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.