Chapter XXIII (2)

What he would have done with the Presidency had he reached it is not easy to say or to surmise. He was altogether unsuited for official life, for which, nevertheless, he had a longing. But he was not so readily deceived in men or misled in measures as he seemed, and as most people thought him.

His convictions were emotional, his philosophy experimental; but there was a certain method in their application to public affairs. He gave bountifully of his affection and his confidence to the few who enjoyed his familiar friendship; he was accessible and sympathetic, though not indiscriminating, to those who appealed to his impressionable sensibilities and sought his help. He had been a good party man and was temperamentally a partizan.

To him place was not a badge of bondage; it was a decoration, preferment, promotion, popular recognition. He had always yearned for office as the legitimate destination of public life and the honorable reward of party service. During the greater part of his career, the conditions of journalism had been rather squalid and servile. He was really great as a journalist. He was truly and highly fit for nothing else, but, seeing less deserving and less capable men about him advanced from one post of distinction to another, he wondered why his turn proved so tardy in coming, and when it would come. It did come with a rush. What more natural than that he should believe it real instead of the empty pageant of a vision?

After the first shock and surprise of the Cincinnati nomination, it had taken me only a day and a night to pull myself together and to plunge into the swim to help fetch the water-logged factions ashore. This was clearly indispensable to forcing the Democratic organization to come to the rescue of what would prove otherwise but a derelict upon a stormy sea. Schurz was deeply disgruntled. Before he could be appeased, a bridge found in what was called the Fifth Avenue Hotel Conference had to be constructed in order to carry him across the stream which flowed between his disappointed hopes and aims and what appeared to him an illogical and repulsive alternative. Like another Achilles, he had taken to his tent and sulked. He was harder to deal with than any of the Democratic file-leaders; but he finally yielded, and did splendid work in the campaign.

Carl Schurz was a stubborn spirit, not readily adjustable. He was a nobly gifted man, but from first to last an alien in an alien land. He once said to me, “If I should live a thousand years, they would still call me a Dutchman.” No man of his time spoke so well or wrote to better purpose. He was equally skilful in debate, an overmatch for Conkling and Morton, whom, especially in the French Arms matter, he completely dominated and outshone. As sincere and unselfish, as patriotic and as courageous, as any of his contemporaries, he could never attain the full measure of the popular heart and confidence, albeit reaching its understanding directly and surely. Within himself a man of sentiment, he was not the cause of sentiment in others. He knew this and felt it.

During the campaign the Nast cartoons in “Harper’s Weekly,” which while unsparing to the last degree to Greeley and Sumner, and treating Schurz with a kind of considerate, qualifying humor, nevertheless greatly offended him. I do not think Greeley minded them much, if at all. They were very effective, notably the “Pirate Ship,” which represented Greeley rising above the taffrail of a vessel carrying the Stars-and-Stripes and waving his handkerchief at the man-of-war _Ship of State_ in the distance, while the political leaders of the Confederacy, dressed in true corsair costume, crouched below, ready to spring. Nothing did more to sectionalize Northern opinion and fire the Northern heart, or to lash the fury of the rank and file of those who were urged to vote as they had shot, and who had hoisted above them “the bloody shirt” for a banner.

In the first half of the canvass the impetus was with Greeley; the second half, beginning in eclipse, seemed about to end in something very like collapse. The old man seized his flag and set out upon his own account for a tour of the country. And right well he bore himself. If speech-making ever does any good toward the shaping of results, Greeley’s speeches surely should have elected him. They were marvels of impromptu oratory, mostly homely and touching appeals to the better sense and the magnanimity of a people not ripe or ready for generous impressions, convincing in their simplicity and integrity, unanswerable from any point of view of sagacious statesmanship or true patriotism, if the North had been in any mood to listen, to reason, and to respond.

I met him at Cincinnati and acted as his escort to Louisville and thence to Indianapolis, where others were waiting to take him in charge. He was in a state of querulous excitement. Before the vast and noisy audiences which we faced he stood apparently pleased and composed, delivering his words as he might have dictated them to a stenographer. As soon as we were alone he would break out into a kind of lamentation, punctuated by occasional bursts of objurgation. He especially distrusted the Quadrilateral, making an exception in my case as well he might, because, however his nomination had jarred my judgment, I had a real affection for him, dating back to the years immediately preceding the war, when I was wont to encounter him in the reporters’ galleries at Washington, which he preferred to using his floor privilege as an ex-member of Congress.

It was mid-October. We had heard from Maine. Indiana and Ohio had voted, and Greeley was for the first time realizing the hopeless nature of the contest. The South, in irons and under military rule and martial law sure for Grant, there had never been any real chance. Now it was obvious that there was to be no compensating ground-swell at the North. That he should pour forth his chagrin to one whom he knew so well and even regarded as one of his “boys” was inevitable. Much of what he said was founded on a basis of fact, some of it was mere suspicion and surmise, all of it came back to the main point that defeat stared us in the face.

I was glad and yet loath to part with him. If ever a man needed a strong friendly hand and heart to lean upon he did during those dark days--the end in darkest night nearer than any one could divine. He showed stronger mettle than had been allowed him; bore a manlier part than was commonly ascribed to his slovenly, slipshod habiliments and his aspect in which benignancy and vacillation seemed to struggle for the ascendancy. Abroad, the elements conspired against him. At home his wife lay ill, as it proved, unto death. The good gray head he still carried like a hero, but the worn and tender heart was beginning to break.

Happily the end came quickly. Overwhelming defeat was followed by overwhelming affliction. He never quitted his dear one’s bedside until the last pulse-beat, and then he sank beneath the load of grief. “‘The Tribune’ is gone and I am gone,” he said, and spoke no more.

The death of Greeley fell upon the country with a sudden shock. It aroused a wide-spread sense of pity and sorrow and awe. All hearts were hushed. In an instant the bitterness of the campaign was forgotten, though the huzzas of the victors still rent the air. President Grant, his late antagonist, with his cabinet, and the leading members of the two Houses of Congress, attended his funeral. As he lay in his coffin, he was no longer the arch-rebel leading a combine of buccaneers and insurgents, which the Republican orators and newspapers had depicted him, but the brave old apostle of freedom, who had done more than all others to make the issues upon which a militant and triumphant party had risen to power. The multitude remembered only the old white hat and the sweet, old baby face beneath it, heart of gold, and hand wielding the wizard pen; the incarnation of probity and kindness, of steadfast devotion to his duty, as he saw it, and to the needs of the whole human family. It was, indeed, a tragedy; and yet, as his body was lowered into its grave, there rose above it, invisible, unnoted, a flower of matchless beauty--the flower of peace and love between the parts of the Union to which his life had been a sacrifice.

The crank convention had builded wiser than it knew. That the Democratic party could ever have been brought to the support of Horace Greeley for President of the United States reads even now like a page out of a nonsense-book. That his warmest support should have come from the South seems an incredible, and was a priceless, fact. His martyrdom shortened the distance across the bloody chasm; his coffin very nearly filled it. The candidacy of Charles Francis Adams or of Lyman Trumbull would have meant a mathematical formula, with no solution of the problem, and as certain defeat at the end of it. Greeley’s candidacy threw a flood of light and warmth into the arena of deadly strife; it made a more equal and reasonable division of parties possible; it put the Southern half of the country in a position to plead its own case by showing the Northern half that it was not wholly recalcitrant, and it made way for real issues of pith and moment relating to the time instead of pigments of bellicose passion and scraps of ante bellum controversy.

In a word, Greeley did more by his death to complete the work of Lincoln than he could have done by a triumph at the polls and the term in the White House he so much desired. Though only sixty years of age, his race was run. Of him it may be truly written that he lived a life full of inspiration to his countrymen, and died not in vain, “our later Franklin” fittingly inscribed upon his tomb.

[1] Dissatisfaction with the administration of General Grant led
a number of distinguished Republicans to unite in a call for
what they named a Liberal Republican Convention to assemble
in Cincinnati the first of May, 1872. Charles Sumner, Lyman
Trumbull, and Carl Schurz were foremost among these Republicans.
Mr. Schurz was chosen permanent chairman of the convention and
delivered a striking key-note speech. Stanley Matthews, afterward
a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, served as
temporary chairman.

The free-trade and civil-service reform elements were largely
represented under the leadership of David A. Wells, George
Hoadley, and Horace White. Charles Francis Adams was the choice
of these for the Presidential nomination. The opposition to Mr.
Adams was divided at the outset between Justice David Davis of
the Supreme Court, ex-Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, and
Governor B. Gratz Brown of Missouri, with a strong undercurrent
for Horace Greeley. The arrival upon the scene at the opportune
moment of Governor Brown, accompanied by General Francis P.
Blair, turned the tide from both Adams and Davis, and, Brown
withdrawing and throwing his strength to Greeley, secured on the
sixth ballot the nomination of the famous editor of the New York
“Tribune,” Brown himself taking second place on the ticket.

In the platform that was adopted the free-trade issue, in
deference to Mr. Greeley’s Protectionist antecedents and
sentiments, was “relegated to the congressional districts.”

The result at Cincinnati was received with mingled ridicule and
applause. Many Liberal Republicans refused to accept Mr. Greeley
and fell back within the lines of the regular Republican party. A
sub-convention, called the Fifth Avenue Conference, was required
to hold others of them, including Carl Schurz. Finally, the
Democratic National Convention, which met at Baltimore in July,
ratified the Greeley and Brown ticket.

During the midsummer there were high hopes of its election; but
as the canvass advanced, its prospects steadily declined. Early
in October Mr. Greeley made a tour from New England westward
as far as Indiana and Ohio, delivering a series of speeches in
persuasive eloquence regarded as unexampled in the political
annals of the country. But nothing sufficed to stay overwhelming
defeat, the portion fate seemed to have allotted Mr. Greeley on
several occasions, in 1861 as a candidate for the Senate, in
1869 as a candidate for Controller of New York, and in 1870 as a
representative in Congress, to which he had been sent in 1848-9.

During his absence from home his wife had fallen ill. He returned
to find her condition desperate. She died and was buried amid
the closing scenes of the disastrous campaign. Mr. Greeley had
for years suffered from insomnia. His vigil by the bedside of
his dying wife had quite exhausted him. Inflammation of the
brain ensued; he remained sleepless, delirium set in, and he
died November 29, 1872. General Grant and his Cabinet, with
most of the officials of Congress and the Government, attended
his funeral, the tragic circumstances of his death wholly
obliterating partizan feeling and arousing general sympathy among
all classes of the people.

COMMENTS ON COLONEL WATTERSON’S PAPER

The foregoing was written in the south of France to help while
away a winter vacation. I was not willing to give it to the public
without the “visé” of my surviving colleagues, Whitelaw Reid and
Horace White, to each of whom I sent a copy. At first I thought of
recasting my matter to meet their objections. But, on second thought,
it seems best to “let the hide go with the tallow,” as it were, their
comments not only illuminating my narrative, but throwing on it
the side lights of their differing points of view. No one holds in
higher respect than I the noble aims and great sacrifices made by the
Liberal Republicans.

~Henry Watterson.~

I--BY WHITELAW REID

Dorchester House,
Park Lane, W., London, England,
May 3, 1911.

My dear Watterson:

I have read the manuscript with the greatest interest. On a few little matters I shouldn’t have put things quite the same way; but that of course is to be expected from the different points of view from which we necessarily regard the subject. On the whole, it seems to me extremely fair and accurate.

I shall append a few notes, which I have made on different points suggested by the manuscript, not with the idea that you will find any occasion to incorporate any of my suggestions in your account, but only by way of refreshing your memory, as your manuscript has refreshed mine, about interesting incidents of a period which now seems so remote as to belong exclusively to our romantic youth.

On page 27 it would seem to be implied that Ben Wade was somewhat influenced in his support of the impeachment policy by the fact that if impeachment succeeded, he was the inevitable successor. I saw a great deal of Wade in those days. He certainly knew what the consequence to himself of a successful impeachment would be, but I never saw any reason to suppose that if somebody else had been acting Vice-President, Wade’s attitude would not have been the same. Probably he would have been even more outspoken.

Page 31. What you say of the attitude of three of the Quadrilateral toward myself is not news to me. I knew, however, the reasons for it (which would probably have influenced me if I had been in their places), and I bore no grudges. In fact, at the time I had a pretty strong conviction that they were the people who were going to be badly disappointed in the end; so that, while you all thought you were taking me into camp, I was comforting myself with the belief that I was taking the Quadrilateral into camp, and should find them very useful articles to begin housekeeping with.

Page 35. Did McCullagh come from Chicago? I thought we always counted him as belonging to Cincinnati until he went to St. Louis. When I first went to Cincinnati, he was a reporter on the “Gazette,” from which he went to the “Commercial.”

Page 40. The “bravery” of Greeley’s outstretched hand may have been fully recognized, but I doubt if its self-sacrifice ever was. First and last it must have cost him (poor man that he was) nearly a million dollars. Shortly after the first volume of his history, “The American Conflict,” was published, I remember congratulating him on the pecuniary success. His reply was: “Oh, I haven’t made as much as the newspapers say. Still, I’ve made a hundred thousand dollars that I know of, for I have spent every cent of it. The past at least is secure.” With that figure as a basis, you can calculate how much he would probably have made from the enormously augmented sale of the first volume when the second came out, as well as from the copyrights on the second. The circulation of “The Tribune” was also affected for a time in the same disastrous way.

Page 41. With my intimate knowledge of Greeley at that period I should hardly have said he had a passion for office. What I did think was that he had a passion for recognition, and was very sore at being treated not as an equal and comrade, but as a convenience to the machine, by Seward and Thurlow Weed. It was less office he sought than an opportunity to teach those gentlemen their places and his. Certainly he never had a lifelong passion for office like Lincoln.

Page 41. We had no better politics during the campaign than in the management of the Fifth Avenue Conference. I remember that William Henry Hurlbert and some others who were doing their best then to defeat us did not wake up to the real significance of our attitude toward this conference until the morning it met. Then Hurlbert described the course of “The Tribune” as that of a court gallant, tiptoeing forward to bow the favorites to their places.

I always thought we had the country with us until after the North Carolina election, and believed we carried that. I am afraid it was our old friend Ned Webster who deliberately rushed down to steal it away from us, and that his very strong measures had pretty high sanction. Or was it in the Hayes-Tilden election that he came to the front? The truth is the North Carolina election was the turning-point. If the result had been left as we believed it to be for the first two or three days, I don’t think we should have had the October reaction, or that Nast’s cartoons could have had anything like the effect they did exert.

By the way, some of those cartoons could hardly have been tolerated at any other time in America, and would hardly have been tolerated in any other country at any time, such as the one depicting Greeley--Greeley of all living men!--as clasping hands with the ghost of Wilkes Booth across the grave of murdered Abraham Lincoln. I once told “Brooklyn” Joe Harper he ought to be ashamed of that, and begin every day of his life with a prayer for forgiveness for it. His reply was that we all of us had done something at some time in our lives that we ought to be ashamed of. He understood perfectly that I never resented in the least Nast’s caricatures of myself. In fact, I thought some of them extraordinarily clever, such as the one depicting me playing a hand-organ in front of the old Manhattan Club, with Greeley as the monkey holding out a hat for pennies, while on the end of the organ was the familiar quotation from “The Tribune” of those days, “This is not an organ.”

Page 42. You are perfectly right in praising Greeley’s hopeless campaign in the West. In fact, if I were writing, I should pitch the note a little higher. I remember Joseph H. Choate saying to a group, of which I was a member, one Saturday night at the Century Club during that campaign, “What extraordinarily good speeches Greeley is making out West!” To give that its full value, please remember that Choate was a partner of Evarts, who had nominated Seward, and that to that whole combination Greeley was anathema.

Page 42. My recollection is that Mrs. Greeley died in the interval after his return from the West, but before the election. I always attributed his sudden collapse after the election as much to his loss of sleep, while watching for a week at her bedside, as to disappointment over the result, and this opinion was somewhat confirmed by Dr. Choate (a brother of Joseph), to whose private sanatorium he was taken. I asked Choate what the real disease was, and he said, “If you want it in popular phrase, it is really an inflammation of the outer membrane of the brain, due to loss of sleep or extraordinary excitement.” Then I asked what his prognosis was, and he replied, “He will either be well in a week or dead.” This is of course not a description of insanity at all; and I always felt a cruel injustice was done his memory in describing him as going crazy over defeat--as cruel as it would be to say such a thing of a fever patient because he was in a temporary delirium.

I was never convinced that the “last words” you quote were ever uttered by him, “‘The Tribune’ is gone, and I am gone.” Dana was surrounded in those days by people who for one reason or another had grudges equal to his own against “The Tribune”--Amos Cummings, who had left us in a pet because of some rebuke from John Russell Young; Dr. Wood, whom Amos got away from us; and, above all, a man in the proof-room, who resented my criticisms of his proofreading and deserted us, taking with him the manuscript of one or two of Greeley’s unbalanced articles, which his brother-in-law, John Cleveland, had discovered and brought to me, and which I suppressed because they were obviously unbalanced. They reveled in these things; and it happened at that time to be all grist to Dana’s mill.

II--BY HORACE WHITE

I have read “The Humor and Tragedy of the Greeley Campaign.” What I think of it depends upon the point of view from which I look at it. The only tragic thing in it is the death of Greeley. All the rest is comedy.

Regarded as such it has high merits. I can think of nothing political that is more mirth-provoking, unless it is Dickens’s description of _Mr. Veneering’s_ campaign for a seat in Parliament with the help of _Boots_ and _Brewer_ riding about London in cabs and “bringing him in.”

The first three pages are serious. On the fourth page the fun begins, and continues till the death of Greeley. At the bottom of page 33 there are two sentences beginning with the words, “We were wholly serious,” which excuse the participants, including yourself, for being at Cincinnati at all. Then the humor starts afresh and becomes side-splitting at the place where McClure enters and tosses Schurz and Halstead and yourself to the ceiling successively.

Now the question arises, What will the readers of your paper, who get from it their first and only knowledge of the campaign of 1872--and these will probably be ninety per cent. of its readers--think of that campaign? They will think it was a very droll affair and quite unaccountable. They will know nothing about disfranchisement or Santo Domingo or nepotism or whisky frauds, or civil-service rapine or the real causes of the uprising of 1871-72.

The McClure episode, by the way, is even more unaccountable. I don’t understand it myself. It reads as though Colonel McClure was surveying the scene from Olympus as a disinterested spectator, with great scorn for the participants in the convention. In fact he was chairman of the Pennsylvania delegation, supporting Greeley or Davis or somebody. He was as deep in the mud as anybody else was in the mire.