That was the legislature which elected John M. Palmer to the United
States Senate from Illinois. The election was accomplished only after a
memorable deadlock of two months in which the Democrats of the general
assembly stood so nobly, shoulder to shoulder, that they were called
“The Immortal 101.” When they were finally reënforced by the votes of
two members elected as representatives of the Farmers’ Alliance, and
elected their man, they had a gold medal struck to commemorate their
own heroism. They were not, perhaps, exactly immortal, but they did
stand for their principles so stanchly that when they came to celebrate
their victory, some of their orators compared them to those other
immortals who held Thermopylæ.
Their principle was the popular election of United States senators, and
they had a fine exemplar of democracy in their candidate. He had been
nominated by a state convention, as had Lincoln, whom General Palmer
had known intimately and had supported both for senator and president.
He was the last of those great figures of Illinois whom the times
immediately preceding the Civil War had so abundantly brought forth.
He had commanded an army corps, he had been governor of his state, and
in 1872 a presidential possibility in the Republican party. But he had
turned to the Democrats, and after he became their senator, the first
Illinois had known since Douglas, he became a presidential possibility
in the Democratic party; that was in 1892, and whatever chances he had
he destroyed himself by coming on from Washington and declaring for
Grover Cleveland.
Four years later he was nominated for the presidency by the
conservative faction of his party. He told me, when I was finishing
my law studies under him, that he had never lost anything politically
by bolting any of the several parties he had been in, but had usually
gained in self respect by doing so; and if to the politician his whole
career presented inconsistencies, to the man of principle he must seem
wholly consistent and sincere. Certain it is that he followed that
inward spirit which alone can guide a man through the perplexities of
life, and so the principle with him came ever before the party.
He was a simple man with simple tastes, and his very simplicity was
an element of that dignity which seemed to belong to other times than
ours. The familiar figure of him along the quiet streets of Springfield
was pleasing to men and to children alike; he would go along erectly
and slowly under his great broad hat, a striking figure with his
plentiful white hair, his closely trimmed chin whiskers, the broad,
smoothly shaven upper lip distinguishing a countenance that was of
a type associated with the earlier ideals of the republic, and the
market basket he carried on his arm helped this effect. At home he was
delightful; he had a viol, and used to play it, if there were not too
many about to hear him, and if he were alone, sing a few staves of
old songs, like “Darling Nelly Gray,” and “Rosie Lee, Courting Down
in Tennessee,” and some of the old tunes he had learned in Kentucky
as a boy. He liked poetry, if it were not of the introspective modern
mood, and while I have heard of such extraordinary characters, I never
believed the stories of their endurance, until I was able to discover
in him one man who actually did read Sir Walter Scott’s novels through
every year. For the most part he had some member of his family read
them to him, and he found in them the naïve pleasure of a child. I
used to think I would remember the things he was always saying, and
the stories he was always telling about Lincoln or Douglas or Grant,
but I never could keep note-books and the more imposing sayings have
departed. Yet there flashes before the memory with the detail of a
cinematograph that scene of a winter’s evening when I entered the big
living-room in his home and there found him with his wife before the
great open fire. She was reading aloud to him from “Ivanhoe.”
“Come in, Mr. Brand,” he always addressed me by prefixing “Mr.” to my
Christian name. “Come in,” he called in his hearty voice. “We are just
storming a castle.”
He lived on to the century’s end, with a sort of gusto in life that
never failed, I think, until that day when he attended the funeral
of the last of his old contemporaries, General John M. McClernand,
that fierce old warrior who had quarreled with Grant and lived on in
Springfield until he could fight no more with anyone. Senator Palmer
came home from his funeral amused by the fact that McClernand had
been buried in the full uniform of a major-general, which he had not
worn, I suppose, since Vicksburg. When some member of Senator Palmer’s
household asked him if he should like to be buried in his uniform, he
shook his head against it, but added:
“It was all right for Mac; it was like him.”
But the end was in his thoughts; Oglesby was gone, and now McClernand
as the last of the men with whom he had fought in the great crisis, and
he went, pretty soon after that, himself. He had participated in two
great revolutionary epochs of his nation, going through the one and
penetrating though not so far into the second, a long span of life and
experience.
It was perhaps natural that he should not have divined the implications
of the second phase as clearly as he did those of the first; and though
he had helped to inaugurate the new movement, the latest urge toward
democracy in this land, he could not go so far. He was young in ’56 and
old in ’96, and as we grow old we grow conservative, whether we would
or not, and much, I suppose, in the same way.