There came in 1853 to the Thirty-third Congress a youngish, dapper and
graceful man notable as the only Democrat in the Massachusetts
delegation. It was said that he had been a dancing master, his wife a
work girl. They brought with them a baby in arms with the wife’s sister
for its nurse—a mis-step which was quickly corrected. I cannot now tell
just how I came to be very intimate with them except that they lived at
Willard’s Hotel. His name had a pretty sound to it—Nathaniel Prentiss
Banks.
A schoolmate of mine and myself, greatly to the mirth of those about
us, undertook Mr. Banks’ career. We were going to elect him Speaker of
the next House and then President of the United States. This was
particularly laughable to my mother and Mrs. Linn Boyd, the wife of the
contemporary Speaker, who had very solid presidential aspirations of
his own.
The suggestion perhaps originated with Mrs. Banks, to whom we two were
ardently devoted. I have not seen her since those days, more than sixty
years ago. But her beauty, which then charmed me, still lingers in my
memory—a gentle, sweet creature who made much of us boys—and two years
later when Mr. Banks was actually elected Speaker I was greatly elated
and took some of the credit to myself. Twenty years afterwards General
Banks and I had our seats close together in the Forty-fourth Congress,
and he did not recall me at all or the episode of 1853. Nevertheless I
warmed to him, and when during Cleveland’s first term he came to me
with a hard-luck story I was glad to throw myself into the breach. He
had been a Speaker of the House, a general in the field and a Governor
of Massachusetts, but was a faded old man, very commonplace, and except
for the little post he held under Government pitiably helpless.
Colonel George Walton was one of my father’s intimates and an imposing
and familiar figure about Washington. He was the son of a signer of the
Declaration of Independence, a distinction in those days, had been
mayor of Mobile and was an unending raconteur. To my childish mind he
appeared to know everything that ever had been or ever would be. He
would tell me stories by the hour and send me to buy him lottery
tickets. I afterward learned that that form of gambling was his mania.
I also learned that many of his stories were apocryphal or very highly
colored.
One of these stories especially took me. It related how when he was on
a yachting cruise in the Gulf of Mexico the boat was overhauled by
pirates, and how he being the likeliest of the company was tied up and
whipped to make him disgorge, or tell where the treasure was.
“Colonel Walton,” said I, “did the whipping hurt you much?”
“Sir,” he replied, as if I were a grown-up, “they whipped me until I
was perfectly disgusted.”
An old lady in Philadelphia, whilst I was at school, heard me mention
Colonel Walton—a most distinguished, religious old lady—and said to me,
“Henry, my son, you should be ashamed to speak of that old villain or
confess that you ever knew him,” proceeding to give me his awful,
blood-curdling history.
It was mainly a figment of her fancy and prejudice, and I repeated it
to Colonel Walton the next time I went to the hotel where he was then
living—I have since learned, with a lady not his wife, though he was
then three score and ten—and he cried, “That old hag! Good Lord! Don’t
they ever die!”
Seeing every day the most distinguished public men of the country, and
with many of them brought into direct acquaintance by the easy
intercourse of hotel life, destroyed any reverence I might have
acquired for official station. Familiarity may not always breed
contempt, but it is a veritable eye opener. To me no divinity hedged
the brow of a senator. I knew the White House too well to be impressed
by its architectural grandeur without and rather bizarre furnishments
within.