Houston and Wigfall of Texas—Stephen A. Douglas—The Twaddle about
Puritans and Cavaliers—Andrew Johnson and John C. Breckenridge
I
The National Capitol—old men’s fancies fondly turn to thoughts of
youth—was picturesque in its personalities if not in its architecture.
By no means the least striking of these was General and Senator Sam
Houston, of Texas. In his life of adventure truth proved very much
stranger than fiction.
The handsomest of men, tall and stately, he could pass no way without
attracting attention; strangers in the Senate gallery first asked to
have him pointed out to them, and seeing him to all appearance idling
his time with his jacknife and bits of soft wood which he whittled into
various shapes of hearts and anchors for distribution among his lady
acquaintances, they usually went away thinking him a queer old man. So
inded he was; yet on his feet and in action singularly impressive, and,
when he chose, altogether the statesman and orator.
There united in him the spirits of the troubadour and the spearman.
Ivanhoe was not more gallant nor Bois-Guilbert fiercer. But the valor
and the prowess were tempered by humor. Below the surging subterranean
flood that stirred and lifted him to high attempt, he was a comedian
who had tales to tell, and told them wondrous well. On a lazy summer
afternoon on the shady side of Willard’s Hotel—the Senate not in
session—he might be seen, an admiring group about him, spinning these
yarns, mostly of personal experience—rarely if ever repeating
himself—and in tone, gesture and grimace reproducing the drolleries of
the backwoods, which from boyhood had been his home.
He spared not himself. According to his own account he had been in the
early days of his Texas career a drunkard. “Everybody got drunk,” I
once heard him say, referring to the beginning of the Texas revolution,
as he gave a side-splitting picture of that bloody episode, “and I
realized that somebody must get sober and keep sober.”
From the hour of that realization, when he “swore off,” to the hour of
his death he never touched intoxicants of any sort.
He had fought under Jackson, had served two terms in Congress and had
been elected governor of Tennessee before he was forty. Then he fell in
love. The young lady was a beautiful girl, well-born and highly
educated, a schoolmate of my mother’s elder sister. She was persuaded
by her family to throw over an obscure young man whom she preferred,
and to marry a young man so eligible and distinguished.
He took her to Nashville, the state capital. There were rounds of
gayety. Three months passed. Of a sudden the little town woke to the
startling rumor, which proved to be true, that the brilliant young
couple had come to a parting of the ways. The wife had returned to her
people. The husband had resigned his office and was gone, no one knew
where.
A few years later Mrs. Houston applied for a divorce, which in those
days had to be granted by the state legislature. Inevitably reports
derogatory to her had got abroad. Almost the first tidings of Governor
Houston’s whereabouts were contained in a letter he wrote from
somewhere in the Indian country to my father, a member of the
legislature to whom Mrs. Houston had applied, in which he said that
these reports had come to his ears. “They are,” he wrote, “as false as
hell. If they be not stopped I will return to Tennessee and have the
heart’s blood of him who repeats them. A nobler, purer woman never
lived. She should be promptly given the divorce she asks. I alone am to
blame.”
She married again, though not the lover she had discarded. I knew her
in her old age—a gentle, placid lady, in whose face I used to fancy I
could read lines of sorrow and regret. He, to close this chapter,
likewise married again a wise and womanly woman who bore him many
children and with whom he lived happy ever after. Meanwhile, however,
he had dwelt with the Indians and had become an Indian chief. “Big
Drunk, they called me,” he said to his familiars. His enemies averred
that he brought into the world a whole tribe of half-breeds.