Urbana in those days was not without its atmosphere of culture,
influenced in a degree by the presence of the Urbana University, a
Swedenborgian college which in the days before the war had flourished,
because so many of its students came from the southern states. It
declined after the war, but even after that event, the presence of so
many persons of the Swedenborgian persuasion, with their gentle manners
and intellectual appreciation, kept the traditions alive, and the
college itself continued, though not so flourishingly, on its endowed
foundation.
One of the tutors in it was a young, brown-haired man who several
times a day passed by my grandfather’s home on his way to and from his
classes, whom afterwards I came to admire for those writings to which
was signed the name of Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen. He did not remain long
in Urbana, not longer it seems than he could help, and to judge from
some of his pictures of various phases of its life, he did not like the
town as well as the Urbana folk themselves liked it. It was a rather
self-sufficient town, I fancy, and it cared so little for change that
it has scarcely changed at all, save as one misses the faces and the
forms one used to see there in other days. It was the home of the
distinguished family, and the birthplace, too, of John Quincy Adams
Ward, the sculptor, and the possession of a personality in itself
distinguishes a town.
I was walking with my father across Market Square not long ago; it
had shrunk in size and seemed little and mean and sordid, despite the
new city hall that has replaced the old, and there was no miserable
prisoner idly sweeping the cobblestones, though the negro drivers with
their bull whips were snoozing there as formerly.
“They have been there ever since eighteen sixty-six,” said my father,
who had gone there in the year he had mentioned on his coming out of
college.
His home was in Piqua, a town not far away, where his father had
retired to rest after his lifelong labors on a farm he had himself
“cleared” in Montgomery County many years before. This paternal
grandfather was a large, gaunt, silent man, who spoke little, and then
mostly in a sardonic humor, as when, during that awful pioneer work of
felling a forest to make a little plantation, he said to his grown sons
who were helping to clear away the underbrush of a walnut wood:
“Boys, what little you cut, pile here.”
Few other of his sayings have been preserved, and it may be that he
has left behind an impression that he never talked at all because
he never talked politics, and not to do that in Ohio dooms one to
a silence almost perpetual. He had once been a Democrat, and had
participated with such enthusiasm in the campaign of 1856 that he had
kept his horses’ tails and manes braided for a month that they might
roll forth in noble curls when they were loosened, and the horses
harnessed to a carriage containing four veterans of the Revolution,
who were to be thus splendidly drawn to the raising of a tall hickory
pole in honor of James Buchanan, that year a candidate for president.
But the old diplomatist made such a miserable weakling failure of his
administration that his Piqua partizan became disgusted and renounced
forever his interest in political affairs, and, like Henry I., never
smiled again.
But my Grandfather Brand, when he was not talking about poetry or
the war, was talking about politics; sometimes world politics, for
he was interested in that; sometimes European politics, which he had
followed ever since in Paris he had witnessed the outbreak of the
Franco-Prussian War, or national politics, or state politics, or, in
default of a larger interest, local politics, which in Ohio, as no
doubt elsewhere, sometimes looms largest and most important of all,
because, perhaps, as De Tocqueville says, local assemblies constitute
the strength of free institutions.
My grandfather was then, at the time of which I am thinking even if
I am not very specifically writing about it, mayor--and continued
to be mayor for four terms. It was an office that was suited, no
doubt, to the leisure of his retirement, and while it gave him the
feeling of being occupied in public affairs, it nevertheless left him
opportunities enough for his German poets, and for his horses and his
farm out at Cable, and the strawberries he was beginning to cultivate
with the enthusiasm of an amateur.
In such an atmosphere as that in the Ohio of those days it was natural
to be a Republican; it was more than that, it was inevitable that one
should be a Republican; it was not a matter of intellectual choice, it
was a process of biological selection. The Republican party was not
a faction, not a group, not a wing, it was an institution like those
Emerson speaks of in his essay on Politics, rooted like oak-trees in
the center around which men group themselves as best they can. It was
a fundamental and self-evident thing, like life, and liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness, or like the flag, or the federal judiciary. It
was elemental, like gravity, the sun, the stars, the ocean. It was
merely a synonym for patriotism, another name for the nation. One
became, in Urbana and in Ohio for many years, a Republican just as the
Eskimo dons fur clothes. It was inconceivable that any self-respecting
person should be a Democrat. There were, perhaps, Democrats in
Lighttown; but then there were rebels in Alabama, and in the Ku-klux
Klan, about which we read in the evening, in the Cincinnati _Gazette_.
One of the perplexing and confounding anomalies of existence was the
fact that our neighbor, Mr. L----, was a Democrat. That fact perhaps
explained to me why he walked so modestly, so unobtrusively, in the
shade, so close to the picket fences of Reynolds Street, with his head
bowed. I supposed that, being a Democrat, it was only natural for him
to slink along. He was a lawyer and a gentleman; my grandfather spoke
with him, but from my mind I could never banish the fact that he was
a Democrat, and to explain his bent, thoughtful attitude I imagined
another reason than the fact that he was a meditative, studious man.
Lawyers, of course, were Republicans, else how could they deliver
patriotic addresses on Decoration Day and at the reunions of the 66th
regiment? It was natural for a young man to be a lawyer, then to be
elected prosecuting attorney, then to go to the legislature, then
to congress, then--governor, senator, president. They could not, of
course, go any more to war and fight for liberty; that distinction was
no longer, unhappily, possible, but they could be Republicans. The
Republican party had saved the Union, won liberty for all men, and
there was nothing left for the patriotic to do but to extol that party,
and to see to it that its members held office under the government.
In those days the party had many leaders in Ohio who had served the
nation in military or civil capacity during the great crisis; scarcely
a county that had not some colonel or general whose personality
impressed the popular imagination; they were looked up to, and revered,
and in the political campaigns their faces, pale or red in the flare
of the torches of those vast and tumultuous processions that still
staged the political contest in the terms of war, looked down from the
festooned platforms in every public square. And yet they were already
remote, statuesque, oracular, and there was the reverent sense that
somehow placed them in the ideal past, whose problems had all been
happily solved, rather than in the real present.
V
But up in the northwestern part of the state, still referred to, even
in days so late as those, with something of the humorous contempt that
attached to the term, as the Black Swamp, there had risen a young,
fiery, and romantic figure who ignored the past and flung himself with
fierce ardor into a new campaign for liberty. His words fell strangely
on ears that were accustomed to the reassurance that liberty was at
last conquered, and his doctrines perplexed and irritated minds that
had sunk into the shallow optimism of a belief that there were no more
liberations needed in the world. It was not a new cry, indeed, that he
raised, but an old one thought to have been stilled, and the standard
he lifted in the Black Swamp was looked upon by many Ohioans as much
askance as though it were another secession flag of stars and bars.
Indeed, it had long been associated with the cause of the conquered
South, because that section, by reason of its economic conditions, had
long espoused the principle of Free Trade.
This young man was Frank Hunt Hurd, then the congressman from the
Toledo district, and in that city, where my father was the pastor of a
church, he had won many followers and adherents, though not enough to
keep him continually in his seat in the House of Representatives.
He served for several alternate terms, the interims being filled by
some orthodox nonentity, who was so speedily forgotten that there must
have been an impression that for years our district was represented by
this one man.
I had heard of him with that dim sense of his position which a boy has
of any public character, but I had a real vivid conception of him after
that Fourth of July when, during a citizens’ celebration which must
have been so far patriotic as to forget, for a time, partizanism, and
to remember patriotism sufficiently to include the Democrats, I saw him
conducted to the platform by our distinguished citizen, David R. Locke,
whom the world knew as “Petroleum V. Nasby.”
He delivered a patriotic oration, and anyone,--even though he were
but a wondering boy quite by chance in attendance, standing on the
outskirts of the crowd, following some whim which for a while kept him
from his sports,--anyone who ever heard Frank Hurd deliver an oration
never forgot it afterward.
I have no idea now what it was he said, perhaps I had as little then,
but his black hair, his handsome face, his beautiful voice, and the
majestic music of his rolling phrases were wholly and completely
charming. He was explicitly an orator, a student of the great art,
and he formed his orations on the ancient Greek models, writing them
out with exordium, proposition, and peroration, and while he did not
perhaps exactly commit them to memory, he, nevertheless, in the process
of preparing them, so completely possessed himself of them that he
poured forth his polished sentences without a flaw.
His speech on Free Trade, delivered in the House of Representatives,
February 18, 1881, remains the classic on that subject, ranking with
Henry Clay’s speech on “The American System,” delivered in the Senate
in 1832. In that address Frank Hurd began with the phrase, “The tariff
is a tax,” which acquired much currency years after when Grover
Cleveland used it.
Everyone, or nearly everyone, told me of course that Frank Hurd was
wrong, if he was not, indeed, wicked, and the subject possessed a kind
of fascination for me. In thinking of it, or in trying to think of
it, I only perplexed myself more deeply, until at last I reached the
formidable, the momentous decision of taking my perplexities to Frank
Hurd himself, and of laying them before him.
I was by this time a youth of eighteen, and in the summer when he had
come home from Washington I somehow found courage enough to go to the
hotel where he lived, and to inquire for him. He was there in the
lobby, standing by the cigar-stand, talking to some men, and I hung on
the outskirts of the little group until it broke up, and then the fear
I had felt vanished when he turned and smiled upon me. I told him that
I wished to know about Free Trade, and since there was nothing he liked
better to talk about, and too, since there were few who could talk
better about anything than he could talk about the tariff, we sat in
the big leather chairs while he discoursed simply on the subject. It
was the first at several of these conversations, or lessons, which we
had in the big leather chairs in the lobby of the old Boody House, and
it was not long until I was able, with a solemn pride, to announce at
home that I was a Free-Trader and a Democrat.
It could hardly have been worse had I announced that I had been
visiting Ingersoll, and was an atheist. Cleveland was president, and in
time he sent his famous tariff reform message to Congress, and though I
could not vote, I was preparing to give him my moral support, to wear
his badge, and even, if I could do no more, to refuse to march in the
Republican processions with the club of young men and boys organized in
our neighborhood.
For the first time in my life I went on my vacation trip to Urbana
that summer with reluctance, for the first time in my life I shrank
from seeing my grandfather. The wide front door opened, and from the
heat without to the dark and cool interior of the hall I stepped; I
prolonged the preliminaries, I went through the familiar apartments,
and out into the garden to see how it grew that summer, and down to
the stable to see the horses; but the inevitable hour drew on, and at
last, with all the trivial things said, all the personal questions
asked, we sat in the living-room, cool in the half-light produced
by its drawn shades, the soft air of summer blowing through it, the
odd old Nuremberg furniture, the painting of the Nuremberg castle
presented to my grandfather by the American artist whom he had rescued
from a scrape, the tall pier glass, with the little vase of flowers
on its marble base, and my grandfather in his large chair, his white
waistcoat half unbuttoned and one side sagging with the weight of
the heavy watch-chain that descended from its large hook, his white
beard trimmed a little more closely, his white hair bristling as
aggressively as ever--all the same, all as of old, like the reminders
of the old life and all its traditions now to be broken and rendered
forever and tragically different from all it had been and meant. He
sat there looking at me, the blue eyes twinkling under their shaggy
brows, and stretched forth his long white hand in the odd gesture with
which he began his conversations. Conversations with him, it suddenly
developed, were not easy to sustain; he pursued the Socratic method. If
you disagreed with him, he lifted three fingers toward you, whether in
menace or in benediction it was difficult at times to determine, and
said:
“Let me instruct you.”
For instance:
“Do you know why Napoleon III. lost the battle of Sedan?” he might
abruptly inquire.
“No, sir,” you were expected to say. (You always addressed him as
“sir.”)
“Let me instruct you.”
Or:
“Do you know who was the greatest English poet?”
“No, sir,” you would say, or, perhaps, in those days you might
venture, “Was it Shakespeare, sir?”
Then he would look at you and say:
“Let me instruct you.”
This afternoon then, after I had inspected the premises, noticed how
much taller my cousin’s fir-tree was than the one I called mine (we
had planted them one day, as little boys, years before), and after I
had had a drink at the old pump, which in those days, before germs,
brought up such cold, clear water, and after I had ascended to my cool
room upstairs, and come downstairs again, and we had idly talked for
a little while, as I said, he sat and looked at me a moment, and then
said:
“Do you understand this tariff question?”
In those days I might have made the due, what I might term with
reference to that situation, the conventional reply, and so have said:
“No, sir.”
In these days I am sure I should. But I hesitated. He had already
stretched forth his hand.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
He drew in his hand, and for an instant touched with his long fingers
the end of his large nose. I plunged ahead.
“I am in favor of Free Trade, sir.”
He did not extend his hand. He looked at me a moment, and then he said:
“You are quite right; we must support Mr. Cleveland in the coming
contest.”
And then he sank back in his chair and laughed.
He was always like that, following the truth as he saw it, wherever
it led him. But his active days were not many after that; ere long he
was kicked by one of his horses, a vicious animal, half bronco, which
he insisted on riding, and he was invalided for the rest of his days.
He spent them in a wheel-chair, pushed about by a negro boy. It was a
cross he bore bravely enough, without complaint, spending his hours
in reading of politics, now that he could no longer participate in
them, and more and more in reading verse, and even in committing it
to memory, so that to the surprise of his family he soon replaced the
grace he had always said at table with some recited stanza of poetry,
and he took to cultivating, or to sitting in his chair while there was
cultivated, under his direction, a little rose garden. He knew all
those roses as though they were living persons: when a lady called,--if
the roses were in bloom,--he would say to his colored house-boy:
“Go cut off Madame Maintenon, and bring her here.”
Then he would present Madame Maintenon to the caller with such a bow
as he could make in his chair, and an apology for not rising. He was
patient and brave, yet he did not like to feel the scepter passing
from him, and he resented what he considered interferences with his
liberties. One day when he had returned from a visit to an old friend,
to whose home his colored boy had wheeled him, one of his daughters
asked, in a somewhat exaggerated tone of propitiation:
“Well, Father, how did you find Mr. Hovey?”
“I found him master of his own house!” he blazed.
In 1896 he supported Mr. Bryan, and his Republican neighbors said:
“Poor old Major Brand! His mind must be affected!”
It was an effort for him to get out to the polls, but he went,
beholding in that conflict, as he could in any conflict however
confused and clouded, the issue of free men above any other issue. He
did not get out much after that, even when that last summer the few
remnants of the 66th regiment gathered in Urbana to hold the annual
reunion. He could not so much as get up town to greet his old comrades,
and they sent word that in the afternoon they would march in review
before his home. He was wheeled out on the veranda, and there he sat
while his old regiment, the fifty or sixty gray, broken men, marched
past. They saluted as they went by, and he returned the salutes with
tears streaming down the cheeks where I had never seen tears before.
And he said with a little choking laugh:
“Why, look at the boys!”
It was not long after, that six of us, his grandsons, bore him out
of the old home forever. And on his coffin were the two things that
expressed him best, I think--his roses and his flag.