I
Silas Wright was deprived by sheer modesty of the honor of being
President of the United States. His is one of the truly Homeric figures
in American history. By downright purity of motive, transparency of
purpose, and the devotion of commanding powers to the public good, he
won for himself the honor, the love and the unbounded confidence of all
his fellows. It used to be said of him that he was as honest as any man
under heaven _or in it_. He might have aspired to any office to which it
was in America's power to call him. Only his extreme humility, and his
dread of impeding the promotion of his friends, kept him from rising to
a position in which his name would have taken its place with those of
Washington and Lincoln. But he refused almost every honor. 'He refused
cabinet appointments,' says Benton, in his _Thirty Years' View_. 'He
refused a seat on the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States;
he rejected instantly the nomination of 1844 for Vice-President; he
refused to be nominated for the Presidency. He spent as much time in
declining office as others did in winning it. The offices he did accept
were thrust upon him. He was born great and above office and unwillingly
descended to it.' Whittier is very conservative in his choice of heroes.
Those whom he commemorates in verse are not only great men, but good
ones. And Silas Wright is among them. 'Man of the millions,' he says, in
the lines that he penned on hearing of Mr. Wright's death:
Man of the millions, thou art lost too soon!
Portents at which the bravest stand aghast--
The birththroes of a Future, strange and vast,
Alarm the land; yet thou, so wise, and strong,
Suddenly summoned to the burial bed,
Lapped in its slumbers deep and ever long,
Hear'st not the tumult surging overhead.
Who now shall rally Freedom's scattered host?
Who wear the mantle of the leader lost?
The splendid personality of Silas Wright has been best revealed to us in
Irving Bacheller's _The Light in the Clearing_. The book is partly
history and partly commentary and partly fiction. Silas Wright, says
Irving Bacheller, carried the candle of the Lord; and all the world
rejoiced in its radiance.