Chapter II: Preface (1)

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There are over 3,000 prefaces in my library. None of them suit me. They are all better and more appropriate than I can write, so I extract from different ones as many as I think are needed for this book of mine.

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“If the perusal of these pages should cheer some fainting wanderer on the world’s highway, and lead him far from the haunts of evil, by the still waters of temperance, my labor will have been well repaid.”--_Autobiography and Personal Recollections of John B. Gough._

“The author has taken the liberty to dedicate this book to certain enterprising gentlemen in London, who have displayed their devotion to a sentiment now widely prevailing in the music halls, by republishing an American book without solicitation on the author’s part.”--_Mr, Dooley, “In the Hearts of His Countrymen.”_

“Yes, take it all around, there is quite a good deal of information in this book. Information seems to stew out of me naturally, like the precious ottar of roses out of the otter. Sometimes it seems to me that I would give worlds if I could retain my facts; but it cannot be. The more I calk up the sources, and the tighter I get, the more I leak wisdom. Therefore, I only claim indulgence at the hands of the reader, not justification.”--_“Roughing It,” Mark Twain._

“A blaze of splendor is the pictorial part of this book, an art gallery on the wing. You need not visit New York, or Dresden, or Berlin, or Rome, to see the masterpieces, for the best part of them is now, my dear reader, _between your forefinger and thumb_! The publishers of this book have ransacked the earth for these three, hundred and thirteen gems (313).”

“_GREAT is the responsibility!_ of the publishing a book, especially in _this_ case where the publishers, a MONTH BEFORE THE BOOK IS PUBLISHED! HAVE SOLD! 250,000 COPIES THEREOF! An unprecedented occurrence in the history of LITERATURE!” (the capitals, italics, and astonishers are mine.--J. B. P.).--_“The Pathway of Life,” Rev. T. DeWitt Talmage._

“It is not to illustrate any heroic achievements of a man, but to vindicate a just and beneficent principle, in its application to the whole human family, by letting in a light of truth upon a system esteemed by some as a blessing, and by others as a curse and a crime.”--_“My Bondage and Freedom,” Frederick Douglass._

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“Look in the hearts of average men;
The tragedies of doom are there,
And comedies of glad delight,
And hopeless wailings of despair,
And hopes and sorrows infinite--
Shall not a poet now and then
Look in the hearts of average men?”
--_“Waifs from Wild Meadows,” Sam Walter Foss._

FIRST QUESTION ANSWERED.

My friends often ask how I got into the Lyceum business. I drifted into it, the same as most people do who have to find some place for which they are fitted, or try to. It was my fortune to be raised on the frontier. My father was one of the pioneers of Wisconsin. He was an abolitionist. The Bible and the New York “_Trybune_,” not _Tribune_, were almost synonymous in our family, and about the only library we had.

Wisconsin was a sort of refuge for the fugitive slave, and my father kept an underground station. Many a night I have slept out on the prairie with some runaway slaves, with father and the neighbors protecting them against the United States marshal. I found myself, when eighteen years of age, carrying a Sharp’s rifle in 1856 with John Brown, in Kansas.

I was between thirteen and fourteen when, after my father had given me a severe drubbing for telling a lie, which was not a lie, I ran away.

Then I was in Fond du Lac. I remember the wooden sidewalks, and seeing boys wearing shoes in the summer time. How I pitied them; I thought it dreadful! I was looking at the wonder scenes, gazing with intense interest into the shop windows. All of a sudden I heard a noise in a shop. I looked in. It was a printing office. It was so wonderful I ventured to step inside the door. Just then the man working the press (who proved to be the foreman) said to me, “Well, what do you want?”

I replied, “Nothing,” and stepped back.

He said, “Don’t you want to learn the trade?”

“Don’t know, sir.”

“Don’t you want to be a printer’s devil?”

At that I was still more frightened. He said:

“You see the editor in that sanctum--” Just then a man came to the door from an adjoining room and spoke very gently to me. _I never forgot that._

He said, “I want an apprentice to learn the printer’s trade. Would you like to try? I will give you $25 for the first year, $30 for the second, and $50 for the third.” I agreed.

“You go in there and roll that press,” said the foreman.

It seems the regular “devil” had had an altercation with the foreman and left, and one of the journeyman printers was rolling a handbill, while a man outside with his sulky and horse was waiting for it, and that poster I can always recall. It was a rude cut of a stallion, with black letter announcements relating thereto. That beautiful clean white paper and the glossy black ink startled me. I never got over it. I have been using black ink and white paper ever since.

To make a long story short, I was behind that press and covered with printers’ ink in a very few minutes. After the handbill was printed, the foreman lifted the form, called me to his side of the press, and said:

“Take this form to that sink and wash it.”

I started, and right in front of the sink it seems a little of the lye had accumulated and the floor was slippery. I slipped and down I went. The chase went over my head and the type flew in all directions. The foreman said:

“There! by thunder, you leave!”

The editor stepped out of the sanctum and said,

“What’s the matter?”

“He’s pied that form,” replied the foreman.

“Did you show him how to wash it?” asked the editor.

“He leaves, or I do,” said the foreman.

“You can leave if you want,” said the editor.

Probably the reader can imagine my feelings at having such a friend to take my part.

So the foreman left, and I did the best I could, picking up the type until it was about time to quit, when the editor told me to come with him to his house.

I went there and looked in; at first I did not dare enter. There was the first upholstered furniture I had ever seen, a white tablecloth, glass tumblers and napkins--such things I had never seen. There were figures on the carpet. Two beautifully dressed ladies came downstairs and took seats at the table directly opposite me. I must have turned crimson. I was completely dazed by their beauty and so embarrassed I must have betrayed my feelings. I was glad my feet were under the table, for I was barefooted. I went through some motions, but ate no supper. Next morning I was to be at the office, open it, and have it swept by seven o’clock. I had the key in my pocket and it fairly burned there, so anxious was I to be at my new work and to turn that key in the lock.

I was at the office before six to sweep it out. I hunted around and found a broom and began sweeping everything toward the door. I swept the sanctum, a corner partitioned off from the main room, of the printing office. I dared not pick up the loose exchanges lying on the floor, but swept around them, and had almost a winrow of dirt moved up to the door, amid clouds of dust, when Walker Rouse, the elder apprentice, came in and exclaimed:

“Whew, what a dust! Why, you haven’t sprinkled before sweeping!”

I did not know what he meant until he got the sprinkling pot and showed me how to sprinkle the floor, and then how to dust the bank and cases and the editor’s sanctum, pick up and fold the exchanges, and tidy up his desk. All this Walker showed me how to do by doing it for me. At seven o’clock the printers came around. The editor came in at eight.

“Boy,” he said, “what is your name?”

“James--James Pond.”

“James, your office is looking fine. You are beginning well.”

And so it has been going ever since. I think I have had credit a great many times for what somebody else has done.

The Fountain City _Herald_ survived but a few months. I went from Fond du Lac to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where I obtained work on the Oshkosh _Democrat_, served my time as an apprentice, and then went to Madison, Wisconsin, and worked as a journeyman. In the summer of 1856, with Charles G. Finney, Jr. (son of the president of Oberlin College), I found myself in Kansas, working on _The Herald of Freedom_, at Lawrence; a little later carrying a Sharp’s rifle (“Beecher Bible”) with old John Brown. In the fall I went to St. Louis, to work during the winter. Then back to Wisconsin.

In 1873, after the war and emancipation of the slaves, I found myself associated with the first gentile paper in Utah--_The Salt Lake Tribune_. About that time the railroad had reached Zion, and there was a tremendous influx of gentiles. We had territorial officers who could not be used by the Mormons, and there was considerable excitement. President Brigham Young and several Mormon leaders were put under arrest. There were so many gentiles that they could not possibly find accommodations at the hotels, and Brigham Young proclaimed to his people that they could open their houses and receive them as boarders, and that a fair price for their board--not exorbitant, but a fair price--should be charged. He thought three dollars a week a good price for board. He admonished his people that they must not forget that they were all missionaries.

It happened that a Methodist minister (the Rev. C. C. Stratton) and his wife obtained board with Ann Eliza Young, then Brigham Young’s last and nineteenth wife, who was keeping house by herself in a small cottage, not far from the Lion House. Ann Eliza was born in Mormonism and reared in Utah by her mother, who was an educated woman and one of the first converts of Joseph Smith, living in Nauvoo, Ill., for several years before they migrated to Utah. Ann Eliza was a very intelligent woman, but her whole life was circumscribed by Mormonism. She had never attended any other church, and never read any other literature than Mormon books. She was a conscientious woman. It was through this Methodist minister and his wife that she apostatized.

One evening it was arranged that Ann Eliza should tell her story to the guests of the hotel (the Walker House), where she had taken refuge under the protection of the officials of the territory--Governor Woods and Chief Justice McKean, who lived there. I was there also and had something to do with making the arrangements. She did give her story--the most interesting and thrilling story that anybody ever heard. That speech was telegraphed to the Associated Press, and the next day came telegrams from theatrical managers, showmen, and speculators from all parts of the country. One was from P. T. Barnum and another from James Redpath, the owner of the Lyceum Bureau, in Boston, whom I had met and known in Kansas in 1856. It asked her to lecture.

Our people decided that if Ann Eliza could tell that story in Washington, we would get some attention and legislation. Up to that time we had been able to get little attention and no legislation. I happened to be available and went to Washington with her. I made a proposition that if she would go on a lecture tour I would manage it. She accepted it. That’s where I first became a manager.

Although she was to speak first in Washington, they were determined to hear her in Laramie and Denver en route. I got the schoolroom in Laramie, charged $1.50 a ticket, and sold four hundred tickets, and took in $600 that evening. Next, in Denver, she spoke in the New Baptist Church, the largest auditorium in the city at that time. I remember the night she was to appear in Denver I went to the Inter-Ocean Hotel where she boarded, to escort her to the church, and did not know her. She was dressed up, and--well, she looked very pretty. The leading Methodist minister--she had been converted by a Methodist, and they claimed her--introduced her to one of the largest audiences ever assembled in Denver.

Armed with letters of introduction to Speaker James G. Blaine, President U. S. Grant, and many members of Congress, we reached Washington, where we got into the Speaker’s room and she sent her card to Speaker Blaine. He was in the speaker’s chair. He came out and shook hands with her and was half tempted to be a little bit funny and jocose, but he discovered at once that she was a lady, a woman with a cause, and an earnest one, and in a moment his attention was riveted. He did not go back to his chair but sent word to somebody else to take his place, and in a few minutes _somebody_ else came into the speaker’s room, and in not over twenty minutes that room was packed with members of Congress. There was a stampede on the floor, and she held an ovation for two hours. Everybody wanted to see and hear her. Two days after that she did tell her story in Washington. Forty-eight hours later the Poland bill for the relief of the oppressed in Utah was a law.

I will say now that in all my experience I have never found so eloquent, so interesting, so earnest a talker. I have heard a great many, too. She had a cause. She was in dead earnest. She could sway audiences with her eloquence. She was able in two years from that time to leave Utah with her children and her family, and she never returned.

I took a desk in Mr. Redpath’s office in Boston and booked Mrs. Young’s time in New England and the Eastern States, while, with an Eastern lady as chaperone, she travelled and lectured nightly to as large audiences as were being drawn by the most popular lecturers of that period, such as Gough, Phillips, Anna Dickinson, and Mary A. Livermore. At the end of the season she had earned over $20,000.

I have frequently visited Utah on tours with some of my celebrities, and have found amongst the Mormon people as intelligent and interested listeners as are to be found in any other part of the United States. I do not believe there is a more critical or appreciative public in America. From the time of my first visit to Utah I have known and respected the Mormon people, and some of the best friends I now have are among them. I have always made it a rule to make special terms and prices for that public because of its universal intelligence and appreciation.

In the spring of 1899, it was my privilege to place F. Marion Crawford with the Brigham Young Normal College at Provo, where I found over six hundred young men and maidens studying to become teachers and missionaries for the Mormon church. The president of that college, Mr. Cluff, I had known when a boy living near the spot where the college now stands. His uncle, David Cluff, was a customer of mine in 1868. He kept a furniture store and was undertaker for the town of Provo. He had three wives living under the same roof. Over his store he had an assembly hall where the young people gathered for dancing, theatricals, and other amusements. I attended one of these dances while a guest of Mr. Cluff and was introduced to his wives and several of his children, a cousin of whom is now president of this great collegiate institution. Mr. Cluff, senior, had come originally from Vermont. His first wife was also a New England girl. I think that I was the only gentile in Provo that night. I had driven forty miles by team from Salt Lake City the day before. I was made to feel perfectly at home in this Mormon family and met with all comforts of a home that reminded me of the old-time pioneer households in Western New York and Wisconsin. When the party assembled in the ball room, before the music started--the band was made up entirely of members of the Cluff family--Mr. Cluff opened the proceedings with prayer, as is the custom on all public occasions among the Mormons.

One of the faculty of the Brigham Young College, a lady, is Mrs. Susa Young Gates, a daughter of Lucy and Brigham Young, one of the most prominent women in Utah and editor of _The Young Woman’s Journal_ of that State. I had never met Mrs. Gates until on this occasion, but she has been one of my correspondents in Utah for a number of years. She is well known as one of the leaders among women, and is identified with all the discussions and movements for their progress in the United States. I had thought favorably of trying to induce her to come East and lecture to women’s clubs and associations. When we met, naturally the memory of Ann Eliza, who was my first star, was still green in this community, and she gently took me to task for having been opposed to her people and religion. To show that Ann Eliza had inflicted an injury to the cause and faith she believed in and followed, I submit the following extract from a letter Mrs. Gates wrote to me while I was in California with Mr. Crawford, shortly after leaving her:

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“Major Pond--I like the frank and manly way in which you speak of the unfortunate past and of your wish to help my people in the future. I applied to you simply as the greatest manager on earth; and perhaps had resolved that all transactions should be kept on the strictest impersonal and business basis. But I became convinced after a few conversations with you that you had played an unwitting part in the great harm that Ann Eliza did my father and the whole people. I have been closely observing you, Major, while you were studying me. And I understand how with your generous and chivalrous disposition you could champion the cause of one you esteemed at that time to be an oppressed woman. But Ann Eliza was untruthful. She was a jealous and unscrupulous woman! God forgive her and let Him deal with her. I have no bitterness in my heart for her. I love my religion too well to hold enmity to any one, however wilful and wicked they may be. My dear father was one of the purest and most unselfish of men as well as one of the greatest; and you, Major, who are such a lover of heroes, would revere my father more and more if you would study him more. Yes, I accept in good faith your candid offer, and will let God and the future prove if a Mormon’s friendship is not as high and noble as that of any one on earth. My husband was very favorably impressed with your whole-hearted generous praise of all that you saw, and he stands with me in this offer to ‘smoke the pipe of peace.’”

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It was while engaged in the Redpath Bureau in Boston, booking Ann Eliza’s time, that I became enamored of the business, and a year later, with Mr. George H. Hathaway, chief clerk of the bureau, bought out James Redpath and assumed the management of that fine business. After four years’ most pleasant partnership, Mr. Hathaway and I separated, he retaining the Redpath Lyceum Bureau and its good name, and I moved to New York and established a bureau of my own, put my sign in the window, where it has remained twenty-two years and will probably stay as long as I care to work.

I have endeavored to tell of the famous men and women, who have been lyceum favorites, that I have known and managed since I began with Mr. Hathaway in Boston in March, 1875, and most of whom, it has been my pleasure to call my friends.

Since I started out as a journeyman printer in 1856, I have realized that the best and most useful advice ever given to me was that of my employer whom I was about to leave. In bidding me good-by, he said: “Now, Jim, you are starting from this minute out into the world to look after yourself. Let me give you some advice. Always associate with people from whom you can learn something useful. The greater a man is, the easier he is of approach. You can choose your companions from among the very best, and a man is always known by the company he keeps. It is much easier to ride than to carry a load.”

This advice I never forgot. It was worth more to me than any I ever had. It has helped me always when I set out to try to secure some celebrity, and has invariably proved true. I have never felt the slightest hesitancy in approaching any famous man or woman, and it never took long to ascertain whether the man was a gentleman or the woman a lady.

In preparing this book I have told of the people as I knew them, and shall avoid any attempt to over-estimate or to belittle their genuine characters.

ORATORS

ECCENTRICITIES OF GENIUS

THE TRIUMVIRATE OF LECTURE KINGS.

The great triumvirate of lecture kings consisted of Gough, Beecher, and Wendell Phillips. Other men for a season, and sometimes for a few years, were as popular as any of them, but it was a calcium-light popularity, whereas the popularity of the “Big Three” endured for their entire lives.

Phillips held his place the longest, beginning lyceum work about 1845, and continuing it to his death nearly forty years later. Gough was the most supremely popular--not the greatest of the three intellectually, but most level to the largest number of the plain people. Beecher came parallel with him and had a higher influence. His position during and after the Civil War reached the altitude of world influence. His command of the Plymouth pulpit was the most enormous mental leverage. Theodore Parker said of it as early as 1856, that its “sounding board was the Rocky Mountains”--the auditorium therefore was the continent. Beecher touched the hearts of men; Gough held to the fear of the effects of wrong-doing; Phillips, through the intellect, reached the conscience of his generation. He was a name in Great Britain, a power in the Northern States. Beecher was a power on both sides of the ocean, a person beloved on all sides. Who shall name other men who have filled the last half of the century with such enduring recognition?

John B. Gough deserves the title of King of the Lecture World, if popularity be made the sole test, and only Mr. Beecher and Wendell Phillips had any claim to contest the title with him, if eloquence--the power to hold and charm audiences--be made the test.

Mr. Gough was a more popular lecturer for a longer term of years than any other favorite of the lyceums. He was a born orator, with great dramatic power. Men of greater culture but less natural ability used to be fond of attributing his success to the supposed fact that he was the “evangelical comedian,” that the unco’ good, whose religious prejudices would not suffer them to go to the theatre, found a substitute in listening to the comic stories and the dramatic delivery of Gough.

This theory does not suffice to explain the universal and long-continued popularity of this great orator. He never faced an audience that he did not capture and captivate; and not in the United States only, not in the North only, where his popularity never wavered, but in the South, where Yankees were not in favor, and in the Canadian Provinces, where they were disliked, and in every part of England, Scotland, and Ireland as well. He delighted not only all the intelligent audiences he addressed in these six nations--for during most of his career our North and our South were at heart two nations’ making with Canada three nations on our continent, and the three distinct nationalities on the British Islands making up the six--but he delighted all kinds and conditions of men. He was at his best before an educated audience in an evangelical community. But when he addressed a “mission” audience in North Street, Boston, or in the Five Points in New York, he charmed the gamin and the poorest classes who gathered there as much as he charmed the cultivated assemblages in Music Hall, Boston, then admitted to be the finest audiences that Boston and its suburbs could turn out.

Mr. Gough never asked a fee in his life. He left his remuneration to the public who employed him. It rose year after year, beginning with less than a dollar at times, until, when the bureau did his business for him, it reached from $200, the lowest fee, to $500 a night. In the last years of his life his income exceeded $30,000. He did more to promote the temperance cause than any man who ever lived. It is strange, but it is a fact, that although Gough never broke down in his life as an orator, and never failed to capture his audience, yet he always had a mild sort of stage-fright, which never went off until he began to speak.

To get time to master this fright was the reason why he always insisted on being “introduced” to his audiences before he spoke, and he so insisted even in places where the absurd custom had been abandoned for years. When the chairman was introducing him, Mr. Gough was “bracing up” to overcome his stage-fright. And let me say right here that the phrase “bracing up” has two meanings; that the slanderous statements often started against Mr. Gough, that he sometimes took a drink in secret, were wholly and wickedly untrue. In his autobiography Mr. Gough has told the true story of his fall, his conversion, and his one relapse, and he has told it truthfully. He was absolutely and always, after his first relapse, a total-abstinence man in creed and life. There never lived a truer man.

For forty years he held the reputation as first in the land as an orator and champion of temperance. He probably delivered more lectures than any man who has lived in the present age. From a carefully kept record we find that from 1842 to 1852 he lectured on an average of 300 times a year, making 3,000 lectures. From 1862 to 1870 he averaged 260 times a year, or 2,080 lectures on temperance. Of these, 1,160 were delivered in Great Britain. After 1870 Mr. Gough lectured on miscellaneous subjects. Each year he prepared a new lecture upon a fresh topic. Among the most taking were: “Eloquence and Orators,” “Peculiar People,” “Fact and Fiction,” “Habit,” “Curiosity,” “Circumstances,” “Will It Pay,” “Now and Then,” “Night Scenes,” “Blunders,” which was his last. From 1861 to the time of his death, February 11, 1886, he delivered 3,526 lectures, making in all 9,600 addresses before 9,000,000 hearers.

Mr. Gough was a charming man personally: modest, unassuming, kind-hearted, and sincere, always ready to help a worthy cause or a needy friend. He was a zealous Christian, but he never obtruded his religious belief offensively on others. One needed to see him in his home to know what a devoted Christian he was.

John B. Gough was among the heroes of the nineteenth century. The incalculable good he did to his fellow-men can never be known. It is no idle statement when we say that he was the direct means, under God, of raising tens of thousands from degradation to be law-abiding men and women. It was my privilege, in 1879, to see in Mr. Gough’s library four large books containing the names of over 140,000 men, women, and children who, by his own personal efforts, had been induced to sign the pledge.

It was the habit of John B. Gough, for forty years, to carry two overcoats on his lecture tours. After his lectures he put both of them on--the first, a light one, which he buttoned up tight, and the second, a very heavy one, a sort of combination of heavy ulster and the regulation overcoat.

His two-hour lecture was an unbroken succession of contortions and antics that left him dripping with perspiration. It required all this covering to protect his body from the air before he changed his wet clothing for dry.

On his return to his hotel, Mrs. Gough was always in waiting with fresh clothing. A valet at once set to work rubbing him down, exactly as is the custom of grooming a racehorse at the end of the heat. After this process he appeared apparently as fresh as ever. He would eat a bowl of bread and milk, and always wanted an old-fashioned bowl.

Mrs. Gough was his constant companion, but did not attend the lectures. During the last twelve years of their travel together she did not hear him once.

Gough was a man of the people, the son of a workingman and himself a workingman, self-educated but not what is technically called a scholar.

Wendell Phillips was the bluest of the blue blood of New England. His forefather came over in the _Arabella_, the vessel that followed the _Mayflower_, and there was a clergyman in every generation from the first immigrant to Phillips himself. They were always prominent people. Phillips studied for the law and there was a brilliant career open for him. When he was at college, he showed no sympathy with any radical movement. On the contrary, he was a member of an exclusive set known as The Gentlemen’s Club, and used to laugh at Sumner for taking Garrison’s _Liberator_. But he happened one day to attend a meeting in Faneuil Hall, and heard the Attorney General of the State vindicate the murderers of Lovejoy, in Illinois, and say that Lovejoy died as the fool dieth. Young Phillips sprang to his feet at once and delivered a short speech which placed him at the head of the orators of New England, a position he kept until he lay still in death. That incident made him an abolitionist for life. He abandoned all ideas of eminence in law or politics and determined to devote his whole life to the anti-slavery agitation.

He was the most polished and graceful orator our country ever produced. He spoke as quietly as if he were talking in his own parlor, and almost entirely without gestures, yet he had as great a power over all kinds of audiences as any American of whom we have any record. Often called before howling mobs, who had come to the lecture-room to prevent him from being heard, and who would shout and sing to drown his voice, he never failed to subdue them in a short time. These were occasions when even such men as Garrison and Theodore Parker were as powerless as children and were forced to retire. One illustration of his power and tact occurred in Boston. The majority of the audience was hostile. They yelled and sang and completely drowned his voice. The reporters were seated in a row just under the platform, in the place where the orchestra play in an ordinary theatre. Phillips made no attempt to address the howling audience, but bent over and seemed to be speaking in a low tone to the reporters. By and by the curiosity of the howling audience was excited: they ceased to clamor and tried to hear what he was saying to the reporters. Phillips looked at them and said quietly:

“Go on, gentlemen, go on. I do not need your ears. Through these pencils I speak to thirty millions of people.”

Not a voice was raised again. The mob had found its master and stayed whipped until he sat down.

He was open and sympathetic to all appeals and causes, and this made him accessible always to the poorest of men. I knew that in Boston among some of his most trusted intimates--men to whom he was always accessible--were workmen and laborers, who would hardly have been admitted at the kitchen doors of others of the “Brahmins” of that city.

George Lowell Austin, in his “Life and Times of Wendell Phillips,” says:

“Among all the noble men in Massachusetts who early came to the support of William Lloyd Garrison, in his war upon slavery, none came from a higher social plane, or parted with brighter prospects, or brought to the cause more brilliant abilities than did Wendell Phillips. He might have been congressman, governor, senator of the United States, and, possibly, have risen higher still, had he allied himself to either of the great political parties. In the Senate, had he reached that body, he would have ranked with Sumner and Conkling as an orator, and with Fessenden, Grimes, Douglas, and O. P. Morton as a debater.”

Eloquent as he was as a lecturer, he was far more effective as a debater. Debate was for him the flint and steel which brought out all his fire.

The memory of Mr. Phillips was something wonderful. He would listen to an elaborate speech for hours, and, without a single note of what had been said, in writing, reply to every part of it as fully and completely as if the speech were written out before him. Those who heard him only on the platform, and when not confronted by an opponent, have a very limited comprehension of his wonderful resources as a speaker.

In his style as a debater he resembled Sir Robert Peel, in grace and courtliness of manner and in fluency and copiousness of diction. He never hesitated for a word, or failed to employ the word best fitted to express his thought on the point under discussion.

The great agitator’s tact was only equalled by the serene humor and pleasant wit that he exhibited. An old friend has recently told me of Mr. Phillips questioning him as to the highest grade he had won in the Union army on the occasion of his going to the Federal capital just after muster-out, as a special correspondent. Mr. Phillips, knowing the young man’s radical views, had given him several letters of introduction and was writing one to Senator Sumner when he asked this question, remarking with a gentle laugh: “Yes, a title has its value with my friend Charles.” His unvarying urbanity was in conspicuous contrast with the Senator’s sometimes unpleasant surliness.

Mr. Phillips was decidedly old-fashioned in many of his ways. When at home, for example, he did his own marketing, and he knew how to buy. His chief purchases, however, were always in the way of dainties for his invalid wife. His own table habits were of the simplest. He was quite apt to answer his own door bell. On the entrance to that quiet Boston house there was no door-plate--only the name painted in large black letters--

=PHILLIPS.=

I called on him one morning at his house. He answered the bell himself. I remarked:

“Mr. Phillips, you have a very conspicuous sign on your door.”

He told me that as the door-plate had been torn off by vandals he had decided to have his name painted on the door so conspicuously that any one who wished to find his house could easily distinguish the name.

A large commercial block now occupies the ground where the house stood. On the corner of this modern building there is a bronze tablet bearing the following inscription:

His benevolence was abounding. He inherited a fair fortune for those days, and he earned a great sum of money as a lecturer. Yet when he died there was nothing left--not even a debt. Mrs. Phillips, who did not long survive him, never knew this, for the friends about her arranged that the frugal household--and that it always was--should go on till the end.

Mr. Phillips was quite an adept with tools, keeping the household goods always in repair. At home, when not with Mrs. Phillips, he was always puttering with tools or engaged in reading and studying. He claimed that, as a boy, there was not an ordinary craft at which he had not done a good day’s work. His understanding of the building trades made him always at home with their workers.

Mr. Phillips was in demand wherever his services could be secured. He did not earn so much money lecturing as he might have made. He never allowed lecture committees to lose money if he knew it. In case of bad weather, or a disappointment of any kind to the persons who had failed to realize a profit on the large fee promised, he would invariably insist that he receive only an equitable portion of the profits. Seldom was there such an occasion, for his were the palmiest days of the lyceum.

Mr. Phillips’s repertoire was encyclopædic, embracing a vast list: travel, science, current politics, reform, labor, anti-slavery, education, legal topics, foreign matters, biography, and religion. Some of his titles were: “Street Life in Europe,” “The Lost Arts,” “The Times, or a Lesson of the Hour,” “Temperance,” “Woman,” “The Indians, or in Early Days,” “Agitation,” “Training,” “Law and Lawyers,” “Courts and Jails,” “The Irish Question,” “O’Connell,” “Sumner,” and “Christianity a Battle, not a Dream.”

No speaker of his day ever treated a greater variety of topics, nor with more even excellence, than Wendell Phillips. I quote from some of his letters illustrating an experience while on a long Western lecture tour. From Illinois he writes in a car with a lead pencil: “The weather is dull; only two days since I left that I have seen the sun. Rain, snow, clouds, damp, mud, and grim heavens. Still, the audiences are large.” From, one of the oil towns in Pennsylvania: “Here I am in an oil town, mud over the hubs of the wheels; literally, one horse was smothered in it; the queerest crowd of men, with trousers tucked in their boots; no privacy--hotels all one crowd--chambers mere thoroughfares, everybody passing through at will, and here I must stay until Sunday. I find some of the Boston people here. Everybody here is making money--the first place I have found where this is the case. Explanation--they have all struck oil.”

Again he writes from an Iowa town: “It has been extremely cold. I have been in the smaller towns and have had poor hotels and a generally hard time, rushed from one train to another, and puffed from station to station. In eleven days I have slept in a regular bed but four nights, still I have been fortunate in filling every engagement, and Sumner has been the favorite subject.

“In Milwaukee, I was at the ‘Plankington,’ where I had a fine suite of rooms, bath, chamber, parlor with pier glass ten feet high and five feet broad--nothing showy--just comfortable.”

Another time from Davenport, Iowa, to Redpath, his former abolitionist friend, as well as manager: “I, the traveller, the ‘elderly gentleman,’ have been--kissed! in Illinois! Put that in your pipe and smoke it, if you can without choking your envious soul. Yes, kissed!! on a public platform, in front of a depot, the whole world envying me. ‘Who did it?’ do you ask? It was an old man of seventy-three years--a veteran abolitionist, a lovely old saint. In the early days of the cause we used to kiss each other like the early Christians, and when he saw me he resumed the habit.”

William Lloyd Garrison.--Now that Phillips and Garrison and the era in which they flourished have passed into history, it is common for writers who treat on that period to talk of these two champions of freedom as if they were equals, or of Phillips, even, as if he were Garrison’s inferior.

Those who knew both men smile at such absurdities.

Phillips and Garrison were equals in one respect only--in moral courage and unselfish devotion to the slave. Garrison was a commonplace man in respect to intellectual ability, whereas Phillips was a man of genius of the rarest culture. Garrison was a strong platform speaker. Phillips was one of the greatest orators of the century. Only three men of his time could contest the palm of eloquence with him--Webster, Clay, and Beecher.

There never was a more benevolent face than William Lloyd Garrison’s. He had a kindly eye, a winning smile, a gentleness of way, a crisp, straightforward way of talking, and a merciless movement in straight lines of thought.

Mr. Garrison visited England after the war was over and the emancipation of the slaves was accomplished, and received unusual courtesies. At a dinner given him by the British Anti-Slavery Society he was presented with a gold watch. As he took it in his hand he said:

“Well, gentlemen, if this had been a rotten egg I should have known what to do with it, but as it is a gold watch, I have nothing to say.”

Charles Sumner was an aristocrat. He was my father’s ideal. After I had got back from Kansas and visited my father’s home in Wisconsin, father said to me: “James, the Honorable Charles Sumner is going to speak at R----. We must hear him.”

So we arranged to go. We walked nine miles to hear him speak. My father never spoke of him without giving him his title. He had enjoyed that speech intensely. I do not know whether I did or not. Father occupied a front seat with the intention of rushing up to the platform and greeting him by the hand when he was finished, but the Honorable Charles was too quick for him. He disappeared, got to his hotel, and nobody saw him.

Father said: “James, the Honorable Charles Sumner is going to Milwaukee to-morrow morning, and we can ride with him a part of the way.”

We were on the train early the next morning, and so was the Honorable Charles Sumner. He was sitting reading in the drawing-room car.

Father stepped up and said: “The Honorable Charles Sumner? I have read all of your speeches. I feel that it is the duty of every American to take you by the hand. This is my son. He has just returned from the Kansas conflict.”

Honorable Charles Sumner did not see father nor his son, but he saw the porter and said: “Can you get me a place where I will be undisturbed?”

Poor father! His heart was almost broken. During his last twenty-five years he never referred to the Honorable Charles Sumner. Sumner was in greater demand as a lecturer than any other man of his time just about those years.

When at the height of his fame, he lectured in Providence and, at the close, the committee gave him a check for $500, expecting that he would hand it back, as it was at that time such an unprecedented fee. But Mr. Sumner put the check into his pocket.

His price with the bureau was $300 to $500. There was never any difficulty in getting it.

Chauncey M. Depew I regard as the peerless all-round orator of the present time. I have listened to him on all sorts of occasions for the past twenty-five years, and I am bound to say that I have never known a more versatile public speaker. I have heard many jocose references to Chauncey’s chestnuts, and have been chestnut hunting whenever I could get into the field where he was, with poor pickings--at public dinners, college commencements, Press Club gatherings, alumni associations, mechanics’ associations, workingmen’s societies, and political campaigns--and must say that without exception he deviates from the line in which he is expected to talk less than anybody I have ever known excepting Beecher.

I remember a dinner of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick in Delmonico’s early in the ’80’s, where Mr. Beecher and Mr. Depew were the principal speakers. It was a large gathering of the representative Irish-Americans, and there were present quite a number of distinguished foreigners. While Mr. Beecher was speaking, Mr. Depew came over and sat by me, and on one or two occasions intimated that it was one of the most remarkable orations he had ever listened to. After Mr. Beecher had finished, Mr. Depew was called upon, and Mr. Beecher came over and occupied the chair that Mr. Depew had vacated. There was tremendous applause when “Our Chauncey” was called upon. After quiet had been restored, Mr. Depew assumed a very serious expression. In opening his address he told his hearers that he had something serious to say to them: that we were on the eve of a great crisis--great labor strikes--and that he stood there as the representative of the largest labor constituency in America, and he told those men that he should hold them in a certain degree responsible for what might happen. He wanted them to _distinctly understand that he and those he represented were prepared to meet this crisis_. It was a long, earnest speech. There was not much applause until after Mr. Depew had finished.

Mr. Beecher and I left immediately afterward, drove in a carriage to Dorlon’s Oyster House, in Fulton Market, as was his usual custom after a New York speech, where we had supper. During our ride from Delmonico’s to Fulton Ferry Mr. Beecher did not speak. He was very quiet until supper was served. I remember the first words that came from his lips were something like this:

“The people of New York and of this country generally have looked upon Chauncey M. Depew as a sort of an entertainer and comedian for public occasions, and don’t realize the greatness of the man.” Then, after referring to the many responsibilities and trusts which were under Mr. Depew’s guidance, he wound up by saying, “Chauncey M. Depew is a great man, and I would like to vote for him for president of the United States.”

Of course Mr. Depew is not a lyceum lecturer, but he might be the most successful in America. He never will accept a fee for lecturing, and consequently the manager has little use for him in a business way.

I met him in his office November 27, 1899, and asked him if he could tell me of any incident in his speech-making career that had not been published. He told me that he thought the best speech he ever made in his life had never got into print, and he related the incident:

He and General Grant both had cottages at Long Branch. The General had taken offence at something that Mr. Depew had said in a speech, and for a long time they had passed each other without speaking. This silence lasted about four years. One day he received a letter from Judge Daly urging him to speak at the Sons of St. Patrick’s dinner at Delmonico’s, saying that General Grant was to be there and would speak. At that time General Grant had never made a public speech. “I took pains,” said Mr. Depew, “to prepare a speech for that occasion, although the time was very short and I had a case in the Supreme Court and was obliged to come from Washington on a late train which reached New York at nine o’clock. I hurried into my evening dress and to the dining hall, where I arrived about ten o’clock. General Grant was speaking. He discovered me as I was twisting myself through the crowd to the guest table. Grant stopped speaking (he told me afterward that his knees were knocking together under the table). As I arrived at my seat I heard the general say, ‘Oh! if I could only stand in Depew’s shoes!’ and he sat down. As I was called upon, I threw away my prepared speech and replied, ‘Who could stand in Grant’s shoes?’ and then all of Grant’s achievements multiplied before me and I believe I made the best speech of my life. It never got reported. After I sat down I felt some one take hold of my hand. I looked around; it was General Grant. He whispered to me, ‘That was the greatest speech that ever fell from human lips.’ Grant insisted on driving me home in his carriage that night, and we were close friends ever afterward.”

“Mr. Depew, who are our greatest orators?” I asked. “Compared with a quarter of a century ago we have no great orators, have we?”

“No, we have not,” said Mr. Depew. “I know one very eloquent man, with a big resounding voice, who holds his audience spell-bound, but what does he say? It is dull reading the next day.” He told me that Phillips and Beecher were the two greatest orators of their time, and that he thought they must have surpassed Webster and Clay.

I told Mr. Depew that when I was in England in 1886, I heard his name mentioned more among the religious classes than any American preacher in the country excepting Mr. Beecher.

He said, “You mean my reply to John Fiske at the Twentieth Century Club?”

“Yes,” I said, “that’s the speech. It was circulated as a religious tract in Great Britain.”

“Yes,” he replied, “I am told that millions of them have been circulated. I never considered that much of a speech. It was more an outburst of my heart at the time.”

With Mr. Depew’s permission I submit the speech, which, with the exception of “In His Steps,” has had the greatest circulation in England of any religious document ever published:

* * * * *

THE CHRISTIAN FAITH: A REPLY TO JOHN FISKE.

“I am a practical man, overwhelmed with the cares of business. It is exceedingly difficult for me to get on the plane of philosophic thought. I am a practical man. I believe in the Old Testament and the New Testament precisely as they are presented by Christianity. I am in antagonism to Mr. Wakeman, who dismisses the Bible as entirely a mass of legend, and with Professor Fiske, who accepts it with an interpretation entirely his own.

“It was the atheism of France that taught license for liberty and led to the French Revolution. Where are those old philosophies and the old philosophers? They are dead, while Christianity survives. The school of atheism led to despair. Materialism soon found that every violation of the moral law could go on consistently with its teachings. So pantheism and positivism have followed, only to be destroyed, and now we have the school of humanity and the cosmic philosophy coming close to the borders of Christianity as expounded by John Fiske.

“They tell us there is no more Creator, only a cosmic dust. Who made the dust? There is only protoplasm, indeed. Who made the protoplasm? They tell us of evolution from dust to monkey and then to man; but all the scientists have never found the missing link. The simple gospel of the humble son of a carpenter, preached by twelve fishermen, has survived the centuries and outlives all other philosophies of eighteen hundred years.

“I am not versed in the terminology of the philosophies. I believe them to be of little use to reach the hearts and to influence the actions of simple men. There is no liberty that lasts in the world, and there is no government which has liberty in it which lasts, that does not recognize the Bible. What is the object of all theology? It is to reach the human heart and to control the actions of men as they are.

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Eccentricities of geniusChapter II: Preface (1)

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