The Last Leaf
Observations, during Seventy-five Years,
of Men and Events in America and Europe
By
James Kendall Hosmer, LL.D.
Member of the Minnesota Historical Society, Corresponding Member
of the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Colonial Society of
Massachusetts
Author of "A Short History of German Literature," "The Story of the
Jews," the Lives of Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Sir Henry Vane,
etc.
1912
FOREWORD
Standing on the threshold of my eightieth year, stumbling badly,
moreover, through the mutiny, well justified, of a pair of worn-out
eyes, I, a veteran maker of books, must look forward to the closing of
an over-long series.
I retain in my memory certain films, which record impressions of long
ago. Can I not possibly develop and present these film records for a
moving picture of the men and events of an eventful period?
We old story-tellers do our talking under a heavy handicap. Homer,
long ago, found us garrulous, and compared us to cicadas chirping
unprofitably in the city-gate. In the modern time, too, Dr. Holmes,
ensconced in smug youth, could "sit and grin" at one of our kind as he
"Totters o'er the ground
With his cane."
He thought
"His breeches and all that
Were so queer."
The "all that" is significant. To the callow young doctor, men of our
kind were throughout queered, and so, too, think the spruce and jaunty
company who are shouldering us so fast out of the front place. In
their thought we are more than depositors of last leaves, in fact we
are last leaves ourselves, capable in the green possibly of a pleasant
murmur, but in the dry with no voice but a rattle prophetic of winter.
I hope Dr. Holmes lived to repent his grin. At any rate he lived to
refute the notion that youthful fire and white hairs exclude each
other. If we must totter, what ground we have to totter over, with
two generations and more behind us! The ground is ours. We only have
looked into the faces of the great actors, and have taken part in the
epoch-making events. As I unroll my panorama I may totter, but I hope
I shall not dodder.
Retiring, as I must soon do from my somewhat Satanic activity, from
"going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in it," I can
claim, like my ill-reputed exemplar, to have encountered some patient
Jobs, servants of the Lord, but more who were impatient, yet not the
less the Lord's servants, and the outward semblance of these I try to
present. My pictures have to some extent been exhibited before, in
the _Atlantic Monthly_, the New York _Evening Post_, and
the Boston _Transcript_, and I am indebted to the courtesy of the
publishers of these periodicals for permission to utilise them here.
I am emboldened by the favour they met to present them again to
the public, retouched, and expanded. I attempt no elaborate
characterisation of men, or history of events or exposition of
philosophies. My films are snap-shots, caught from the curbstone, from
the gallery of an assembly, in a scholar's study, or by the light of
a camp-fire. I have ventured to address my reader as friend might talk
to a friend, with the freedom of familiar intercourse, and I hope that
the reader may not be conscious of any undue intrusion of the showman
as the figures and scenes appear. Go, little book, with this setting
forth of what you are and aim to do.
J.K.H.
MINNEAPOLIS, October, 4, 1912.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
STATESMEN OF OUR CRITICAL PERIOD
"Tippecanoe and Tyler too." Millard Fillmore. Abraham Lincoln at
Church. Stephen A. Douglas. Daniel Webster. William H. Seward. Edward
Everett. Robert C. Winthrop. Charles Sumner. John A. Andrew.
CHAPTER II
SOLDIERS I HAVE MET
U.S. Grant. Philip H. Sheridan. George G. Meade. W.T. Sherman. Jacob
D. Cox. N.P. Banks. B.F. Butler. John Pope. Henry W. Slocum. O.O.
Howard. Rufus Saxton. James H. Wilson. T.W. Sherman. Horatio G.
Wright. Isaac I. Stevens. Harvard Soldiers. W.F. Bartlett. Charles R.
Lowell. Francis C. Barlow.
CHAPTER III
HORACE MANN AND ANTIOCH COLLEGE
Horace Mann. "The New Wrinkle at Sweetbrier." Dramatics in the Schools
of Germany, of France, of England, at Antioch College.
CHAPTER IV
THE GIANT IN THE SPIKED HELMET
Prussia in 1870. Militarism in the Schools, in the Universities, in
the Home, in the Sepulchre. The Hohenzollern Lineage.
CHAPTER V
A STUDENT'S EXPERIENCE IN THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR
Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse. The Emperor Frederick. Wilhelm II. Francis
Joseph of Austria. King Ludwig of Bavaria. Munich in War-time. A
Deserted Switzerland. France in Arms. Paris on the Verge of the Siege.
CHAPTER VI
AMERICAN HISTORIANS
George Bancroft. Justin Winsor. John Fiske.
CHAPTER VII
ENGLISH AND GERMAN HISTORIANS
Sir Richard Garnett. S.R. Gardiner. E.A. Freeman. Goldwin Smith.
James Bryce. The House of Commons. Lord Randolph Churchill and W.E.
Gladstone as Makers of History. Von Treitschke. Ernst Curtius. Leopold
von Ranke. Theodor Mommsen. Lepsius. Hermann Grimm.
CHAPTER VIII
POETS AND PROPHETS
Henry W. Longfellow. Oliver Wendell Holmes. James Russell Lowell.
The Town of Concord. Henry D. Thoreau. Louisa M. Alcott. Nathaniel
Hawthorne. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Phillips Brooks.
CHAPTER IX
MEN OF SCIENCE
German Scientists: Kirchoff, the Physicist. Bunsen, the Chemist.
Helmholtz. American Scientists: Simon Newcomb, Asa Gray, Louis
Agassiz, Alexander Agassiz.
CHAPTER X
AT HAPHAZARD
William Grey, Ninth Earl of Stamford. The Franciscan of Salzburg. The
Berlin Dancer. Visits to Old Battle-fields. Eupeptic Musings.
INDEX
The Last Leaf
CHAPTER I
STATESMEN OF OUR CRITICAL PERIOD
I came to consciousness in the then small town of Buffalo in western
New York, whither, in Andrew Jackson's day, our household gods and
goods were conveyed from Massachusetts for the most part by the Erie
Canal, the dizzy rate of four miles an hour not taking away my baby
breath. Speaking of men and affairs of state, as I shall do in this
opening paper, I felt my earliest political thrill in 1840. I have a
distinct vision, the small boy's point of view being not much above
the sidewalk, of the striding legs in long processions, of wide-open,
clamorous mouths above, and over all of the flutter of tassels and
banners. Then began my knowledge of log-cabins, coon-skins, and of
the name hard cider, the thump of drums, the crash of brass-bands,
cockades, and torch-lights. My powers as a singer, always modest,
I first exercised on "For Tippecanoe and Tyler too," which still
obtrudes too obstinately upon my tympanum, though much fine harmony
heard since in cathedrals and the high shrines of music is quite
powerless now to make that organ vibrate. Four years later, my
emerging voice did better justice to "Harry Clay of Old Kentucky," and
my early teens found me in an environment that quickened prematurely
my interest in public affairs. My father, the pioneer apostle of an
unpopular faith, ministered in a small church of brick faced with
stone to a congregation which, though few in numbers, contained some
remarkable people. Millard Fillmore and his partner, Nathan K. Hall,
soon to be Postmaster-General, were of his fold, together with Hiram
Barton, the city's mayor, and other figures locally noteworthy.
Fillmore was only an accidental President, dominated, no doubt, and
dwarfed in the perspective by greater men, while the part he played
in a great crisis brought upon him obloquy with many good people. "Say
what you will about Fillmore," said a fellow-totterer to me the other
day, adjusting his "store" teeth for an emphatic declaration, "by
signing the Fugitive Slave Bill he saved the country. That act
postponed the Civil War ten years. Had it come in 1850, as it
assuredly would but for that scratch of Fillmore's pen, the Union
would have gone by the board. The decade that followed greatly
increased the relative strength of the North. A vast immigration
poured in which almost universally came to stand for the Union.
Moreover the expanding West, whose natural outlet until then had been
down the Mississippi to the South, became now linked to the East by
great lines of railroad, and West and East entered into such a new
bond of sympathy that there was nothing for it, in a time of trial,
but to stand together. As it was, it was only by the narrowest margin
that the Union weathered the storm. Had it come ten years earlier,
wreck would have been inevitable, and it is to Fillmore's signature
that we owe that blessed postponement." As the old man spoke, I had a
vision of the grave, troubled face of my father as he told us once of
a talk he had just had with Mr. Fillmore. The relations of the
pastor and the parishioner, always cordial, had become more than ever
friendly through an incident creditable to both. Mr. Fillmore had
good-naturedly offered my father a chaplaincy in the Navy, a post with
a comfortable salary, which he might easily hold, taking now and then
a pleasant sea-cruise with light duties, or indeed not leaving home
at all, by occasional trips and visits to the one man-of-war which the
Government maintained on the Great Lakes. To an impecunious minister,
with a large family to educate, it was a tempting offer. But my father
in those days was a peace-man, and he was also disinclined to nibble
at the public crib while rendering no adequate service. He declined
the appointment, a course much censured. "The fool parson, to let
such a chance go!" Mr. Fillmore admired it and their friendship became
heartier than ever. In the interview, my father had asked his friend
to explain his course on the Fugitive Slave Law, an act involving
suffering for so many, and no doubt took on a tone of remonstrance. He
told us the President raised his hands in vehement appeal. He had only
a choice between terrible evils--to inflict suffering which he hoped
might be temporary, or to precipitate an era of bloodshed with the
destruction of the country as a probable result. He did not do
evil that good might come, but of two imminent evils he had, as he
believed, chosen the lesser.
Fillmore lives in my memory a stately, massive presence, with hair
growing grey and kindly blue eyes looking down upon the little boy
with a pleasant greeting. His wife was gentle and unassuming. His
daughter Abby matured into much beauty and grace, and her sudden
death, by cholera, in the bloom of young womanhood cast a shadow
on the nation. They were homely folk, thrust up suddenly into high
position, but it did not turn their heads. In their lives they were
plainly sweet and honest. No taint of corruption attaches to Fillmore
in either his private or public career. He was my father's friend. I
think he meant well, and am glad that our most authoritative historian
of the period, Rhodes, can say that he discharged the duties of his
high office "with ability and honour."
When in February, 1861, Abraham Lincoln, on his way to Washington,
arrived in Buffalo Saturday night and it became known he would spend
Sunday, the town was alive with curiosity as to where he would go
to church. Mr. Lincoln was Mr. Fillmore's guest. They had known
each other well in Congress--Fillmore a veteran at the head of the
Committee of Ways and Means, Lincoln then quite unknown, serving his
only term. Both were Whigs of the old school, in close contact and I
suppose not afterwards far apart. Lincoln was prepared to execute
the Fugitive Slave Law, while Fillmore was devoted to the Union,
and probably would have admitted at the end that Lincoln's course
throughout was good. My father's church was looked on somewhat
askance. "It's lucky," said a parishioner once, "that it has a
stone face." Would Lincoln go to the Unitarian church? Promptly at
service-time Mr. Fillmore appeared with his guest, the two historic
figures side by side in the pew. Two or three rows intervened between
it and that in which sat my mother and our household. I beheld the
scene only through the eyes of my kindred, for by that time I had
flown the nest. But I may be pardoned for noting here an interesting
spectacle. As they stood during the hymns, the contrast was
picturesque. Both men had risen from the rudest conditions through
much early hardship. Fillmore had been rocked in a sap-trough in a
log-cabin scarcely better than Lincoln's early shelter, and the two
might perhaps have played an even match at splitting rails. Fillmore,
however, strangely adaptive, had taken on a marked grace of manner,
his fine stature and mien carrying a dignified courtliness which is
said to have won him a handsome compliment from Queen Victoria--a
gentleman rotund, well-groomed, conspicuously elegant. Shoulder to
shoulder with him rose the queer, raw-boned, ramshackle frame of
the Illinoisan, draped in the artless handiwork of a prairie tailor,
surmounted by the rugged, homely face. The service, which the new
auditor followed reverently, being finished, the minister, leaving the
pulpit, gave Lincoln God-speed--and so he passed on to his greatness.
My mother, sister, and brothers--the youngest of whom before two years
were gone was to fill a soldier's grave--stood close at hand.
I once saw Stephen A. Douglas, the man who was perhaps more closely
associated than any other with the fame of Lincoln, for he was the
human obstacle by overcoming whom Lincoln proved his fitness for the
supreme place. Douglas was a man marvellously strong. Rhodes declares
it would be hard to set bounds to his ability. I saw him in 1850, when
he was yet on the threshold, just beginning to make upon the country
an impress of power. Fillmore had recently, through Taylor's death,
become President, and was making his first visit to his home after his
elevation, with members of his Cabinet and other conspicuous figures
of his party. How Douglas came to be of the company I wonder, for he
was an ardent Jacksonian Democrat, but there he was on the platform
before the multitude, and I, a boy of sixteen, watched him curiously,
for he was young as compared with the grey heads about him. His
image, as he stood up to speak, is very clear to me even now--a face
strong-featured and ruddy with vigour beneath a massive forehead
whose thatch had the blackness and luxuriance of youth. His trunk was
disproportionately large, carried on legs sturdy enough but noticeably
short. The wits used to describe him as the statesman "with coat-tails
very near the ground." It is worth while to remark on this physical
peculiarity because it was the direct opposite of Lincoln's
configuration. He, while comparatively short-bodied, had, as all the
world knows, an abnormal length of limb, a fact which I suppose will
account for much of his ungainly manner. In an ordinary chair he was
undoubtedly uncomfortable, and hence his familiar attitude with his
feet on the table or over the mantelpiece. The two fought each other
long and sternly on those memorable platforms in Illinois in 1858, and
in their physique there must have been, as they stood side by side,
a grotesque parody of their intellectual want of harmony. Douglas's
usual sobriquet was "the little giant," and it fitted well--a man
of stalwart proportions oddly "sawed off." His voice was vibrant and
sonorous, his mien compelling. It was no great speech, a few sentences
of compliment to the city and of good-natured banter of the political
foes among whom he found himself; but it was _ex pede Herculem_,
a leader red-blooded to the finger-tips. I treasure the memory of this
brief touch into which I once came with Douglas for I have come to
think more kindly of him as he has receded. Not a few will now admit
that, taken generally, his doctrine of "squatter sovereignty" was
right. Congress ought not to have power to fix a status for people of
future generations. If a status so fixed becomes repugnant it will be
repudiated, and rightfully. Douglas was certainly cool over the woes
of the blacks; but he refused, it is said, to grow rich, when the
opportunity offered, from the ownership of slaves or from the proceeds
of their sale. His rally to the side of Lincoln at last was finely
magnanimous and it was a pleasant scene, at the inauguration of March
4, 1861, when Douglas sat close by holding Lincoln's hat. There was
an interview between the two men behind closed doors, on the night the
news of Sumter came, of which one would like to have a report. Lincoln
came out from it to issue, through the Associated Press, his call
for troops, and Douglas to send by the same channel the appeal to his
followers to stand by the Government. What could the administration
have done without the faithful arms and hearts of the War Democrats?
And what other voice but that of Douglas could have rallied them to
its support? Had he lived it seems inevitable that the two so long
rivals would have been close friends--that Douglas would have been in
Lincoln's Cabinet, perhaps in Stanton's place. This, however, is not
a memory but a might-have-been, and those are barred out in this Last
Leaf.
Daniel Webster came home to die in 1852. He was plainly failing fast,
but the State for which he stood hoped for the best, and arranged that
he should speak, as so often before, in Faneuil Hall. As I walked
in from Harvard College, over the long "caterpillar bridge" through
Cambridge Street and Dock Square, my freshman mind was greatly
perplexed. My mother's family were perfervid Abolitionists, accepting
the extremest utterances of Garrison and Wendell Phillips. I was
now in that environment, and felt strong impress from the power
and sincerity of the anti-slavery leaders. Fillmore and his
Postmaster-General, N.K. Hall, were old family friends. We children
had chummed with their children. Their kindly, honest faces were among
the best known to us in the circle of our elders. I had learned to
respect no men more. I was about to behold Webster, Fillmore's chief
secretary and counsellor. On the one hand he was much denounced, on
the other adored, in each case with fiery vehemence, and in my little
world the contrasting passions were wildly ablaze. In the mass that
crowded Faneuil Hall we waited long, an interval partly filled by the
eccentric and eloquent Father Taylor, the seamen's preacher, whom
the crowd espied in the gallery and summoned clamorously. My mood was
serious, and it jarred upon me when a classmate, building on current
rumours, speculated irreverently as to the probable contents of
the pitcher on Mr. Webster's desk. He came at last, tumultuously
accompanied and received, and advanced to the front, his large frame,
if I remember right, dressed in the blue coat with brass buttons and
buff vest usual to him on public occasions, which hung loosely
about the attenuated limbs and body. The face had all the majesty I
expected, the dome above, the deep eyes looking from the caverns, the
strong nose and chin, but it was the front of a dying lion. His colour
was heavily sallow, and he walked with a slow, uncertain step. His
low, deep intonations conveyed a solemn suggestion of the sepulchre.
His speech was brief, a recognition of the honour shown him, an
expression of his belief that the policy he had advocated and followed
was necessary to the country's preservation. Then he passed out to
Marshfield and the death-bed. What he said was not much, but it made
a strange impression of power, and here I am minded to tell an ancient
story. Sixty years ago, when I was ensconced in my smug youth, and
could "sit and grin," like young Dr. Holmes, at the queernesses of
the last leaves of those days, I heard a totterer whose ground was the
early decades of the last century, chirp as follows:
"This Daniel Webster of yours! Why, I can remember when he had a hard
push to have his ability acknowledged. We used to aver that he never
said anything, and that it was only his big way that carried the
crowd. I have in mind an old-time report of one of his deliverances:
'Mr. Chairman (_applause_), I did not graduate at this university
(_greater applause_), at this college (_tumultuous applause_),
I graduated at another college (_wild cheering with hats thrown
in the air_), I graduated at a college of my native State
(_convulsions of enthusiasm, during which the police spread
mattresses to catch those who leaped from the windows_).'"
That day in Faneuil Hall I felt his "big way" and it overpowered,
though the sentences were really few and commonplace. What must he
have been in his prime! What sentences in the whole history of oratory
have more swayed men than those he uttered! I recall that in 1861 we
young men of the North did not much argue the question of the right
of secession. The Constitution was obscure about it, and one easily
became befogged if he sought to weigh the right and the wrong of it.
But Webster had replied to Hayne. Those were the days when schoolboys
"spoke pieces," and in thousands of schoolhouses the favourite piece
was his matchless peroration. From its opening, "When my eyes shall
be turned to behold for the last time the sun in the heavens," to
the final outburst, "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and
inseparable!" it was all as familiar to us as the sentences of the
Lord's Prayer, and scarcely less consecrated. No logical unravelling
of the tangle, but that burning expression of devotion to the Union,
lay behind the enthusiasm with which we sprang to arms. The ghost of
Webster hovered in the battle-smoke, and it was his call more than any
other that rallied and kept us at the firing-line.
I think my mother told me once that on the canal-boat as we went West
in the thirties, we had Webster for a time as a fellow-passenger, who
good-naturedly patted the heads of the two little boys who then made
up her brood. I wish I could be sure that the hand of Webster had once
rested on my head. His early utterances as to slavery are warm with
humane feeling. I have come to feel that his humanity did not cool,
but he grew into the belief that agitation at the time would make sure
the destruction of the country, in his eyes the supreme calamity. The
injustice, hoary from antiquity, not recognised as injustice until
within a generation or two, might wait a generation or two longer
before we dealt with it. Let the evil be endured a while that the
greater evil might not come. I neither defend nor denounce him. I am
now only remembering; and what a stately and solemn image it is to
remember!
* * * * *
William H. Seward, unlike Webster, had the handicap of an unimpressive
exterior, nor had his voice the profound and conquering note which
is so potent an ally of the mind in subduing men. I heard Seward's
oration at Plymouth in 1855, a worthy effort which may be read in his
works, but I do better here to pick up only the straws, not meddling
with the heavy-garnered wheat. I recall an inconspicuous figure, of
ordinary stature, and a face whose marked feature was the large nose
(Emerson called it "corvine"), but that, as some one has said, is the
hook which nature makes salient in the case of men whom fortune is
to drag forward into leadership. He spoke in the pulpit of my
grandfather, who at the time had been for nearly sixty years minister
of the old Pilgrim parish. From that coign of vantage, my faithful
grandsire had no doubt smoked out many a sinner, and had not been
sparing of the due polemic fulminations in times of controversy. The
old theology, too, had undergone at his hands faithful fumigation to
make it sanitary for the modern generations. From one kind of smoke,
however, that venerable pulpit had been free until the hour of
Seward's arrival. It arched my eyebrows well when I saw him at the end
of his address light a cigar in the very shrine, a burnt-offering, in
my good grandfather's eyes certainly, more fitting for altars satanic.
My grandfather promptly called him down, great man though he was,
a rub which the statesman received from the white-haired minister,
good-naturedly postponing his smoke. But Seward rode rough-shod too
often over conventions, and sometimes over real proprieties. In an
over-convivial frame once, his tongue, loosened by champagne, nearly
wagged us into international complications, and there is a war-time
anecdote, which I have never seen in print and I believe is
unhackneyed, which casts a light. A general of the army, talking with
Lincoln and the Cabinet, did not spare his oaths. "What church do you
attend?" interposed the President at last, stroking his chin in his
innocent way. Confused at an inquiry so foreign to the topic under
discussion, the soldier replied he did not attend much of any church
himself, but his folks were Methodists. "How odd!" said. Lincoln,
"I thought you were an Episcopalian. You swear just like Seward, and
Seward is an Episcopalian."
But I should be sorry to believe there was any trouble with Seward but
a surface blemish. Though in '61 he advocated a foreign war as a
means for bringing together North and South, and desired to shelve
practically Lincoln while he himself stood at the front to manage the
turmoil, he made no more mistakes than statesmen in general. He had
been powerful for good before the war, and during its course, with
what virile stiffness of the upper lip did he face and foil the
frowning foreign world! He had the insight and candour to do full
justice at last to Lincoln, whom at first he depreciated. Then the
purchase of Alaska! Writing as I do on the western coast I am perhaps
affected by the glamour of that marvellous land. When news of the
bargain came in the seventies, the scorners sang:
"Hear it all ye polar bears,
Waltz around the pole in pairs.
All ye icebergs make salaam,
You belong to Uncle Sam.
Lo, upon the snow too plain
Falls his dark tobacco stain."
We thought that very funny and very apt,--but now! I am glad I have
his image vivid, in the pulpit beside my grandfather scratching a
match for a too careless cigar. Between smokes he had done, and was
still to do, some fine things.
* * * * *
In those days, Edward Everett and Robert C. Winthrop were often
under my immature gaze. Men much alike in views, endowments, and
accomplishments, they had played out their parts in public life and
had been consigned to their Boston shelf. In the perspective they are
statuettes rather than statues, of Parian spotlessness, ribboned and
gilt-edged through an elegant culture, well appointed according to
the best taste, companion Sévres pieces, highly ornamental, and
effectually shelved. By the side of the robust protagonists of those
stormy years they stand as figurines, not figures, and yet it was
rather through their fate than through their fault perhaps that they
are what they are in our Pantheon. They were not at all without virile
quality. Everett bore himself well in some rough Senatorial debates,
and Winthrop, as Speaker of the House at Washington, was in stormy
times an able and respected officer. But coarse contacts jarred upon
their refinement; and when, like the public men in general who saw
in postponement of the slavery agitation the wiser course, they were
retired from the front, it is easy to see why the world judged them
as it did. Everett's son, Mr. Sidney Everett, at one time Assistant
Secretary of State, was my classmate, and honoured me once with a
request to edit his father's works. I declined the task, but not from
the feeling that the task was not worth doing. Everett had the idea
that the armed rush of the North and South against each other might
be stayed even at the last, by reviving in them the veneration for
Washington, a sentiment shared by both. The delivery of his oration on
Washington as a means to that end was well meant, but pathetic in its
complete futility to accomplish such a purpose. So small a spill of
oil upon a sea so raging! He was a master of beautiful periods, and I
desire here to record my testimony that he also possessed a power
for off-hand speech. The tradition is that his utterances were
all elaborately studied, down to the gestures and the play of the
features. I have heard him talk on the spur of the moment, starting
out from an incident close at hand and touching effectively upon
circumstances that arose as he proceeded.
Of the two men, often seen side by side, so similar in tastes,
education, and character, both for the same cause ostracised from
public life by their common wealth, a repugnance to reform which
scouted all counting of costs, Winthrop impressed me in my young days
as being the abler. His public career closed early, but he had time
to show he could be vigorous and finely eloquent. I remember him most
vividly as I saw him presiding at a Commencement dinner, a function
which he discharged with extraordinary felicity. He had an alertness,
as he stood lithe and graceful, derived perhaps from his strain of
Huguenot blood. His wit was excelling, his learning comprehensive and
well in hand. He was no more weighed down by his erudition than was
David by his sling. Encomium, challenge, repartee,--all were quick and
happy, and from time to time in soberer vein he passed over without
shock into befitting dignity. I have sat at many a banquet, but for me
that ruling of the feast by Winthrop is the masterpiece in that kind.
He lived long after retiring from politics, the main stay of causes
charitable, educational, and for civic betterment. My memory is
enriched by the image of him which it holds.
* * * * *
Sixty years ago, one met, under the elms of the streets of Cambridge,
two men who plainly were close friends: one of moderate height,
well groomed in those days almost to the point of being dapper, very
courteous, bowing low to every student he met, Henry W. Longfellow.
Of him I shall have something to say later on. The other was a man
of unusual stature and stalwart frame, with a face and head of marked
power. His rich brown hair lay in heavy locks; the features were
patrician. He would have been handsome but for an hauteur about the
eyes not quite agreeable. His presence was commanding, not genial. It
was Charles Sumner.
I often encountered the two men in those days, receiving regularly
the poet's sunny recognition and the statesman's rather unsympathetic
stare. Both men were overwhelmingly famous, but, touched
simultaneously by warmth and frost, I, a shy youngster, could keep
my balance in their presence. Sumner in those years was the especial
_bête noire_ of the South and the conservative North, and the
idol of the radicals--at once the most banned and the most blessed
of men. I had, besides, a personal reason for looking upon him with
interest. He was a man with whom my father had once had a sharp
difference, and I wondered, as I watched the stride of the stately
Senator down the street, if he remembered, as my father did, that
difference of twenty-five years before.
My father, in the late twenties a divinity student at Harvard, was a
proctor, living in an entry of Stoughton Hall, for the good order
of which he was expected to care. The only man he ever reported was
Charles Sumner, and this was my father's story.
Sumner, an undergraduate, though still a boy, had nearly attained his
full stature and weight. He was athletic in his tastes, and given to
riding the velocipede of those days, a heavy, bonebreaking machine,
moved not by pedals but by thrusting the feet against the ground.
This Sumner kept in his room, carrying it painfully up the stairs, and
practised on it with the result, his size and energy being so
unusual, that the building, solid as it was, was fairly shaken, to
the detriment of plaster and woodwork, and the complete wreck of the
proper quiet of the place. My father remonstrated mildly, but without
effect. A second more emphatic remonstrance was still without effect,
whereupon came an ultimatum. If the disturbance continued, the
offender would be reported to the college authorities.
The bone-breaker crashed on and the stroke fell. Sumner was called up
before President Kirkland and received a reprimand. He came from the
faculty-room to the proctor's apartment in a very boyish fit of tears,
complaining between sobs that he was the victim of injustice, and
upbraiding the proctor. My father was short with him; he had brought
it upon himself, the penalty was only reasonable, and it would be
manly for him to take it good-naturedly. Long afterward, when Sumner
rose into great fame, my father remembered the incident perhaps too
vividly.
My curiosity as to whether Mr. Sumner had any rankling in his heart
from that old difference was at length gratified. The years passed,
the assault in the Senate Chamber by Brooks roused the whole country;
then came the time of slow recovery. Sumner had come back from the
hands of Dr. Brown-Séquard at Paris to Boston, and was mustering
strength to resume his great place. Calling one day on a friend in
Somerset Street, I found a visitor in the parlour, a powerful man
weighed down by physical disability, whom I recognised as the sufferer
whose name at the moment was uppermost in millions of hearts.
As he heard my name in the introduction which followed my entrance, he
said quickly, while shaking my hand, "I wonder if you are the son of
the man who reported me in college." The tone was not quite genial.
The old difference was not quite effaced. I told him as sturdily as I
could that I was the son of his old proctor and that I had often heard
my father tell the story. He said plainly he thought it unnecessary
and unfair, and that that was the only time since his childhood when
he had received a formal censure. Long after, he received censure from
the Massachusetts Legislature for an act greatly to his credit, the
suggestion that the captured battle-flags should be returned to the
Southern regiments from which they had been taken.
But it was only a momentary flash. He settled back into the easy-chair
with invalid languor, and began to tell me good-naturedly about his
old velocipede, describing its construction, and the feats he had been
able to perform on it, clumsy though it was. He could keep up with a
fast horse in riding into Boston, but at the cost of a good pair of
shoes. The contrivance supported the weight of the body, which rolled
forward on the wheels, leaving the legs free to speed the machine
by alternate rapid kicks. From that he branched off into college
athletics of his day in a pleasant fashion, and at the end of the not
short interview I felt I had enjoyed a great privilege.
Another contact with Charles Sumner was a rather memorable one. We
were in the second year of the Civil War. He was in his high place,
Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the Senate, a main
pillar of the Northern cause. I meantime had been ordained as minister
of a parish in the Connecticut valley, and was a zealous upholder of
the cause of the Union. John A. Andrew was Governor of Massachusetts.
I had come to know him through having preached in the church at
Hingham with which he was connected. He was superintendent of the
Sunday-school, and had introduced me once for an address to his
charge. We were theologically in sympathy, but for me it was a closer
bond that he was the great war Governor.
At an Amherst commencement we had talked about recruiting in the
Connecticut valley, and he had impressed me much. Short in stature,
square, well-set in frame, he had a strong head and face. His colour
was white and pink almost like that of a boy, and the resolute blue
eyes looked out from under an abundant mat of light curling hair that
confirmed the impression he made of youth. Not many months before, he
had been the target of much ridicule, being held over-anxious about a
coming storm. He had bought three thousand overcoats for the militia,
and otherwise busied himself to have soldiers ready. He was "our merry
Andrew." But the Massachusetts Sixth had been first on the ground
at Washington, with many more close behind, and the Governor had had
splendid vindication.
Early in September, 1862, I went to Boston with a deputation of
selectmen from four towns of the Connecticut valley. They had an
errand, and my function was, as an acquaintance of the Governor, to
introduce them. Little we knew of what had just happened in Virginia,
the dreadful second Bull Run campaign, with the driving in upon
Washington of the routed Pope, and the pending invasion of Maryland.
The despatches, while not concealing disappointment, told an
over-flattering tale. More troops were wanted for a speedy finishing
of the war, which we fondly believed was, in spite of all, nearing its
end. Our errand was to ask that in a regiment about to be raised in
two western counties the men might have the privilege of electing the
officers, a pernicious practice which had been in vogue, and always
done much harm. But in those days our eyes were not open.
Entering the Governor's room in the State House with my farmer
selectmen, I found it densely thronged. Among the civilians were many
uniforms, and men of note in the field and out stood there in waiting.
Charles Sumner presently entered the room, dominating the company by
his commanding presence, that day apparently in full vigour,
alert, forceful, with a step before which the crowd gave way, his
masterfulness fully recognised and acknowledged. He took his seat with
the air of a prince of the blood at the table, close at hand to the
Chief Magistrate.
Naturally abashed, but feeling I was in for a task which must be
pushed through, I made my way to the other elbow of the Governor, who,
looking up from his documents, recognised me politely and asked what
I wanted. I stated our case, that a deputation from Franklin and
Hampshire counties desired the privilege for the men of the new
regiment about to be raised to elect their own officers, and not be
commanded by men whom they did not know.
"Where are your selectmen?" said Governor Andrew, rising and pushing
back his chair with an energy which I thought ominous. My companions
had taken up a modest position in a far corner. When I pointed them
out, the Governor made no pause, but proceeded to pour upon them
and me a torrent of impassioned words. He said that we were making
trouble, that the country was in peril, and that while he was trying
to send every available man to the front in condition to do effective
work he was embarrassed at home by petty interference with his
efforts. "I have at hand soldiers who have proved themselves brave
in action, have been baptised in blood and fire. They are fit through
character and experience to be leaders, and yet I cannot give them
commissions because I am blocked by this small and unworthy spirit of
hindrance."
For some minutes the warm outburst went on. The white, beardless face
flushed up under the curls, and his hands waved in rapid gesture. "A
capital speech, your Excellency," cried out Sumner, "a most capital
speech!" and he led the way in a peal of applause in which the crowd
in the chamber universally joined, and which must have rung across
Beacon Street to the Common far away. My feeble finger had touched the
button which brought this unexpected downpour, and for the moment I
was unpleasantly in the limelight.
"Now introduce me to your selectmen," said Governor Andrew, stepping
to my side. I led the way to the corner to which the delegation had
retreated, and presented my friends in turn. His manner changed. He
was polite and friendly, and when, after a hand-shaking, he went back
to his table, we felt we had not understood the situation and that our
petition should have been withheld. For my part, I enlisted at once as
a private and went into a strenuous campaign.
Sumner was intrepid, high-purposed, and accomplished, but what is
the world saying now of his judgment? His recent friendly but
discriminating biographer, Prof. George H. Haynes, declares that
even in matters of taste he was at fault. The paintings he thought
masterpieces, his gift to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, are for the
most part consigned to the lumber-room. In sculpture his judgment
was not better. As to literary art, his writing was ponderous and
over-weighted with far-fetched allusion. The world felt horror at
the attack of Brooks, but the whole literature of invective contains
nothing more offensive than the language of Sumner which provoked it
and which he lavished right and left upon opponents who were sometimes
honourable. It was in the worst of taste.
In great affairs his service was certainly large. Perhaps he was at
his highest in the settlement of the _Trent affair_, but his
course in general in guiding our foreign relations was able
and useful. He put his hand to much reconstruction of ideas and
institutions. Often he made, but too often he marred. He suffered
sadly from the lack of a sense of humour. "What does Lincoln mean?"
he would blankly exclaim, impervious alike to the drollery and to the
keen prod concealed within it. In his fancied superiority he sought to
patronise and dominate the rude Illinoisian. The case is pathetic. The
width and the depth of the chasm which separates the two men in the
regard of the American people!