Houston and Wigfall of Texas--Stephen A. Douglas--The Twaddle about
Puritans and Cavaliers--Andrew Johnson and John C. Breckenridge
I
The National Capitol--old men's fancies fondly turn to thoughts of
youth--was picturesque in its personalities if not in its architecture. By
no means the least striking of these was General and Senator Sam Houston,
of Texas. In his life of adventure truth proved very much stranger than
fiction.
The handsomest of men, tall and stately, he could pass no way without
attracting attention; strangers in the Senate gallery first asked to have
him pointed out to them, and seeing him to all appearance idling his time
with his jacknife and bits of soft wood which he whittled into various
shapes of hearts and anchors for distribution among his lady acquaintances,
they usually went away thinking him a queer old man. So inded he was;
yet on his feet and in action singularly impressive, and, when he chose,
altogether the statesman and orator.
There united in him the spirits of the troubadour and the spearman. Ivanhoe
was not more gallant nor Bois-Guilbert fiercer. But the valor and the
prowess were tempered by humor. Below the surging subterranean flood that
stirred and lifted him to high attempt, he was a comedian who had tales to
tell, and told them wondrous well. On a lazy summer afternoon on the shady
side of Willard's Hotel--the Senate not in session--he might be seen,
an admiring group about him, spinning these yarns, mostly of personal
experience--rarely if ever repeating himself--and in tone, gesture and
grimace reproducing the drolleries of the backwoods, which from boyhood had
been his home.
He spared not himself. According to his own account he had been in the
early days of his Texas career a drunkard. "Everybody got drunk," I once
heard him say, referring to the beginning of the Texas revolution, as he
gave a side-splitting picture of that bloody episode, "and I realized that
somebody must get sober and keep sober."
From the hour of that realization, when he "swore off," to the hour of his
death he never touched intoxicants of any sort.
He had fought under Jackson, had served two terms in Congress and had been
elected governor of Tennessee before he was forty. Then he fell in love.
The young lady was a beautiful girl, well-born and highly educated, a
schoolmate of my mother's elder sister. She was persuaded by her family to
throw over an obscure young man whom she preferred, and to marry a young
man so eligible and distinguished.
He took her to Nashville, the state capital. There were rounds of gayety.
Three months passed. Of a sudden the little town woke to the startling
rumor, which proved to be true, that the brilliant young couple had come to
a parting of the ways. The wife had returned to her people. The husband had
resigned his office and was gone, no one knew where.
A few years later Mrs. Houston applied for a divorce, which in those days
had to be granted by the state legislature. Inevitably reports derogatory
to her had got abroad. Almost the first tidings of Governor Houston's
whereabouts were contained in a letter he wrote from somewhere in the
Indian country to my father, a member of the legislature to whom Mrs.
Houston had applied, in which he said that these reports had come to his
ears. "They are," he wrote, "as false as hell. If they be not stopped I
will return to Tennessee and have the heart's blood of him who repeats
them. A nobler, purer woman never lived. She should be promptly given the
divorce she asks. I alone am to blame."
She married again, though not the lover she had discarded. I knew her in
her old age--a gentle, placid lady, in whose face I used to fancy I could
read lines of sorrow and regret. He, to close this chapter, likewise
married again a wise and womanly woman who bore him many children and with
whom he lived happy ever after. Meanwhile, however, he had dwelt with the
Indians and had become an Indian chief. "Big Drunk, they called me," he
said to his familiars. His enemies averred that he brought into the world a
whole tribe of half-breeds.