The Jupiter Tonans of reform in attendance upon the convention was Col.
Alexander K. McClure. He was one of the handsomest and most imposing of
men; Halstead himself scarcely more so. McClure was personally unknown
to the Quadrilateral. But this did not stand in the way of our asking
him to dine with us as soon as his claims to fellowship in the good
cause of reform began to make themselves apparent through the need of
bringing the Pennsylvania delegation to a realizing sense.
He looked like a god as he entered the room; nay, he acted like one.
Schurz first took him in hand. With a lofty courtesy I have never seen
equalled he tossed his inquisitor into the air. Halstead came next, and
tried him upon another tack. He fared no better than Schurz. And
hurrying to the rescue of my friends, McClure, looking now a bit bored
and resentful, landed me somewhere near the ceiling.
It would have been laughable if it had not been ignominious. I took my
discomfiture with the bad grace of silence throughout the stiff, formal
and brief meal which was then announced. But when it was over and the
party, risen from table, was about to disperse I collected my energies
and resources for a final stroke. I was not willing to remain so
crushed nor to confess myself so beaten, though I could not disguise
from myself a feeling that all of us had been overmatched.
“McClure,” said I with the cool and quiet resolution of despair,
drawing him aside, “what in the —— do you want anyhow?”
He looked at me with swift intelligence and a sudden show of sympathy,
and then over at the others with a withering glance.
“What? With those cranks? Nothing.”
Jupiter descended to earth. I am afraid we actually took a glass of
wine together. Anyhow, from that moment to the hour of his death we
were the best of friends. Without the inner circle of the
Quadrilateral, which had taken matters into their own hands, were a
number of persons, some of them disinterested and others simple
curiosity and excitement seekers, who might be described as merely
lookers-on in Vienna. The Sunday afternoon before the convention was to
meet we, the self-elect, fell in with a party of these in a garden
“over the Rhine,” as the German quarter of Cincinnati is called. There
was first general and rather aimless talk. Then came a great deal of
speech making. Schurz started it with a few pungent observations
intended to suggest and inspire some common ground of opinion and
sentiment. Nobody was inclined to dispute his leadership, but everybody
was prone to assert his own. It turned out that each regarded himself
and wished to be regarded as a man with a mission, having a clear idea
how things were not to be done. There were Civil Service Reform
Protectionists and Civil Service Reform Free Traders. There were a few
politicians, who were discovered to be spoilsmen, the unforgivable sin,
and quickly dismissed as such.
Coherence was the missing ingredient. Not a man jack of them was
willing to commit or bind himself to anything. Edward Atkinson pulled
one way and William Dorsheimer exactly the opposite way. David A. Wells
sought to get the two together; it was not possible. Sam Bowles shook
his head in diplomatic warning. Horace White threw in a chunk or so of
a rather agitating newspaper independency, and Halstead was in an
inflamed state of jocosity to the more serious-minded.
It was nuts to the Washington Correspondents—story writers and
satirists who were there to make the most out of an occasion in which
the bizarre was much in excess of the conventional—with George Alfred
Townsend and Donn Piatt to set the pace. Hyde had come from St. Louis
to keep especial tab on Grosvenor. Though rival editors facing our way,
they had not been admitted to the Quadrilateral. McCullagh and Nixon
arrived with the earliest from Chicago. The lesser lights of the guild
were innumerable. One might have mistaken it for an annual meeting of
the Associated Press.
V
The convention assembled. It was in Cincinnati’s great Music Hall.
Schurz presided. Who that was there will ever forget his opening words:
“This is moving day.” He was just turned forty-two; in his physiognomy
a scholarly _Herr Doktor_; in his trim lithe figure a graceful athlete;
in the tones of his voice an orator.
Even the bespectacled doctrinaires of the East, whence, since the days
when the Star of Bethlehem shone over the desert, wisdom and wise men
have had their emanation, were moved to something like enthusiasm. The
rest of us were fervid and aglow. Two days and a night and a half the
Quadrilateral had the world in a sling and things its own way. It had
been agreed, as I have said, to limit the field to Adams, Trumbull and
Greeley; Greeley being out of it, as having no chance, still further
abridged it to Adams and Trumbull; and, Trumbull not developing very
strong, Bowles, Halstead and I, even White, began to be sure of Adams
on the first ballot; Adams the indifferent, who had sailed away for
Europe, observing that he was not a candidate for the nomination and
otherwise intimating his disdain of us and it.
Matters thus apparently cocked and primed, the convention adjourned
over the first night of its session with everybody happy except the D.
Davis contingent, which lingered on the scene, but knew its “cake was
dough.” If we had forced a vote that night, as we might have done, we
should have nominated Adams. But inspired by the bravery of youth and
inexperience we let the golden opportunity slip. The throng of
delegates and the audience dispersed.
In those days, it being the business of my life to turn day into night
and night into day, it was not my habit to seek my bed much before the
presses began to thunder below, and this night proving no exception,
and being tempted by a party of Kentuckians, who had come, some to back
me and some to watch me, I did not quit their agreeable society until
the “wee short hours ayont the twal.” Before turning in I glanced at
the early edition of the Commercial, to see that something—I was too
tired to decipher precisely what—had happened. It was, in point of
fact, the arrival about midnight of Gen. Frank P. Blair and Governor B.
Gratz Brown.
I had in my possession documents that would have induced at least one
of them to pause before making himself too conspicuous. The
Quadrilateral, excepting Reid, knew this. We had separated upon the
adjournment of the convention. I being across the river in Covington,
their search was unavailing. I was not to be found. They were in
despair. When having had a few hours of rest I reached the convention
hall toward noon it was too late.
I got into the thick of it in time to see the close, not without an
angry collision with that one of the newly arrived actors whose coming
had changed the course of events, with whom I had lifelong relations of
affectionate intimacy. Sailing but the other day through Mediterranean
waters with Joseph Pulitzer, who, then a mere youth, was yet the
secretary of the convention, he recalled the scene; the unexpected and
not over attractive appearance of the governor of Missouri; his not
very pleasing yet ingenious speech; the stoical, almost lethargic
indifference of Schurz.
“Carl Schurz,” said Pulitzer, “was the most industrious and the least
energetic man I have ever worked with. A word from him at that crisis
would have completely routed Blair and squelched Brown. It was simply
not in him to speak it.”
Greeley was nominated amid a whirl of enthusiasm, his workers, with
Whitelaw Reid at their head, having maintained an admirable and
effective organization and being thoroughly prepared to take advantage
of the opportune moment. It was the logic of the event that B. Gratz
Brown should be placed on the ticket with him.
The Quadrilateral was nowhere. It was done for. The impossible had come
to pass. There rose thereafter a friendly issue of veracity between
Schurz and myself, which illustrates our state of mind. My version is
that we left the convention hall together with an immaterial train of
after incidents, his that we had not met after the adjournment—he quite
sure of this because he had looked for me in vain.
“Schurz was right,” said Joseph Pulitzer upon the occasion of our
yachting cruise just mentioned, “I know, for he and I went directly
from the hall with Judge Stallo to his home on Walnut Hills, where we
dined and passed the afternoon.”
[Illustration: Mrs. Lincoln in 1861.]
The Quadrilateral had been knocked into a cocked hat. Whitelaw Reid was
the only one of us who clearly understood the situation and thoroughly
knew what he was about. He came to me and said: “I have won, and you
people have lost. I shall expect that you stand by the agreement and
meet me as my guests at dinner to-night. But if you do not personally
look after this the others will not be there.”
I was as badly hurt as any, but a bond is a bond and I did as he
desired, succeeding partly by coaxing and partly by insisting, though
it was devious work.
Frostier conviviality I have never sat down to than Reid’s dinner.
Horace White looked more than ever like an iceberg, Sam Bowles was
diplomatic but ineffusive, Schurz was as a death’s head at the board;
Halstead and I through sheer bravado tried to enliven the feast. But
they would none of us, nor it, and we separated early and sadly,
reformers hoist by their own petard.