I Am Born and Begin to Take Notice--John Quincy Adams and Andrew
Jackson--James K. Polk and Franklin Pierce--Jack Dade and "Beau
Hickman"--Old Times in Washington
I
I am asked to jot down a few autobiographic odds and ends from such data of
record and memory as I may retain. I have been something of a student of
life; an observer of men and women and affairs; an appraiser of their
character, their conduct, and, on occasion, of their motives. Thus, a kind
of instinct, which bred a tendency and grew to a habit, has led me into
many and diverse companies, the lowest not always the meanest.
Circumstance has rather favored than hindered this bent. I was born in a
party camp and grew to manhood on a political battlefield. I have lived
through stirring times and in the thick of events. In a vein colloquial and
reminiscential, not ambitious, let me recall some impressions which these
have left upon the mind of one who long ago reached and turned the corner
of the Scriptural limitation; who, approaching fourscore, does not yet feel
painfully the frost of age beneath the ravage of time's defacing waves.
Assuredly they have not obliterated his sense either of vision or vista.
Mindful of the adjuration of Burns,
Keep something to yourself,
Ye scarcely tell to ony,
I shall yet hold little in reserve, having no state secrets or mysteries of
the soul to reveal.
It is not my purpose to be or to seem oracular. I shall not write after the
manner of Rousseau, whose Confessions had been better honored in the breach
than the observance, and in any event whose sincerity will bear question;
nor have I tales to tell after the manner of Paul Barras, whose Memoirs
have earned him an immortality of infamy. Neither shall I emulate the
grandiose volubility and self-complacent posing of Metternich and
Talleyrand, whose pretentious volumes rest for the most part unopened upon
dusty shelves. I aspire to none of the honors of the historian. It shall be
my aim as far as may be to avoid the garrulity of the raconteur and to
restrain the exaggerations of the ego. But neither fear of the charge of
self-exploitation nor the specter of a modesty oft too obtrusive to be
real shall deter me from a proper freedom of narration, where, though in
the main but a humble chronicler, I must needs appear upon the scene and
speak of myself; for I at least have not always been a dummy and have
sometimes in a way helped to make history.
In my early life--as it were, my salad days--I aspired to becoming what
old Simon Cameron called "one of those damned literary fellows" and Thomas
Carlyle less profanely described as "a leeterary celeebrity." But some
malign fate always sat upon my ambitions in this regard. It was easy to
become The National Gambler in Nast's cartoons, and yet easier The National
Drunkard through the medium of the everlasting mint-julep joke; but the
phantom of the laurel crown would never linger upon my fair young brow.
Though I wrote verses for the early issues of Harper's Weekly--happily no
one can now prove them on me, for even at that jejune period I had the
prudence to use an anonym--the Harpers, luckily for me, declined to publish
a volume of my poems. I went to London, carrying with me "the great
American novel." It was actually accepted by my ever too partial friend,
Alexander Macmillan. But, rest his dear old soul, he died and his
successors refused to see the transcendent merit of that performance, a
view which my own maturing sense of belles-lettres values subsequently came
to verify.
When George Harvey arrived at the front I "'ad 'opes." But, Lord, that
cast-iron man had never any bookish bowels of compassion--or political
either for the matter of that!--so that finally I gave up fiction and
resigned myself to the humble category of the crushed tragi-comedians of
literature, who inevitably drift into journalism.
Thus my destiny has been casual. A great man of letters quite thwarted, I
became a newspaper reporter--a voluminous space writer for the press--now
and again an editor and managing editor--until, when I was nearly thirty
years of age, I hit the Kentucky trail and set up for a journalist. I did
this, however, with a big "J," nursing for a while some faint ambitions
of statesmanship--even office--but in the end discarding everything that
might obstruct my entire freedom, for I came into the world an insurgent,
or, as I have sometimes described myself in the Kentucky vernacular, "a
free nigger and not a slave nigger."