There used to be a story about Raleigh, in North Carolina, where Andrew Johnson was born, which whispered that he was a natural son of William Ruffin, an eminent jurist in the earlier years of the nineteenth century. It was analogous to the story that Lincoln was the natural son of various paternities from time to time assigned to him. I had my share in running that calumny to cover. It was a lie out of whole cloth with nothing whatever to support or excuse it. I reached the bottom of it to discover proof of its baselessness abundant and conclusive. In Johnson's case I take it that the story had nothing other to rest on than the obscurity of his birth and the quality of his talents. Late in life Johnson went to Raleigh and caused to be erected a modest tablet over the spot pointed out as the grave of his progenitor, saying, I was told by persons claiming to have been present, "I place this stone over the last earthly abode of my alleged father."
Johnson, in the saying of the countryside, "out-married himself." His wife was a plain woman, but came of good family. One day, when a child, so the legend ran, she saw passing through the Greenville street in which her people lived, a woman, a boy and a cow, the boy carrying a pack over his shoulder. They were obviously weary and hungry. Extreme poverty could present no sadder picture. "Mother," cried the girl, "there goes the man I am going to marry." She was thought to be in jest. But a few years later she made her banter good and lived to see her husband President of the United States and with him to occupy the White House at Washington.
Much has been written of the humble birth and iron fortune of Abraham Lincoln. He had no such obstacles to overcome as either Andrew Jackson or Andrew Johnson. Jackson, a prisoner of war, was liberated, a lad of sixteen, from the British pen at Charleston, without a relative, a friend or a dollar in the world, having to make his way upward through the most aristocratic community of the country and the time. Johnson, equally friendless and penniless, started as a poor tailor in a rustic village. Lincoln must therefore, take third place among our self-made Presidents. The Hanks family were not paupers. He had a wise and helpful stepmother. He was scarcely worse off than most young fellows of his neighborhood, first in Indiana and then in Illinois. On this side justice has never been rendered to Jackson and Johnson. In the case of Jackson the circumstance was forgotten, while Johnson too often dwelt upon it and made capital out of it.
Under date of the 23rd of May, 1919, the Hon. Josephus Daniels, Secretary of the Navy, writes me the following letter, which I violate no confidence in reproducing in this connection:
MY DEAR MARSE HENRY:--
I can't tell you how much delight and pleasure your reminiscences in the Saturday Evening Post have given me, as well as the many others who have followed them, and I suppose you will put them in a volume when they are finished, so that we may have the pleasure of reading them in connected order.
As you know, I live in Raleigh and I was very much interested in your article in the issue of April 5, 1919, with reference to Andrew Johnson, in which you quote a story that "used to be current in Raleigh, that he was the son of William Ruffin, an eminent jurist of the nineteenth century." I had never heard this story, but the story that was gossiped there was that he was the son of a certain Senator Haywood. I ran that story down and found that it had no foundation whatever, because if he had been the son of the Senator reputed to be his father, the Senator was of the age of twelve years when Andrew Johnson was born.
My own information is, for I have made some investigation of it, that the story about Andrew Johnson's having a father other than the husband of his mother, is as wanting in foundation as the story about Abraham Lincoln. You did a great service in running that down and exposing it, and I trust before you finish your book that you will make further investigation and be able to do a like service in repudiating the unjust, idle gossip with reference to Andrew Johnson. In your article you say that persons who claim to have been present when Johnson came to Raleigh and erected a monument over the grave of his father, declare that Johnson said he placed this stone over the last earthly abode of "my alleged father." That is one phase of the gossip, and the other is that he said "my reputed father," both equally false.
The late Mr. Pulaski Cowper, who was private secretary to Governor Bragg, of our State, just prior to the war, and who was afterwards president of our leading life insurance company, a gentleman of high character, and of the best memory, was present at the time that Johnson made the address from which you quote the rumor. Mr. Cowper wrote an article for The News and Observer, giving the story and relating that Johnson said that "he was glad to come to Raleigh to erect a tablet to his father." The truth is that while his father was a man of little or no education, he held the position of janitor at the State Capitol, and he was not wanting in qualities which made him superior to his humble position. If he had been living in this day he would have been given a lifesaving medal, for upon the occasion of a picnic near Raleigh when the cry came that children were drowning he was the first to leap in and endanger his life to save them.
Andrew Johnson's mother was related to the Chappell family, of which there are a number of citizens of standing and character near Raleigh, several of them having been ministers of the Gospel, and one at least having gained distinction as a missionary in China.
I am writing you because I know that your story will be read and accepted and I thought you would be glad to have this story, based upon a study and investigation and personal knowledge of Mr. Cowper, whose character and competency are well known in North Carolina.
An Old Newspaper Rookery--Reactionary Sectionalism in Cincinnati and Louisville--The Courier-Journal
My dream of wealth through my commission on the Confederate cotton I was to sell to English buyers was quickly shattered. The cotton was burned and I found myself in the early spring of 1865 in the little village of Glendale, a suburb of Cincinnati, where the future Justice Stanley Matthews had his home. His wife was a younger sister of my mother. My grandmother was still alive and lived with her daughter and son-in-law.
I was received with open arms. A few days later the dear old lady said to me: "I suppose, my son, you are rather a picked bird after your adventures in the South. You certainly need better clothing. I have some money in bank and it is freely yours."
I knew that my Uncle Stanley had put her up to this, and out of sheer curiosity I asked her how much she could let me have. She named what seemed to me a stupendous sum. I thanked her, told her I had quite a sufficiency for the time being, slipped into town and pawned my watch; that is, as I made light of it afterward in order to escape the humiliation of borrowing from an uncle whose politics I did not approve, I went with my collateral to an uncle who had no politics at all and got fifty dollars on it! Before the money was gone I had found, through Judge Matthews, congenial work.
There was in Cincinnati but one afternoon newspaper--the Evening Times--owned by Calvin W. Starbuck. He had been a practical printer but was grown very rich. He received me kindly, said the editorial force was quite full--must always be, on a daily newspaper--"but," he added, "my brother, Alexander Starbuck, who has been running the amusements, wants to go a-fishing in Canada--to be gone a month--and, if you wish, you can during his absence sub for him."
It was just to my hand and liking. Before Alexander Starbuck returned the leading editor of the paper fell from a ferryboat crossing the Ohio River and was drowned. The next day General Starbuck sent for me and offered me the vacant place.
"Why, general," I said, "I am an outlawed man: I do not agree with your politics. I do not see how I can undertake a place so conspicuous and responsible."
He replied: "I propose to engage you as an editorial manager. It is as if building a house you should be head carpenter, I the architect. The difference in salary will be seventy-five dollars a week against fifteen dollars a week."
I took the place.
II
The office of the Evening Times was a queer old curiosity shop. I set to and turned it inside out. I had very pronounced journalistic notions of my own and applied them in every department of the sleepy old money-maker. One afternoon a week later I put forth a paper whose oldest reader could not have recognized it. The next morning's Cincinnati Commercial contained a flock of paragraphs to which the Chattanooga-Cincinnati-Rebel Evening Times furnished the keynote.
They made funny reading, but they threw a dangerous flare upon my "past" and put me at a serious disadvantage. It happened that when Artemus Ward had been in town a fortnight before he gave me a dinner and had some of his friends to meet me. Among these was a young fellow of the name of Halstead, who, I was told, was the coming man on the Commercial.
Round to the Commercial office I sped, and being conducted to this person, who received me very blandly, I said: "Mr. Halstead, I am a journeyman day laborer in your city--the merest bird of passage, with my watch at the pawnbroker's. As soon as I am able to get out of town I mean to go--and I came to ask if you can think the personal allusions to me in to-day's paper, which may lose me my job but can nowise hurt the Times, are quite fair--even--since I am without defense--quite manly."
He looked at me with that quizzical, serio-comic stare which so became him, and with great heartiness replied: "No--they were damned mean--though I did not realize how mean. The mark was so obvious and tempting I could not resist, but--there shall be no more of them. Come, let us go and have a drink."
That was the beginning of a friendship which brought happiness to both of us and lasted nearly half a century, to the hour of his death, when, going from Louisville to Cincinnati, I helped to lay him away in Spring Grove Cemetery.
I had no thought of remaining in Cincinnati. My objective was Nashville, where the young woman who was to become my wife, and whom I had not seen for nearly two years, was living with her family. During the summer Mr. Francisco, the business manager of the Evening Times, had a scheme to buy the Toledo Commercial, in conjunction with Mr. Comly, of Columbus, and to engage me as editor conjointly with Mr. Harrison Gray Otis as publisher. It looked very good. Toledo threatened Cleveland and Detroit as a lake port. But nothing could divert me. As soon as Parson Brownlow, who was governor of Tennessee and making things lively for the returning rebels, would allow, I was going to Nashville.
About the time the way was cleared my two pals, or bunkies, of the Confederacy, Albert Roberts and George Purvis, friends from boyhood, put in an appearance. They were on their way to the capital of Tennessee. The father of Albert Roberts was chief owner of the Republican Banner, an old and highly respectable newspaper, which had for nearly four years lain in a state of suspension. Their plan now was to revive its publication, Purvis to be business manager, and Albert and I to be editors. We had no cash. Nobody on our side of the line had any cash. But John Roberts owned a farm he could mortgage for money enough to start us. What had I to say?
Less than a week later saw us back at home winnowing the town for subscribers and advertising. We divided it into districts, each taking a specified territory. The way we boys hustled was a sight to see. But the way the community warmed to us was another. When the familiar headline, The Republican Banner, made its appearance there was a popular hallelujah, albeit there were five other dailies ahead of us. A year later there was only one, and it was nowise a competitor.
Albert Roberts had left his girl, Edith Scott, the niece of Huxley, whom I have before mentioned, in Montgomery, Alabama. Purvis' girl, Sophie Searcy, was in Selma. Their hope was to have enough money by Christmas each to pay a visit to those distant places. My girl was on the spot, and we had resolved, money or no money, to be married without delay. Before New Year's the three of us were wedded and comfortably settled, with funds galore, for the paper had thrived consumingly. It had thrived so consumingly that after a little I was able to achieve the wish of my heart and to go to London, taking my wife and my "great American novel" with me. I have related elsewhere what came of this and what happened to me.
III
That bread cast upon the waters--"'dough' put out at usance," as Joseph Jefferson used to phrase it--shall return after many days has been I dare say discovered by most persons who have perpetrated acts of kindness, conscious or unconscious. There was a poor, broken-down English actor with a passion for Chaucer, whom I was wont to encounter in the Library of Congress. His voice was quite gone. Now and again I had him join me in a square meal. Once in a while I paid his room rent. I was loath to leave him when the break came in 1861, though he declared he had "expectations," and made sure he would not starve.
I was passing through Regent Street in London, when a smart brougham drove up to the curb and a wheezy voice called after me. It was my old friend, Newton. His "expectations" had not failed him, he had come into a property and was living in affluence.
He knew London as only a Bohemian native and to the manner born could know it. His sense of bygone obligation knew no bounds. Between him and John Mahoney and Artemus Ward I was made at home in what might be called the mysteries and eccentricities of differing phases of life in the British metropolis not commonly accessible to the foreign casual. In many after visits this familiar knowledge has served me well. But Newton did not live to know of some good fortune that came to me and to feel my gratitude to him, as dear old John Mahoney did. When I was next in London he was gone.
It was not, however, the actor, Newton, whom I had in mind in offering a bread-upon-the-water moral, but a certain John Hatcher, the memory of whom in my case illustrates it much better. He was a wit and a poet. He had been State Librarian of Tennessee. Nothing could keep him out of the service, though he was a sad cripple and wholly unequal to its requirements. He fell ill. I had the opportunity to care for him. When the war was over his old friend, George D. Prentice, called him to Louisville to take an editorial place on the Journal.
About the same time Mr. Walter Haldeman returned from the South and resumed the suspended publication of the Louisville Courier. He was in the prime of life, a man of surpassing energy, enterprise and industry, and had with him the popular sympathy. Mr. Prentice was nearly three score and ten. The stream had passed him by. The Journal was not only beginning to feel the strain but was losing ground. In this emergency Hatcher came to the rescue. I was just back from London and was doing noticeable work on the Nashville Banner.
"Here is your man," said Hatcher to Mr. Prentice and Mr. Henderson, the owners of the Journal; and I was invited to come to Louisville.
After I had looked over the field and inspected the Journal's books I was satisfied that a union with the Courier was the wisest solution of the newspaper situation, and told them so. Meanwhile Mr. Haldeman, whom I had known in the Confederacy, sent for me. He offered me the same terms for part ownership and sole editorship of the Courier, which the Journal people had offered me. This I could not accept, but proposed as an alternative the consolidation of the two on an equal basis. He was willing enough for the consolidation, but not on equal terms. There was nothing for it but a fight. I took the Journal and began to hammer the Courier.
A dead summer was before us, but Mr. Henderson had plenty of money and was willing to spend it. During the contest not an unkind word was printed on either side. After stripping the Journal to its heels it had very little to go on or to show for what had once been a prosperous business. But circulation flowed in. From eighteen hundred daily it quickly mounted to ten thousand; from fifteen hundred weekly to fifty thousand. The middle of October it looked as if we had a straight road before us.
But I knew better. I had discovered that the field, no matter how worked, was not big enough to support two rival dailies. There was toward the last of October on the edge of town a real-estate sale which Mr. Haldeman and I attended. Here was my chance for a play. I must have bid up to a hundred thousand dollars and did actually buy nearly ten thousand dollars of the lots put up at auction, relying upon some money presently coming to my wife.
I could see that it made an impression on Mr. Haldeman. Returning in the carriage which had brought us out I said: "Mr. Haldeman, I am going to ruin you. But I am going to run up a money obligation to Isham Henderson I shall never be able to discharge. You need an editor. I need a publisher. Let us put these two newspapers together, buy the Democrat, and, instead of cutting one another's throats, go after Cincinnati and St. Louis. You will recall that I proposed this to you in the beginning. What is the matter with it now?"
Nothing was the matter with it. He agreed at once. The details were soon adjusted. Ten days later there appeared upon the doorsteps of the city in place of the three familiar visitors, a double-headed stranger, calling itself the Courier-Journal. Our exclusive possession of the field thus acquired lasted two years. At the end of these we found that at least the appearance of competition was indispensable and willingly accepted an offer from a proposed Republican organ for a division of the Press dispatches which we controlled. Then and there the real prosperity of the Courier-Journal began, the paper having made no money out of its monopoly.
Reconstruction, as it was called--ruin were a fitter name for it--had just begun. The South was imprisoned, awaiting the executioner. The Constitution of the United States hung in the balance. The Federal Union faced the threat of sectional despotism. The spirit of the time was martial law. The gospel of proscription ruled in Congress. Radicalism, vitalized by the murder of Abraham Lincoln and inflamed by the inadequate effort of Andrew Johnson to carry out the policies of Lincoln, was in the saddle riding furiously toward a carpetbag Poland and a negroized Ireland.
The Democratic Party, which, had it been stronger, might have interposed, lay helpless. It, too, was crushed to earth. Even the Border States, which had not been embraced by the military agencies and federalized machinery erected over the Gulf States, were seriously menaced. Never did newspaper enterprise set out under gloomier auspices.
There was a party of reaction in Kentucky, claiming to be Democratic, playing to the lead of the party of repression at the North. It refused to admit that the head of the South was in the lion's mouth and that the first essential was to get it out. The Courier-Journal proposed to stroke the mane, not twist the tail of the lion. Thus it stood between two fires. There arose a not unnatural distrust of the journalistic monopoly created by the consolidation of the three former dailies into a single newspaper, carrying an unfamiliar hyphenated headline. Touching its policy of sectional conciliation it picked its way perilously through the cross currents of public opinion. There was scarcely a sinister purpose that was not alleged against it by its enemies; scarcely a hostile device that was not undertaken to put it down and drive it out.
Its constituency represented an unknown quantity. In any event it had to be created. Meanwhile, it must rely upon its own resources, sustained by the courage of the venture, by the integrity of its convictions and aims, and by faith in the future of the city, the state and the country.
Still, to be precise, it was the morning of Sunday, November 8,1868. The night before the good people of Louisville had gone to bed expecting nothing unusual to happen. They awoke to encounter an uninvited guest arrived a little before the dawn. No hint of its coming had got abroad; and thus the surprise was the greater. Truth to say, it was not a pleased surprise, because, as it flared before the eye of the startled citizen in big Gothic letters, The Courier-Journal, there issued thence an aggressive self-confidence which affronted theamour propreof the sleepy villagers. They were used to a very different style of newspaper approach.
Nor was the absence of a timorous demeanor its only offense. The Courier had its partisans, the Journal and the Democrat had their friends. The trio stood as ancient landmarks, as recognized and familiar institutions. Here was a double-headed monster which, without saying "by your leave" or "blast your eyes" or any other politeness, had taken possession of each man's doorstep, looking very like it had brought its knitting and was come to stay.
The Journal established by Mr. Prentice, the Courier by Mr. Haldeman and the Democrat by Mr. Harney, had been according to the standards of those days successful newspapers. But the War of Sections had made many changes. At its close new conditions appeared on every side. A revolution had come into the business and the spirit of American journalism.
In Louisville three daily newspapers had for a generation struggled for the right of way. Yet Louisville was a city of the tenth or twelfth class, having hardly enough patronage to sustain one daily newspaper of the first or second class. The idea of consolidating the three thus contending to divide a patronage so insufficient, naturally suggested itself during the years immediately succeeding the war. But it did not take definite shape until 1868.
Mr. Haldeman had returned from a somewhat picturesque and not altogether profitable pursuit of his "rights in the territories" and had resumed the suspended publication of the Courier with encouraging prospects. I had succeeded Mr. Prentice in the editorship and part ownership of the Journal. Both Mr. Haldeman and I were newspaper men to the manner born and bred; old and good friends; and after our rivalry of six months maintained with activity on both sides, but without the publication of an unkind word on either, a union of forces seemed exigent. To practical men the need of this was not a debatable question. All that was required was an adjustment of the details. Beginning with the simple project of joining the Courier and the Journal, it ended by the purchase of the Democrat, which it did not seem safe to leave outside.
The political conditions in Kentucky were anomalous. The Republican Party had not yet definitely taken root. Many of the rich old Whigs, who had held to the Government--to save their slaves--resenting Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, had turned Democrats. Most of the before-the-war Democrats had gone with the Confederacy. The party in power called itself Democratic, but was in fact a body of reactionary nondescripts claiming to be Unionists and clinging, or pretending to cling, to the hard-and-fast prejudices of other days.
The situation may be the better understood when I add that "negro testimony"--the introduction to the courts of law of the newly made freedmen as witnesses--barred by the state constitution, was the burning issue. A murder committed in the presence of a thousand negroes could not be lawfully proved in court. Everything from a toothbrush to a cake of soap might be cited before a jury, but not a human being if his skin happened to be black.
Mr. Watterson"s Editorial Staff in 1868, When the Three Daily Newspapers of Louisville Were United into the "Courier-Journal." Mr. George D. Prentice and Mr. Watterson Are in the Center.Mr. Watterson's Editorial Staff in 1868, When the Three Daily Newspapers of Louisville Were United into the "Courier-Journal." Mr. George D. Prentice and Mr. Watterson Are in the Center.
To my mind this was monstrous. From my cradle I had detested slavery. The North will never know how many people at the South did so. I could not go with the Republican Party, however, because after the death of Abraham Lincoln it had intrenched itself in the proscription of Southern men. The attempt to form a third party had shown no strength and had broken down. There was nothing for me, and the Confederates who were with me, but the ancient label of a Democracy worn by a riffraff of opportunists, Jeffersonian principles having quite gone to seed. But I proposed to lead and reform it, not to follow and fall in behind the selfish and short-sighted time servers who thought the people had learned nothing and forgot nothing; and instant upon finding myself in the saddle I sought to ride down the mass of ignorance which was at least for the time being mainly what I had to look to for a constituency.
Mr. Prentice, who knew the lay of the ground better than I did, advised against it. The personal risk counted for something. Very early in the action I made a direct fighting issue, which--the combat interdicted--gave me the opportunity to declare--with something of the bully in the tone--that I might not be able to hit a barn door at ten paces, but could shoot with any man in Kentucky across a pocket handkerchief, holding myself at all times answerable and accessible. I had a fairly good fighting record in the army and it was not doubted that I meant what I said.
But it proved a bitter, hard, uphill struggle, for a long while against odds, before negro testimony was carried. A generation of politicians were sent to the rear. Finally, in 1876, a Democratic State Convention put its mark upon me as a Democrat by appointing me a Delegate at large to the National Democratic Convention of that year called to meet at St. Louis to put a Presidential ticket in the field.
The Courier-Journal having come to represent all three of the English dailies of the city the public began to rebel. It could not see that instead of three newspapers of the third or fourth class Louisville was given one newspaper of the first class; that instead of dividing the local patronage in three inadequate portions, wasted upon a triple competition, this patronage was combined, enabling the one newspaper to engage in a more equal competition with the newspapers of such rival and larger cities as Cincinnati and St. Louis; and that one of the contracting parties needing an editor, the other a publisher, in coming together the two were able to put their trained faculties to the best account.
Nevertheless, during thirty-five years Mr. Haldeman and I labored side by side, not the least difference having arisen between us. The attacks to which we were subjected from time to time drew us together the closer. These attacks were sometimes irritating and sometimes comical, but they had one characteristic feature: Each started out apparently under a high state of excitement. Each seemed to have some profound cause of grief, to be animated by implacable hate and to aim at nothing short of annihilation. Frequently the assailants would lie in wait to see how the Courier-Journal's cat was going to jump, in order that they might take the other side; and invariably, even if the Courier-Journal stood for the reforms they affected to stand for, they began a system of misrepresentation and abuse. In no instance did they attain any success.
Only once, during the Free Silver craze of 1896, and the dark and tragic days that followed it the three or four succeeding years, the paper having stood, as it had stood during the Greenback craze, for sound money, was the property in danger. It cost more of labor and patience to save it from destruction than it had cost to create it thirty years before. Happily Mr. Haldeman lived to see the rescue complete, the tide turned and the future safe.
A newspaper, like a woman, must not only be honest, but must seem to be honest; acts of levity, loose unbecoming expressions or behavior--though never so innocent--tending in the one and in the other to lower reputation and discredit character. During my career I have proceeded under a confident belief in this principle of newspaper ethics and an unfailing recognition of its mandates. I truly believe that next after business integrity in newspaper management comes disinterestedness in the public service, and next after disinterestedness come moderation and intelligence, cleanliness and good feeling, in dealing with affairs and its readers.
From that blessed Sunday morning, November 8, 1868, to this good day, I have known no other life and had no other aim. Those were indeed parlous times. It was an era of transition. Upon the field of battle, after four years of deadly but unequal combat, the North had vanquished the South. The victor stood like a giant, with blood aflame, eyes dilate and hands uplifted again to strike. The victim lay prostrate. Save self-respect and manhood all was lost. Clasping its memories to its bosom the South sank helpless amid the wreck of its fortunes, whilst the North, the benign influence of the great Lincoln withdrawn, proceeded to decide its fate. To this ghastly end had come slavery and secession, and all the pomp, pride and circumstance of the Confederacy. To this bitter end had come the soldiership of Lee and Jackson and Johnston and the myriads of brave men who followed them.
The single Constitutional barrier that had stood between the people of the stricken section and political extinction was about to be removed by the exit of Andrew Johnson from the White House. In his place a man of blood and iron--for such was the estimate at that time placed upon Grant--had been elected President. The Republicans in Congress, checked for a time by Johnson, were at length to have entire sway under Thaddeus Stevens. Reconstruction was to be thorough and merciless. To meet these conditions was the first requirement of the Courier-Journal, a newspaper conducted by outlawed rebels and published on the sectional border line. The task was not an easy one.
There is never a cause so weak that it does not stir into ill-timed activity some wild, unpractical zealots who imagine it strong. There is never a cause so just but that the malevolent and the mercenary will seek to trade upon it. The South was helpless; the one thing needful was to get it on its feet, and though the bravest and the wisest saw this plainly enough there came to the front--particularly in Kentucky--a small but noisy body of politicians who had only worked themselves into a state of war when it was too late, and who with more or less of aggression, insisted that "the states lately in rebellion" still had rights, which they were able to maintain and which the North could be forced to respect.
I was of a different opinion. It seemed to me that whatever of right might exist the South was at the mercy of the North; that the radical party led by Stevens and Wade dominated the North and could dictate its own terms; and that the shortest way round lay in that course which was best calculated to disarm radicalism by an intelligent appeal to the business interests and conservative elements of Northern society, supported by a domestic policy of justice alike to whites and blacks.
Though the institution of African slavery was gone the negro continued the subject of savage contention. I urged that he be taken out of the arena of agitation, and my way of taking him out was to concede him his legal and civil rights. The lately ratified Constitutional Amendments, I contended, were the real Treaty of Peace between the North and South. The recognition of these Amendments in good faith by the white people of the South was indispensable to that perfect peace which was desired by the best people of both sections. The political emancipation of the blacks was essential to the moral emancipation of the whites. With the disappearence of the negro question as cause of agitation, I argued, radicalism of the intense, proscriptive sort would die out; the liberty-loving, patriotic people of the North would assert themselves; and, this one obstacle to a better understanding removed, the restoration of Constitutional Government would follow, being a matter of momentous concern to the body of the people both North and South.
Such a policy of conciliation suited the Southern extremists as little as it suited the Northern extremists. It took from the politicians their best card. South no less than North, "the bloody shirt" was trumps. It could always be played. It was easy to play it and it never failed to catch the unthinking and to arouse the excitable. What cared the perennial candidate so he got votes enough? What cared the professional agitator so his appeals to passion brought him his audience?
It is a fact that until Lamar delivered his eulogy on Sumner not a Southern man of prominence used language calculated to placate the North, and between Lamar and Grady there was an interval of fifteen years. There was not a Democratic press worthy the name either North or South. During those evil days the Courier-Journal stood alone, having no party or organized following. At length it was joined on the Northern side by Greeley. Then Schurz raised his mighty voice. Then came the great liberal movement of 1871-72, with its brilliant but ill-starred campaign and its tragic finale; and then there set in what, for a season, seemed the deluge.
But the cause of Constitutional Government was not dead. It had been merely dormant. Champions began to appear in unexpected quarters. New men spoke up, North and South. In spite of the Republican landslide of 1872, in 1874 the Democrats swept the Empire State. They carried the popular branch of Congress by an overwhelming majority. In the Senate they had a respectable minority, with Thurman and Bayard to lead it. In the House Randall and Kerr and Cox, Lamar, Beck and Knott were about to be reënforced by Hill and Tucker and Mills and Gibson. The logic of events was at length subduing the rodomontade of soap-box oratory. Empty rant was to yield to reason. For all its mischances and melancholy ending the Greeley campaign had shortened the distance across the bloody chasm.
Feminism and Woman Suffrage--The Adventures in Politics and Society--A Real Heroine
It would not be the writer of this narrative if he did not interject certain opinions of his own which parties and politicians, even his newspaper colleagues, have been wont to regard as peculiar. By common repute he has been an all-round old-line Democrat of the regulation sort. Yet on the three leading national questions of the last fifty years--the Negro question, the Greenback question and the Free Silver question--he has challenged and antagonized the general direction of that party. He takes some pride to himself that in each instance the result vindicated alike his forecast and his insubordination.
To one who witnessed the break-up of the Whig party in 1853 and of the Democratic Party in 1860 the plight in which parties find themselves at this time may be described as at least, suggestive. The feeling is at once to laugh and to whistle. Too much "fuss and feathers" in Winfield Scott did the business for the Whigs. Too much "bearded lady" in Charles Evans Hughes perhaps cooked the goose of the Republicans. Too much Wilson--but let me not fall intolèse majesté. The Whigs went into Know-Nothingism and Free Soilism. Will the Democrats go into Prohibition and paternalism? And the Republicans--
The old sectional alignment of North and South has been changed to East and West.
For the time being the politicians of both parties are in something of a funk. It is the nature of parties thus situate to fancy that there is no hereafter, riding in their dire confusion headlong for a fall. Little other than the labels being left, nobody can tell what will happen to either.
Progressivism seems the cant of the indifferent. Accentuated by the indecisive vote in the elections and heralded by an ambitious President who writes Humanity bigger than he writes the United States, and is accused of aspiring to world leadership, democracy unterrified and undefiled--the democracy of Jefferson, Jackson and Tilden ancient history--has become a back number. Yet our officials still swear to a Constitution. We have not eliminated state lines. State rights are not wholly dead.
The fight between capital and labor is on. No one can predict where it will end. Shall it prove another irrepressible conflict? Are its issues irreconcilable? Must the alternative of the future lie between Socialism and Civil War, or both? Progress! Progress! Shall there be no stability in either actualities or principles? And--and--what about the Bolsheviki?
Parties, like men, have their ups and downs. Like machines they get out of whack and line. First it was the Federalists, then the Whigs, and then the Democrats. Then came the Republicans. And then, after a long interruption, the Democrats again. English political experience repeats itself in America.
A taking label is as valuable to a party as it is to a nostrum. It becomes in time an asset. We are told that a fool is born every minute, and, the average man being something of a fool, the label easily catches him. Hence the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.
The old Whig Party went to pieces on the rocks of sectionalism. The institution of African slavery arrived upon the scene at length as the paramount political issue. The North, which brought the Africans here in its ships, finding slave labor unprofitable, sold its slaves to the South at a good price, and turned pious. The South took the bait and went crazy.
Finally, we had a pretty kettle of fish. Just as the Prohibitionists are going to convert mortals into angels overnight by act of assembly--or still better, by Constitutional amendment--were the short-haired women and the long-haired men of Boston going to make a white man out of the black man by Abolition. The Southern Whigs could not see it and would not stand for it. So they fell in behind the Democrats. The Northern Whigs, having nowhere else to go, joined the Republicans.
The wise men of both sections saw danger ahead. The North was warned that the South would fight, the South, that if it did it went against incredible odds. Neither would take the warning. Party spirit ran wild. Extremism had its fling. Thus a long, bloody and costly War of Sections--a fraternal war if ever there was one--brought on by alternating intolerance, the politicians of both sides gambling upon the credulity and ignorance of the people.
Hindsight is readier, certainly surer, than foresight. It comes easier and shows clearer. Anybody can now see that the slavery problem might have had a less ruinous solution; that the moral issue might have been compromised from time to time and in the end disposed of. Slave labor even at the South had shown itself illusory, costly and clumsy. The institution untenable, modern thought against it, from the first it was doomed.
But the extremists would not have it. Each played to the lead of the other. Whilst Wendell Phillips was preaching the equality of races, death to the slaveholders and the brotherhood of man at the North, William Lowndes Yancey was exclaiming that cotton was king at the South, and, to establish these false propositions, millions of good Americans proceeded to cut one another's throats.
There were agitators and agitators in those days as there are in these. The agitator, like the poor, we have always with us. It used to be said even at the North that Wendell Phillips was just a clever comedian. William Lowndes Yancey was scarcely that. He was a serious, sincere, untraveled provincial, possessing unusual gifts of oratory. He had the misfortune to kill a friend in a duel when a young man, and the tragedy shadowed his life. He clung to his plantation and rarely went away from home. When sent to Europe by the South as its Ambassador in 1861, he discovered the futility of his scheme of a Southern confederacy, and, seeing the cornerstone of the philosophy on which he had constructed his pretty fabric, overthrown, he came home despairing, to die of a broken heart.
The moral alike for governments and men is: Keep the middle of the road.
Which brings us to Feminism. I will not write Woman Suffrage, for that is an accomplished fact--for good or evil we shall presently be better able to determine.
Life is an adventure and all of us adventurers--saving that the word presses somewhat harder upon the woman than the man--most things do in fact, whereby she is given greater endurance--leaving to men the duty of caring for the women; and, if need be, looking death squarely and defiantly in the face.
The world often puts the artificial before the actual; but under the dispensation of the Christian civilization--derived from the Hebraic--the family requiring a head, headship is assigned to the male. This male is commonly not much to speak of for beauty of form or decency of behavior. He is made purposely tough for work and fight. He gets toughened by outer contact. But back of all are the women, the children and the home.
I have been fighting the woman's battle for equality in the things that count, all my life. I would despise myself if I had not been. In contesting precipitate universal suffrage for women, I conceived that I was still fighting the woman's battle.
We can escape none of Nature's laws. But we need not handicap ourselves with artificial laws. At best, life is an experiment, Death the final adventure. Feminism seems to me its next of kin; still we may not call the woman who assails the soap boxes--even those that antic about the White House gates--by the opprobrious terms of adventuress. Where such a one is not a lunatic she is a nuisance. There are women and women.
We may leave out of account the shady ladies of history. Neither Aspasia nor Lucrezia Borgia nor the Marquise de Brinvilliers could with accuracy be called an adventuress. The term is of later date. Its origin and growth have arisen out of the complexities of modern society.
In fiction Milady and Madame Marneffe come in for first honors--in each the leopard crossed on the serpent and united under a petticoat, beautiful and wicked--but since the Balzac and Dumas days the story-tellers and stage-mongers have made exceeding free with the type, and we have between Herman Merivale's Stephanie de Mohrivart and Victorien Sardou's Zica a very theater--or shall we say a charnel house--of the woman with the past; usually portrayed as the victim of circumstance; unprincipled through cruel experience; insensible through lack of conscience; sexless in soul, but a siren in seductive arts; cold as ice; hard as iron; implacable as the grave, pursuing her ends with force of will, intellectual audacity and elegance of manner, yet, beneath this brilliant depravity, capable of self-pity, yielding anon in moments of depression to a sudden gleam of human tenderness and a certain regret for the innocence she has lost.
Such a one is sometimes, though seldom, met in real life. But many pretenders may be encountered at Monte Carlo and other European resorts. They range from the Parisian cocotte, signalized by her chic apparel, to the fashionable divorcée who in trying her luck at the tables keeps a sharp lookout for the elderly gent with the wad, often fooled by the enterprising sport who has been there before.
These are out and out professional adventuresses. There are other adventuresses, however, than those of the story and the stage, the casino and the cabaret. The woman with the past becomes the girl with the future.
Curiously enough this latter is mainly, almost exclusively, recruited from our countrywomen, who to an abnormal passion for foreign titles join surpassing ignorance of foreign society. Thus she is ready to the hand of the Continental fortune seeker masquerading as a nobleman--occasionally but not often the black sheep of some noble family--carrying not a bona fide but a courtesy title--the count and the no-account, the lord and the Lord knows who! The Yankee girl with adothad become before the world war a regular quarry for impecunious aristocrats and clever crooks, the matrimonial results tragic in their frequency and squalor.
Another curious circumstance is the readiness with which the American newspaper tumbles to these frauds. The yellow press especially luxuriates in them; woodcuts the callow bedizened bride, the jaded game-worn groom; dilates upon the big money interchanged; glows over the tin-plate stars and imaginary garters and pinchbeck crowns; and keeping the pictorial paraphernalia in cold but not forgotten storage waits for the inevitable scandal, and then, with lavish exaggeration, works the old story over again.
These newspapers ring all the sensational changes. Now it is the wondrous beauty with the cool million, who, having married some illegitimate of a minor royal house, will probably be the next Queen of Rigmarolia, and now--ever increasing the dose--it is the ten-million-dollar widow who is going to marry the King of Pontarabia's brother, and may thus aspire to be one day Empress of Sahara.
Old European travelers can recall many funny and sometimes melancholy incidents--episodes--histories--of which they have witnessed the beginning and the end, carrying the self-same dénouement and lesson.
As there are women and women there are many kinds of adventuresses; not all of them wicked and detestable. But, good or bad, the lot of the adventuress is at best a hard lot. Be she a girl with a future or a woman with a past she is still a woman, and the world can never be too kind to its women--the child bearers, the home makers, the moral light of the universe as they meet the purpose of God and Nature and seek not to thwart it by unsexing themselves in order that they may keep step with man in ways of self-indulgent dalliance. The adventuress of fiction always comes to grief. But the adventuress in real life--the prudent adventuress who draws the line at adultery--the would-be leader of society without the wealth--the would-be political leader without the masculine fiber--is sure of disappointment in the end.
Take the agitation over Suffragism. What is it that the woman suffragette expects to get? No one of them can, or does, clearly tell us.
It is feminism, rather than suffragism, which is dangerous. Now that they have it, my fear is that the leaders will not stop with the ballot for women. They are too fond of the spotlight. It has become a necessity for them. If all women should fall in with them there would be nothing of womanhood left, and the world bereft of its women will become a masculine harlotocracy.
Let me repeat that I have been fighting woman's battles in one way and another all my life. I am not opposed to Votes for Women. But I would discriminate and educate, and even at that rate I would limit the franchise to actual taxpayers, and, outside of these, confine it to charities, corrections and schools, keeping woman away from the dirt of politics. I do not believe the ballot will benefit woman and cannot help thinking that in seeking unlimited and precipitate suffrage the women who favor it are off their reckoning! I doubt the performances got up to exploit it, though somehow, when the hikers started from New York to Albany, and afterward from New York to Washington, the inspiring thought of Bertha von Hillern came back to me.
I am sure the reader never heard of her. As it makes a pretty story let me tell it. Many years ago--don't ask me how many--there was a young woman, Bertha von Hillern by name, a poor art student seeking money enough to take her abroad, who engaged with the management of a hall in Louisville to walk one hundred miles around a fixed track in twenty-four consecutive hours. She did it. Her share of the gate money, I was told, amounted to three thousand dollars.
I shall never forget the closing scenes of the wondrous test of courage and endurance. She was a pretty, fair-haired thing, a trifle undersized, but shapely and sinewy. The vast crowd that without much diminution, though with intermittent changes, had watched her from start to finish, began to grow tense with the approach to the end, and the last hour the enthusiasm was overwhelming. Wave upon wave of cheering followed every footstep of the plucky girl, rising to a storm of exultation as the final lap was reached.
More dead than alive, but game to the core, the little heroine was carried off the field, a winner, every heart throbbing with human sympathy, every eye wet with proud and happy tears. It is not possible adequately to describe all that happened. One must have been there and seen it fully to comprehend the glory of it.
Touching the recent Albany and Washington hikes and hikers let me say at once that I cannot approve the cause of Votes for women as I had approved the cause of Bertha von Hillern. Where she showed heroic, most of the suffragettes appear to me grotesque. Where her aim was rational, their aim has been visionary. To me the younger of them seem as children who need to be spanked and kissed. There has been indeed about the whole Suffrage business something pitiful and comic.
Often I have felt like swearing "You idiots!" and then like crying "Poor dears!" But I have kept on with them, and had I been in Albany or Washington I would have caught Rosalie Jones in my arms, and before she could say "Jack Robinson" have exclaimed: "You ridiculous child, go and get a bath and put on some pretty clothes and come and join us at dinner in the State Banquet Hall, duly made and provided for you and the rest of you delightful sillies."