I Am Born and Begin to Take Notice—John Quincy Adams and Andrew
Jackson—James K. Polk and Franklin Pierce—Jack Dade and “Beau
Hickman”—Old Times in Washington
I
I am asked to jot down a few autobiographic odds and ends from such
data of record and memory as I may retain. I have been something of a
student of life; an observer of men and women and affairs; an appraiser
of their character, their conduct, and, on occasion, of their motives.
Thus, a kind of instinct, which bred a tendency and grew to a habit,
has led me into many and diverse companies, the lowest not always the
meanest.
Circumstance has rather favored than hindered this bent. I was born in
a party camp and grew to manhood on a political battlefield. I have
lived through stirring times and in the thick of events. In a vein
colloquial and reminiscential, not ambitious, let me recall some
impressions which these have left upon the mind of one who long ago
reached and turned the corner of the Scriptural limitation; who,
approaching fourscore, does not yet feel painfully the frost of age
beneath the ravage of time’s defacing waves. Assuredly they have not
obliterated his sense either of vision or vista. Mindful of the
adjuration of Burns,
Keep something to yourself, Ye scarcely tell to ony,
I shall yet hold little in reserve, having no state secrets or
mysteries of the soul to reveal.
It is not my purpose to be or to seem oracular. I shall not write after
the manner of Rousseau, whose Confessions had been better honored in
the breach than the observance, and in any event whose sincerity will
bear question; nor have I tales to tell after the manner of Paul
Barras, whose Memoirs have earned him an immortality of infamy. Neither
shall I emulate the grandiose volubility and self-complacent posing of
Metternich and Talleyrand, whose pretentious volumes rest for the most
part unopened upon dusty shelves. I aspire to none of the honors of the
historian. It shall be my aim as far as may be to avoid the garrulity
of the raconteur and to restrain the exaggerations of the ego. But
neither fear of the charge of self-exploitation nor the specter of a
modesty oft too obtrusive to be real shall deter me from a proper
freedom of narration, where, though in the main but a humble
chronicler, I must needs appear upon the scene and speak of myself; for
I at least have not always been a dummy and have sometimes in a way
helped to make history.
In my early life—as it were, my salad days—I aspired to becoming what
old Simon Cameron called “one of those damned literary fellows” and
Thomas Carlyle less profanely described as “a leeterary celeebrity.”
But some malign fate always sat upon my ambitions in this regard. It
was easy to become The National Gambler in Nast’s cartoons, and yet
easier The National Drunkard through the medium of the everlasting
mint-julep joke; but the phantom of the laurel crown would never linger
upon my fair young brow.
Though I wrote verses for the early issues of Harper’s Weekly—happily
no one can now prove them on me, for even at that jejune period I had
the prudence to use an anonym—the Harpers, luckily for me, declined to
publish a volume of my poems. I went to London, carrying with me “the
great American novel.” It was actually accepted by my ever too partial
friend, Alexander Macmillan. But, rest his dear old soul, he died and
his successors refused to see the transcendent merit of that
performance, a view which my own maturing sense of belles-lettres
values subsequently came to verify.
When George Harvey arrived at the front I “’ad ’opes.” But, Lord, that
cast-iron man had never any bookish bowels of compassion—or political
either for the matter of that!—so that finally I gave up fiction and
resigned myself to the humble category of the crushed tragi-comedians
of literature, who inevitably drift into journalism.
Thus my destiny has been casual. A great man of letters quite thwarted,
I became a newspaper reporter—a voluminous space writer for the
press—now and again an editor and managing editor—until, when I was
nearly thirty years of age, I hit the Kentucky trail and set up for a
journalist. I did this, however, with a big “J,” nursing for a while
some faint ambitions of statesmanship—even office—but in the end
discarding everything that might obstruct my entire freedom, for I came
into the world an insurgent, or, as I have sometimes described myself
in the Kentucky vernacular, “a free nigger and not a slave nigger.”