The reception by the country of the nomination of Horace Greeley was as
inexplicable to the politicians as the nomination itself had been
unexpected by the Quadrilateral. The people rose to it. The
sentimental, the fantastic and the paradoxical in human nature had to
do with this. At the South an ebullition of pleased surprise grew into
positive enthusiasm. Peace was the need if not the longing of the
Southern heart, and Greeley’s had been the first hand stretched out to
the South from the enemy’s camp—very bravely, too, for he had signed
the bail bond of Jefferson Davis—and quick upon the news flashed the
response from generous men eager for the chance to pay something upon a
recognized debt of gratitude.
Except for this spontaneous uprising, which continued unabated in July,
the Democratic Party could not have been induced at Baltimore to ratify
the proceedings at Cincinnati and formally to make Greeley its
candidate. The leaders dared not resist it. Some of them halted, a few
held out, but by midsummer the great body of them came to the front to
head the procession.
He was a queer old man; a very medley of contradictions; shrewd and
simple; credulous and penetrating; a master penman of the school of
Swift and Cobbett; even in his odd picturesque personality whimsically
attractive; a man to be reckoned with where he chose to put his powers
forth, as Seward learned to his cost.
What he would have done with the Presidency had he reached it is not
easy to say or surmise. He was altogether unsuited for official life,
for which nevertheless he had a passion. But he was not so readily
deceived in men or misled in measures as he seemed and as most people
thought him.
His convictions were emotional, his philosophy was experimental; but
there was a certain method in their application to public affairs. He
gave bountifully of his affection and his confidence to the few who
enjoyed his familiar friendship—accessible and sympathetic though not
indiscriminating to those who appealed to his impressionable
sensibilities and sought his help. He had been a good party man and was
by nature and temperament a partisan.
To him place was not a badge of servitude; it was a
decoration—preferment, promotion, popular recognition. He had always
yearned for office as the legitimate destination of public life and the
honorable award of party service. During the greater part of his career
the conditions of journalism had been rather squalid and servile. He
was really great as a journalist. He was truly and highly fit for
nothing else, but seeing less deserving and less capable men about him
advanced from one post of distinction to another he wondered why his
turn proved so tardy in coming, and when it would come. It did come
with a rush. What more natural than that he should believe it real
instead of the empty pageant of a vision?
It had taken me but a day and a night to pull myself together after the
first shock and surprise and to plunge into the swim to help fetch the
waterlogged factions ashore. This was clearly indispensable to forcing
the Democratic organization to come to the rescue of what would have
been otherwise but a derelict upon a stormy sea. Schurz was deeply
disgruntled. Before he could be appeased a bridge, found in what was
called the Fifth Avenue Hotel Conference, had to be constructed in
order to carry him across the stream which flowed between his
disappointed hopes and aims and what appeared to him an illogical and
repulsive alternative. He had taken to his tent and sulked like another
Achilles. He was harder to deal with than any of the Democratic file
leaders, but he finally yielded and did splendid work in the campaign.
His was a stubborn spirit not readily adjustable. He was a nobly gifted
man, but from first to last an alien in an alien land. He once said to
me, “If I should live a thousand years they would still call me a
Dutchman.” No man of his time spoke so well or wrote to better purpose.
He was equally skillful in debate, an overmatch for Conkling and
Morton, whom—especially in the French arms matter—he completely
dominated and outshone. As sincere and unselfish, as patriotic and as
courageous as any of his contemporaries, he could never attain the full
measure of the popular heart and confidence, albeit reaching its
understanding directly and surely; within himself a man of sentiment
who was not the cause of sentiment in others. He knew this and felt it.
The Nast cartoons, which as to Greeley and Sumner were unsparing in the
last degree, whilst treating Schurz with a kind of considerate
qualifying humor, nevertheless greatly offended him. I do not think
Greeley minded them much if at all. They were very effective; notably
the “Pirate Ship,” which represented Greeley leaning over the taffrail
of a vessel carrying the Stars and Stripes and waving his handkerchief
at the man-of-war Uncle Sam in the distance, the political leaders of
the Confederacy dressed in true corsair costume crouched below ready to
spring. Nothing did more to sectionalize Northern opinion and fire the
Northern heart, and to lash the fury of the rank and file of those who
were urged to vote as they had shot and who had hoisted above them the
Bloody Shirt for a banner. The first half of the canvass the bulge was
with Greeley; the second half began in eclipse, to end in something
very like collapse.
The old man seized his flag and set out upon his own account for a tour
of the country. Right well he bore himself. If speech-making ever does
any good toward the shaping of results Greeley’s speeches surely should
have elected him. They were marvels of impromptu oratory, mostly homely
and touching appeals to the better sense and the magnanimity of a
people not ripe or ready for generous impressions; convincing in their
simplicity and integrity; unanswerable from any standpoint of sagacious
statesmanship or true patriotism if the North had been in any mood to
listen and to reason.
I met him at Cincinnati and acted as his escort to Louisville and
thence to Indianapolis, where others were waiting to take him in
charge. He was in a state of querulous excitement. Before the vast and
noisy audiences which we faced he stood apparently pleased and
composed, delivering his words as he might have dictated them to a
stenographer. As soon as we were alone he would break out into a kind
of lamentation, punctuated by occasional bursts of objurgation. He
especially distrusted the Quadrilateral, making an exception in my
case, as well he might, because however his nomination had jarred my
judgment I had a real affection for him, dating back to the years
immediately preceding the war when I was wont to encounter him in the
reporters’ galleries at Washington, which he preferred to using his
floor privilege as an ex-member of Congress.
It was mid-October. We had heard from Maine; Indiana and Ohio had
voted. He was for the first time realizing the hopeless nature of the
contest. The South in irons and under military rule and martial law
sure for Grant, there had never been any real chance. Now it was
obvious that there was to be no compensating ground swell at the North.
That he should pour forth his chagrin to one whom he knew so well and
even regarded as one of his boys was inevitable. Much of what he said
was founded on a basis of fact, some of it was mere suspicion and
surmise, all of it came back to the main point that defeat stared us in
the face. I was glad and yet loath to part with him. If ever a man
needed a strong friendly hand and heart to lean upon he did during
those dark days—the end in darkest night nearer than anyone could
divine. He showed stronger mettle than had been allowed him: bore a
manlier part than was commonly ascribed to the slovenly slipshod
habiliments and the aspects in which benignancy and vacillation seemed
to struggle for the ascendancy. Abroad the elements conspired against
him. At home his wife lay ill, as it proved, unto death. The good gray
head he still carried like a hero, but the worn and tender heart was
beginning to break. Overwhelming defeat was followed by overwhelming
affliction. He never quitted his dear one’s beside until the last
pulsebeat, and then he sank beneath the load of grief.
“The Tribune is gone and I am gone,” he said, and spoke no more.
The death of Greeley fell upon the country with a sudden shock. It
roused a universal sense of pity and sorrow and awe. All hearts were
hushed. In an instant the bitterness of the campaign was forgotten,
though the huzzas of the victors still rent the air. The President, his
late antagonist, with his cabinet and the leading members of the two
Houses of Congress, attended his funeral. As he lay in his coffin he
was no longer the arch rebel, leading a combine of buccaneers and
insurgents, which the Republican orators and newspapers had depicted
him, but the brave old apostle of freedom who had done more than all
others to make the issues upon which a militant and triumphant party
had risen to power.
The multitude remembered only the old white hat and the sweet old baby
face beneath it, heart of gold, and hand wielding the wizard pen; the
incarnation of probity and kindness, of steadfast devotion to his duty
as he saw it, and to the needs of the whole human family. A tragedy in
truth it was; and yet as his body was lowered into its grave there rose
above it, invisible, unnoted, a flower of matchless beauty—the flower
of peace and love between the sections of the Union to which his life
had been a sacrifice.
The crank convention had builded wiser than it knew. That the
Democratic Party could ever have been brought to the support of Horace
Greeley for President of the United States reads even now like a page
out of a nonsense book. That his warmest support should have come from
the South seems incredible and was a priceless fact. His martyrdom
shortened the distance across the bloody chasm; his coffin very nearly
filled it. The candidacy of Charles Francis Adams or of Lyman Trumbull
meant a mathematical formula, with no solution of the problem and as
certain defeat at the end of it. His candidacy threw a flood of light
and warmth into the arena of deadly strife; it made a more equal and
reasonable division of parties possible; it put the Southern half of
the country in a position to plead its own case by showing the Northern
half that it was not wholly recalcitrant or reactionary; and it made
way for real issues of pith and moment relating to the time instead of
pigments of bellicose passion and scraps of ante-bellum controversy.
In a word Greeley did more by his death to complete the work of Lincoln
than he could have done by a triumph at the polls and the term in the
White House he so much desired. Though but sixty-one years of age, his
race was run. Of him it may be truly written that he lived a life full
of inspiration to his countrymen and died not in vain, “our later
Franklin” fittingly inscribed upon his tomb.