VII

I suppose that every young man presently attempting journalism feels

something of the pride and joy I felt when I began it; though pride and

joy are weak words for the passion I had for the work. If my soul was

more in my verse, I did not know it, and I am sure my heart was as much

in my more constant labors. I could find time for poetry only in my

brief noonings, and at night after the last proofs had gone to the

composing-room, or I had come home from the theater or from an evening

party, but the long day was a long delight to me over my desk in the

room next my senior. To come upon some inviting fact, or some flattering

chance for mischief in an exchange, above all a Northern contemporary

with Southern principles, and to take this to him and talk it or laugh

it over and leave it with him, or bring it back and exploit it myself,

was something that made every day a heyday. We shunned personalities,

then the stock in trade of most newspaper wits; we meant to deal only

with the public character of men and things. It seems to have been all

pleasure as I tell it, but there was a great deal of duty in it, too;

though if burlesquing the opposite opinions of our contemporaries

happened to be a duty, so much the better. If it were to do again, I

should not do it, or not so much; but at the time I cannot deny that I

liked doing it. So, too, I liked to write cutting criticisms of the

books which it was part of my work to review; and I still hope to be

forgiven by the kindness which I sinned against without winning the

authority as reviewer which I aimed at.

I had much better been at the theater than writing some of the things I

then wrote. But it may as well be owned here as anywhere that whatever

might have been its value to me as a school of morals the theater was

not good society in Columbus then; and I was now in a way of being good

society, and had been so for some time. The rehabilitation of our

newspaper was coincident with the rise of the Republican party to the

power which it held almost unbroken for fifty years. It had of course

lost the Presidential election in 1856, but its defeat left it in better

case than an untimely victory might have done. Ohio had, at any rate, a

Republican Governor in a man afterward of a prime national importance,

and already known as a statesman-like politician well fitted by capacity

and experience for that highest office which never ceased to be his aim

while he lived. Salmon P. Chase had been a lawyer of the first standing

in Cincinnati, where, although a Democrat, he had early distinguished

himself by his services in behalf of friendless negroes. The revolt of

the whole self-respecting North against the repeal of the Missouri

Compromise swept him finally out of the Democracy into that provisional

organization which loosely knew itself as the Anti-Nebraska party; but

before he was chosen Governor by it he had already served a term in the

United States Senate, where with one other Freesoiler he held the

balance of power in an otherwise evenly divided body. He was a large,

handsome man, of a very senatorial presence, and now in the full

possession of his uncommon powers; a man of wealth and breeding,

educated perhaps beyond any of the other Presidential aspirants except

Seward, versed in the world, and accustomed to ease and state; and he

gave more dignity to his office, privately and publicly, than it had yet

known among us. He lived in a pretty house of the Gothic make then much

affected by our too eclectic architecture, with his brilliant young

daughter at the head of it; for the Governor was a widower.

He was naturally much interested in the new control of the Republican

organ, and it would not be strange if he had taken some active part in

its rehabilitation, but I do not know that he had. At any rate, he

promptly made the editorial force welcome to his house, where Reed and I

were asked to Thanksgiving dinner; Mr. Cooke had not yet brought his

family to Columbus. Thanksgiving was not then observed on the present

national terms; it was still the peculiar festival of New England, and

in our capital its recognition was confined to families of New England

origin; our Kentuckians and Virginians and Marylanders kept Christmas,

though the custom of New-Year's calls was domesticated among us with

people of all derivations, and in due time suffered the lapse which it

fell into in its native New York. Our Governor was born in New

Hampshire, where his family name was already distinguished in public

life; and he kept the Thanksgiving which he had probably not officially

invited his fellow-citizens to commemorate. I suppose we had turkey for

our dinner, but I am surer of the manner than the make of the feast, for

it was served with a formality new to my unworldly experience. The

turkey was set before the governor who carved it, and then it was

brought to the guests by a shining black butler, instead of being passed

from hand to hand among them, as I had always seen it done. That was, in

fact, my first dinner in society.

The young editors were the only guests; and after dinner the family did

not forbid itself the gaieties befitting its young people's years. We

had charades, then much affected in society, and I believe the Governor

alone was not pressed into helping dramatize the riddle to be finally

guessed as Canterbury Bell. I do not remember how the secret was kept to

the end, or guessed from the successive parts. My fear and pride were

put to a crucial test in the first dissyllable, which the girlish

hostess assigned me, and nothing but the raillery glancing through the

deep lashes of her brown eyes which were very beautiful, could have

brought me to the self-sacrifice involved. I lived through the delight

and anguish of that supreme evening, and found myself, as it were,

almost immediately afterward in society. It could not have been quite

immediately, for when I called at the Governor's soon after New-Year's

and he asked me if I had made many New-Year's calls I answered that I

had not made any because I knew no one. Then he said I might have called

at _his_ house; and I did not fail, on this kind reproach, to go to Miss

Chase's next reception, where again she laughed at my supposed dignity

in refusing to dance; she would not suppose my inability.

But before entering that field so flowery fair which society now seemed

to open before me perhaps I had better continue my recollections of a

man whose public career has its peculiar pathos. It was his constant,

his intense, his very just desire to be President; no man of his long

time was fitter to be President, unless his ambition was a foible that

unfitted him. He accepted not the first place, but the second place, in

the administration of the man whose place as President he had so

ardently longed to fill, and after he had resigned his governorship of

Ohio and gone to Washington as Secretary of the Treasury under Lincoln I

saw him there when I went to look after the facts of the consulship

which had been offered me. His fellow Ohioans must have swarmed upon him

in the eagerness for public service afterward much noted in them, and I

do not blame him for imagining that I had called upon him in the hope

that he would urge my case upon the President. He said, rather eagerly,

that he had no influence with the administration (it likewise became

Lincoln's own humorous complaint) quite before I had asked it, and was

sorry that he could not help me; and when I thanked him and remarked

that I believed the President's private secretaries, Hay and Nicolay,

were interested in my affair, he said, with visible relief, Oh well,

then, I was in the best possible hands; as indeed it turned out. I had

heard before that he had spoken to the President in my behalf, and he

may very well have felt that he had done his best.

Four years later, and ten years after my first acquaintance with Chase,

I went to call upon him at his hotel in New York, when I was lately

returned from my consular post in Venice, and ventured to offer him my

congratulations upon his accession to the chief-justiceship of the

Supreme Court. He answered bluntly that it was not the sort of office he

had aspired to, and intimated that it was a defeat of his real

aspirations. He was not commonly a frank man, I believe, but perhaps he

felt that he could be frank with the boy I must still have seemed even

at twenty-eight, bringing the devotion he possibly over-imagined in me.

Since then those words of his, which were the last I was to hear from

him, have been of an increasing appeal with me; and if the Republicans

had not had Lincoln I still think it was a pity they could not have had

Chase. At the end, the Democrats would not have him.