He was a German. He was an artist. By nature a doctrinaire, he had
become a philosopher. He could never wholly adjust himself to his
environment. He lectured Lincoln, and Lincoln, perceiving his earnest
truthfulness and genuine qualities, forgave him his impertinence, nor
ceased to regard him with the enduring affection one might have for an
ardent, aspiring and lovable boy. He was repellant to Grant, who could
not and perhaps did not desire to understand him.... To him the
Southerners were always the red-faced, swashbuckling slave-drivers he
had fancied and pictured them in the days of his abolition oratory.
More and more he lived in a rut of his own fancies, wise in books and
counsels, gentle in his relations with the few who enjoyed his
confidence; to the last a most captivating personality.
Though fastidious, Schurz was not intolerant. Yet he was hard to
convince—tenacious of his opinions—courteous but insistent in debate.
He was a German; a German Herr Doktor of Music, of Letters and of
Common Law. During an intimacy of more than thirty years we scarcely
ever wholly agreed about any public matter; differing about even the
civil service and the tariff. But I admired him hugely and loved him
heartily.
I had once a rather amusing encounter with him. There was a dinner at
Delmonico’s, from whose program of post-prandial oratory I had
purposely caused my own name to be omitted. Indeed, I had had with a
lady a wager I very much wished to win that I would not speak. General
Grant and I went in together, and during the repast he said that the
only five human beings in the world whom he detested were actually here
at table.
Of course, Schurz was one of these. He was the last on the list of
speakers and, curiously enough—the occasion being the consideration of
certain ways and means for the development of the South—and many
leading Southerners present—he composed his speech out of an editorial
tour de force he was making in the Evening Post on The Homicidal Side
of Southern Life. Before he had proceeded half through General Grant,
who knew of my wager, said, “You’ll lose your bet,” and, it being one
o’clock in the morning, I thought so too, and did not care whether I
won or lost it. When he finished, the call on me was spontaneous and
universal. “Now give it to him good,” said General Grant.
And I did; I declared—the reporters were long since gone—that there had
not been a man killed amiss in Kentucky since the war; that where one
had been killed two should have been; and, amid roars of laughter which
gave me time to frame some fresh absurdity, I delivered a prose paean
to murder.
Nobody seemed more pleased than Schurz himself, and as we came
away—General Grant having disappeared—he put his arm about me like a
schoolboy and said: “Well, well, I had no idea you were so
bloody-minded.”