with the close of the Revolution and the establishment of the national government. His father was the friend of Washington, and when the son went into the Western wilds he held a commission as ensign signed by the first of the Presidents. At the age of thirty he was a delegate in Congress from the Northwest Territory. For a succeeding decade he was governor of that wide stretch of country which in time he saw carved into States all owing much to his genius as warrior and statesman. In the second war with Great Britain he commanded the Western armies, and won the notable victories of Tippecanoe and the Thames. The first gave him a name which became the slogan of the Whigs in the memorable campaign of "Tippecanoe and Tyler too." At the battle of the Thames fell Tecumseh, whose death broke the Indian power east of the Mississippi. After the war of 1812 General Harrison was successively Congressman, Senator of the United States, and Minister to Colombia.

Returning in 1830 to his home at North Bend, on the line between Indiana and Ohio, he lived more or less in retirement until 1836, when he was made the Whig candidate for President. He was defeated; but in 1840 he was again the nominee, and, after the greatest campaign of the century, was elected, defeating Martin Van Buren. The campaign of 1840 was called the "log-cabin and hard-cider" campaign, though the reputed log-cabin home of the Whig candidate was in reality a spacious mansion. General Harrison was inaugurated March 4, 1841, and on April 4, a month later, he died in the White House, a victim of exposure and the wearing importunities of office-seeking constituents. Something of the character of the man is disclosed in his last words, spoken four hours before his death. To whom he thought himself speaking can only be conjectured--Vice-President Tyler, some authorities claim; but he was heard by his physician to say: "Sir, I wish you to understand the true principles of the government. I wish them carried out. I ask nothing more."

Physically, General Harrison has been described as "about six feet high," straight and rather slender, and of "a firm, elastic gait," even in his last years. He had "a keen, penetrating eye," a "high, broad and prominent" forehead, and "rather thin and compressed lips."

Mrs. Harrison was not with her husband at his death, and never became an inmate of the White House. For that reason there hangs on its walls no portrait of her, among those of the various ladies of the mansion. She was the daughter of John Cleves Symmes, a scion of the Colonial aristocracy. She loved better than the excitement of social life in Washington the domestic peace of her North Bend home and the society of her thirteen children, growing up in usefulness and honor. In her youth she had been a great belle, and she remained a beautiful woman even in her declining years. She was educated in that first fashionable school for young women in America founded by Isabella Graham in the city of New York. A sister, Polly Symmes, was also a famous beauty. They went together to share their father's fortunes in the unsettled West, and both found their fates in the hand of the Miamis. Polly married Peyton Short, who became a millionaire.

Mrs. Harrison had been detained by illness from going with her husband to witness the proudest event of his life, his inauguration; and she had purposed following him to Washington later in the spring, when the weather should be more favorable for the long, wearisome journey by stage-coach. But, alas! before the spring fully opened, instead of following him to Washington she was following his body to its silent, stone-walled tomb, overlooking the wide sweep of the Ohio southward. This noble woman lived to be eighty-nine and to see her grandson, Benjamin Harrison, now ex-President, a general in the Union army. She retained to the last much of her beauty and that sweetness of disposition which has endeared her memory to those of her blood who knew her best. She sleeps by the side of her husband in the old vault at North Bend.

The Cincinnati statue of General Harrison is the work of L.T. Rebisso, who made the statue of General McPherson which stands in one of the circular parks in Washington, and the equestrian statue of General Grant for the city of Chicago. Its cost, which, exclusive of the pedestal, is twenty-seven thousand dollars, is paid by the city. Mr. Rebisso has given a portrayal of Harrison unlike any of the more familiar pictures. These usually present a decrepit old man, from whose eye have vanished that fire of youth and flash of soul which made Harrison a leader of men. The Rebisso statue, as will be seen by the reproduction of it given herewith, presents a soldier in the full flower of vigorous manhood. And this conception is no mere ideal of fancy, but is taken from a portrait painted in 1812, which now hangs in the house of a grandchild of General Harrison near the old North Bend homestead.

THE SILENT WITNESS

BY HERBERT D. WARD

There are many hamlets in New Hampshire, five, ten miles or even more from the railroad station. To the chance summer visitor the seclusion and the rest seem entrancing. The glamour of mountain scenery and trout effectually obliterates the brave signs of poverty and struggle from before the irresponsive eyes of the man of city leisure. He carelessly gives the urchin, mutely pleading in front of the unpainted farm-house, a few cents for his corrugated cake of maple-sugar, and asks the name of a distant peak. If he should notice, how would he know the meaning of the scant crops of hay and potatoes, or of the empty stall? Sealed to him is the pathos in the history of the owners of the stone farm. His thoughts scarcely glance at the piteous wife plaiting straw hats; the only son, whose rare happiness consists in a barn dance in the village three miles below, and whose large eyes contract with increasing age, and lose all expression except that of anxiety.

There was a time perhaps when the backbone of the New World used to be straightened by men of a mountain birth. The question whether the hills of Vermont and New Hampshire produce giants of trade or law to-day as they did fifty years ago, is an open one. So the grand old stock is run out of the soil? And is it replaced by the sons and grandsons of those sturdy farmers themselves, who buy back the rickety homesteads, and remodel them into summer cottages?

Michael Angelo said that "men are worth more than money," and if what was an axiom then is true in these fallen days of purse worship, Mrs. Abraham Masters was the richest woman under the range of Mount Kearsarge. For her son Isaac was the tallest, the strongest, the tenderest, and truest boy in the county; but her farm of a hundred acres, the only inheritance from a dead husband, was about the poorest, most unprofitable, and most inaccessible collection of boulders in the mountains.

It was situated upon the cold shoulder of a hill, sixteen miles from the nearest station. The three-mile trail which led from the village would have been easier to travel could it have boasted a corduroy road. What a site for a hotel! Yet the hotel did not materialize, and the "view" neither fed nor warmed nor clothed the patient proprietors of the desolate spot.

"Never mind, I reckon we'll pull through," Isaac used to comfort his mother.

"You're a good boy, Ikey. If the Lord is willin', I guess I am," she answered with quaint devoutness.

But the Lord did not seem to be willing, and one spring He caused a late frost in June to kill most of the seed, and a drouth in July and August to wither what was left, and starvation stared in the faces of the widow and her son. At this time, Isaac began to "keep company," and to talk of getting married in the next decade. He was twenty-two, and had a faithful, saving disposition, when there was anything to save. And whether he became engaged because there was nothing but love to harvest, or whether, woman-like, Abbie Faxon loved him better than she did her other suitors because of his poverty and misery, and was willing to tell him so, I cannot pretend to decide. At any rate, Isaac brought Abbie one afternoon from the village, three miles below, and the two women kissed and wept, and Isaac went out and stood alone facing the view; the apple in his throat rose and fell, and great tears blinded his sight.

We can make no hero of Isaac, for he was none. His heart was as simple and as clean as a pebble in a brook. Country vices had not smirched him. He had a mind only for his mother, and the farm, and earning a living--and a heart for Abbie. Great thoughts did not invade his head. But this afternoon, as he stood there on the gray rock, his heart bursting with his happiness, which was made perfect by his mother's blessing, an apprehension for the future--bitter, breathless, began to arouse him. The promise of the horizon suddenly became revealed to him. The distant line of green, now bold, now sinuous, now uncertain, had never asked him questions before, had never exasperated him with a meaning.

But now he saw the tips of spires flecking the verdure of the far-off valleys. He saw the hurrying smoke of a locomotive. He saw with awakening vision, starting from that dead farm of his, the region of trade and life. A film had fallen from his eyes. The energetic arrow of love had touched his ambition, and his round, rosy face became indented with lines of resolve. He turned and walked with a new tread into the house.

"Mother! Abbie!" he blurted out, "I'm going away. I'm going to Boston." He stopped and stammered as he saw the horror-stricken faces before him.

"Lord a-mercy!"

"Ikey! Air you teched?"

"No," he resumed stoutly, "I be'ant. There's Dan Prentiss--he went--see what he done; and Uncle Bill, he--"

"We hain't heard nothing from your Uncle Bill since he sot out. That was twelve years ago, the spring your father built them three feet on the shed." Mrs. Masters spoke firmly.

"Never mind, mother, I'm going to Boston, and I will come back. I'm going to earn my livin'. I'm strong and willin', and as able as Dan Prentiss. Ye needn't be scared, I ain't going yet. I'll finish up the fall work fust. I'm going for the winter anyway, and Abbie'll come an' live with you, mother--won't you, Abbie, dear? She's the only mother you've got now. Your folks can spare you."

Here Abbie announced bravely, "I will, Ikey, if you must go."

She blushed deeply as she said it, and the sight of her pretty color so moved the young man that, having the bashfulness of his native crops, he rushed out into the glory of the sunset, and sat upon the granite boulder watching until the gray, the purple, and then the black had washed out the white steeples from the distant valley.

Isaac Masters was of the boulder type. How many decades was the smooth, worn rock in front of his house riding on the crest of a glacier until it reached its halt? But now it would need a double charge of dynamite to shake it from its base. It generally took the mountain lad days, perhaps weeks, to make up his mind, even upon such a simple problem as the quantity of grain his horse should have at a feed when the spring planting began; but when once his intention was fixed it withstood all opposition. But this time he was astonished at his own temerity of mind, as his mother and sweetheart were; and the more profoundly he pondered over the gravest decision of his life, the more did it seem to him an inspiration, perhaps from the Deity himself.

But Isaac was formed in too simple and honest a mould to delude the two women or himself with iridescent dreams of success. He had worked on the ragged farm bitterly, incessantly. He had fought the rocks, and the weeds, and the soil, the frost and the drouth, as one fights for his life, and never had a thought of food or of comfort visited him unaccompanied by the necessity for labor.