[269]

 

CHAPTER VI.

 

HENRY WILSON.

 

Lincoln, Chase and Wilson as Illustrations of Democracy—Wilson’s Birth and Boyhood—Reads over One Thousand Books in Ten Years—Learns Shoemaking—Earns an Education Twice Over—Forms a Debating Society—Makes Sixty Speeches for Harrison—Enters into Political Life on the Working-Mens’ Side—Helps to form the Free Soil Party—Chosen United States Senator over Edward Everett—Aristocratic Politics in those Days—Wilson and the Slaveholding Senators—The Character of his Speaking—Full of Facts and Practical Sense—His Usefulness as Chairman of the Military Committee—His “History of the Anti-Slavery Measures in Congress”—The 37^th and 38^th Congresses—The Summary of Anti-Slavery Legislation from that Book—Other Abolitionist Forces—Contrast of Sentiments of Slavery and of Freedom—Recognition of Hayti and Liberia; Specimen of the Debate—Salve and Free Doctrine on Education—Equality in Washington Street Cars—Pro-Slavery Good Taste—Solon’s Ideal of Democracy Reached in America.

 

It is interesting to notice how, in the recent struggle that has convulsed our country and tried our republican institutions, so many of the men who have held the working oar have been representative men of the people.  To a great extent they have been men who have grown up with no other early worldly advantages than those which a democratic republic offers to every citizen born upon her soil.  Lincoln from the slave states, and Chase and Henry Wilson in the free, may be called the peculiar sons of Democracy.  That hard Spartan mother trained them early on her black broth to her fatigues, and wrestlings, and watchings, and gave them their shields on entering the battle of life with only the Spartan mother’s brief—“With this, or upon this.”

 

[270]

 

            Native force and Democratic institutions raised Lincoln to the highest seat in the nation, and to no mean seat among the nations of the earth; and the same forces in Massachusetts caused that State, in an hour of critical battle for the great principles of democratic liberty, to choose Henry Wilson, the self-taught fearless shoemaker’s apprentice of Natick, over the head of the gifted and graceful Everett, the darling of foreign courts, the representative of all the sentiments and training which transmitted aristocratic ideas have yet left in Boston and Cambridge.  All this was part and parcel of the magnificent drama which has been acting on the stage of this country for the hope and consolation of all who are born to labor and poverty in all nations of the world.

            Henry Wilson, our present United States Senator, was born at Farmington, N. H., Feb. 12, 1818, of very poor parents.  At the age of ten he was bound to a farmer till he was twenty-one.  Here he had the usual lot of a farm boy—plain, abundant food, coarse clothing, incessant work, and a few weeks’ schooling at the district school in winter.

            In these ten years of toil, the boy, by twilight, firelight, and on Sundays, had read over one thousand volumes of history, geography, biography and general literature, borrowed from the school libraries and from those of generous individuals.

            At twenty-one he was his own master, to begin the world; and in looking over his inventory for starting in life, found only a sound and healthy body, and a mind trained to reflection by solitary thought.  He went to Natick, Mass., to learn the trade of a shoe-

 

[271]

 

maker, and in working at it two years, he saved enough money to attend the academy at Concord and Wolfsborough, N. H.  But the man with whom he had deposited his hard earnings became insolvent; the money he had toiled so long for, vanished; and he was obliged to leave his studies, go back to Natick and make more.  Undiscouraged, he resolved still to pursue his object, uniting it with his daily toil.  He formed a debating society among the young mechanics of the place; investigated subjects, read, wrote and spoke on all the themes of the day, as the spirit within him gave him utterance.  Among his fellow-mechanics, some others were enkindled by his influence, and are now holding high places in the literary and diplomatic world.

            In 1840, young Wilson came forward as a public speaker.  He engaged in the Harrison election campaign, made sixty speeches in about four months, and was well repaid by his share in the triumph of the party.  He was then elected to the Massachusetts Legislature as representative from Natick.

 

            Having entered life on the working man’s side, and known by his own experience the working man’s trials, temptations and hard struggles, he felt the sacredness of a poor man’s labor, and entered public life with a heart to take the part of the toiling and the oppressed.

            Of course he was quick to feel that the great question of our time was the question of labor and its rights and rewards.  He was quick to feel the “irrepressible conflict,” which Seward so happily designated, between the two modes of society existing in America, and to know that they must fight and strug-

 

[272]

 

gle till one of them throttled and killed the other; and prompt to understand this, he made his early election to live or die on the side of the laboring poor, whose most oppressed type was the African slave.

            In the Legislature, he introduced a motion against the extension of slave territory; and in 1845, went with Whittier to Washington with the remonstrance of Massachusetts against the admission of Texas as a slave State.

            When the Whig party became inefficient in the cause of liberty through too much deference to the slave power, Henry Wilson, like Charles Sumner, left it, and became one of the most energetic and efficient organizers in forming the Free Soil party of Massachusetts.  In its interests, he bought a daily paper in Boston, which for some time he edited with great ability.

            Meanwhile, he rose to one step of honor after another, in his adopted State; he became President of the Massachusetts Senate; and at length after a well contested election, was sent to take the place of the accomplished Everett in the United States Senate.

            His election was a sturdy triumph of principle.  His antagonist had every advantage of birth and breeding, every grace which early leisure, constant culture, and the most persevering, conscientious self-education could afford.  He was, in graces of person, manners and mind, the ideal of Massachusetts aristocracy, but he wanted that clear insight into actual events, which early poverty and labor had given to his antagonist.  His sympathies in the great labor question of the land were with the graceful and cultivated aristocrats rather

 

[273]

 

than the clumsy, ungainly laborer; and he but professed the feeling of all aristocrats in saying at the outset of his political life, while Wilson was yet a child, that in the event of a servile insurrection, he would be among the first to shoulder a musket to defend the masters.

            But the great day of the Lord was at hand.  The events which since have unrolled in fire and blood, had begun their inevitable course; and the plain working-man was taken by the hand of Providence towards the high places where he, with other working men, should shape the destiny of the labor question for this age and for all ages.

            Wilson went to Washington in the very heat and fervor of that conflict which the gigantic Giddings, with his great body and unflinching courage, said to a friend, was to him a severer trial of human nerve than the facing of cannon and bullets.  The slave aristocracy had come down in great wrath, as if knowing that its time was short.  The Senate chamber rang with their oaths and curses as they tore and raged like wild beasts against those whom neither their blandishments nor their threats could subdue.  Wilson brought there his face of serene good nature, his vigorous, stocky frame, which had never seen ill-health, and in which the nerves were yet an undiscovered region.  It was entirely useless to bully, or to threaten, or to cajole that honest, good-humored, immovable man, who stood like a rock in their way, and took all their fury as unconsciously as a rock takes the foam of breaking waves.  In every anti-slavery movement he was always foremost, perfectly awake, perfectly well

 

[274]

 

informed, and with that hardy, practical business knowledge of men and things which came from his early education, prepared to work out into actual forms what Sumner gave out as splendid theories.

            Wilson’s impression on the Senate was not mainly that of an orator.  His speeches were as free from the artifices of rhetoric as those of Lincoln, but they were distinguished for the weight and abundance of the practical information and good sense which they contained.  He never spoke on a subject till he had made himself minutely acquainted with it in all its parts, and was accurately familiar with all that belonged to it.  Not even John Quincy Adams or Charles Sumner could show a more perfect knowledge of what they were talking about than Henry Wilson.  Whatever extraneous stores of knowledge and belles lettres may have been possessed by any of his associates, no man on the floor of the Senate could know more of the United States of America than he; and what was wanting in the graces of the orator, or the refinements of the rhetorician was more than made amends for in the steady, irresistible, strong tread of the honest man, determined to accomplish a worthy purpose.

            Wilson succeeded Benton as chairman of the Military Committee of the Senate, and it was fortunate for the country that when the sudden storm of the war broke upon us, so strong a hand held this helm.  Gen. Scott said that he did more work in the first three months of the war than had been done in his position before for twenty years; and Secretary Cameron attributed the salvation of Washington in those early days, mainly to Henry Wilson’s power of doing the

 

[275]

 

apparently impossible in getting the Northern armies into the field in time to meet the danger.

            His recently published account of what Congress has done to destroy slavery, is a history which no man living was better fitted to write.  No man could be more minutely acquainted with the facts, more capable of tracing effects to causes, and thus competent to erect this imperishable monument to the honor of his country.

            It is meet that the poor, farm-bound apprentice, the shoemaker of Natick, should thus chronicle the great history of the deliverance of labor from disgrace in this democratic nation.

            There is something sublime in the history of the movements of the 37^th and 38^th Congresses of the United States.  Perhaps never in any country did an equal number of wise and just men meet together under a more religious sense of their responsibility to God and to mankind.  Never had there been a deeper and more religious awe presiding over popular elections than those which sent those men to Congress to man our national ship in the terrors of the most critical passage our stormy world has ever seen.  They were the old picked, tried seamen, stout of heart, giants in conscience and moral sense.  They were the scarred veterans of long years of battling for the great principles of the Declaration of Independence, men who in old times had come through great battles with the beasts of the slavery Ephesus, and still wore the scars of their teeth.  They had seen their president stricken down at their head, and though bleeding inwardly,

 

[276]

 

had closed up their ranks shoulder to shoulder, to go steadily on with the great work for which he died.

            These men it was who while the din of arms was resounding through the country, while Washington was one great camp and hospital, and the confusing rumors of wars were coming to it from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south—took up and carried to the end the grandest national moral reform ever accomplished in a given time.  Many men of the common sort would have said, “This is no time to be driving at moral reforms.  We must drive this war through first, and when we have done this, we will begin to wipe up, and adjust, and put away.”  So gigantic a war was apology enough to satisfy the consciences of men who looked only to precedents and the rules of ordinary statesmanship, but our Congress was largely made up of men who walked by a higher light, and judged by a higher standard than ever has been given to mere statesmanship before.  The spirit of the old Puritans, their unworldly, God-fearing spirit, their steadfast flint-facedness in principle, came to a final and culminating development in these Congresses.

            Henry Wilson has written a “History of the Anti-Slavery Measures in Congress,” in a brief, clear, compact summary, and made of it a volume which ought to be in every true American library.  It is a volume of which every American has just and honest reason to be proud, and to which every Republican the whole world over, should look with hope and trust, as exhibiting the magnificent morality, the dauntless courage, the unwearied faith, hope and charity that are the

 

[277]

 

crown jewels of republics.  We should be glad to see this book of Henry Wilson’s in every farm house of New England, lying by the family Bible, under the old flag of the Union.  The men who carried through these magnificent reforms—THEY ARE OUR JEWELS.

            Mr. Wilson gives in his book a condensed summary of the debates in the House relative to each step of the reform.  For the most part it is a record of noble, Christian, unworldly patriotic sentiment—a sort of ideal statesmanship becoming real in tangible good deeds.

            Every day some new den in the Augean stable was exposed and opened up to daylight, and the cleansing baptism of liberty applied.  There was some fluttering and screaming of owls and bats, and now and then the poor old dilapidated dragon of slavery gave a bootless hiss, but nobody minded it.  It was a whole-hearted, clean, pure, noble time in Congress, when those walls, so long defiled with the brawls, the mingled profanity and obscenity of slaveholders and slavebreeders, now rang only to manly sentiments and cleanly, noble, Christian resolves, such as make the heart strong to hear.  We quote from the close of Mr. Wilson’s book the summary of what was done by these Congresses in the way of reform legislation.

            “As the Union armies advanced into the rebel States, slaves, inspired by the hope of personal freedom, flocked to their encampments, claiming protection against rebel masters, and offering to work and fight for the flag whose stars for the first time gleamed upon their vision with the radiance of liberty.  Rebel masters and rebel-sympathizing masters sought the en-

 

[278]

 

campments of the loyal forces, demanding the surrender of the escaped fugitives; and they were often delivered up by officers of the armies.  To weaken the power of the insurgents, to strengthen the loyal forces, and assert the claims of humanity, the 37^th Congress enacted an article of war, dismissing from the service officers guilty of surrendering these fugitives.

            Three thousand persons were held as salves in the District of Columbia, over which the nation exercised exclusive jurisdiction; the 37^th Congress made these three thousand bondmen freemen, and made slaveholding in the capital of the nation for evermore impossible.

            “Laws and ordinances existed in the national capital that pressed with merciless rigor upon the colored persons:  the 37^th Congress enacted that colored persons should be tried for the same offences, in the same manner, and be subject to the same punishments, as white persons; thus abrogating the ‘black code.’

            “Colored persons in the capital of this Christian nation were denied the right to testify in the judicial tribunals; thus placing their property, their liberties, and their lives, in the power of unjust and wicked men; the 37^th Congress enacted that persons should not be excluded as witnesses in the courts of the District on account of color.

            “In the capital of the nation, colored persons were taxed to support schools from which their own children were excluded; and no public schools were provided for the instruction of more than four thousand youth; the 38^th Congress provided by law that public schools should be established for colored children, and that the same rate of appropriations for colored

 

[279]

 

schools should be made as are made for schools for the education of white children.

            “The railways chartered by Congress, excluded from their cars colored persons, without the authority of law; Congress enacted that there should be no exclusion from any car on account of color.

            “Into the territories of the United States,—one third of the surface of the country,—the slaveholding class claimed the right to take and hold their slaves under the protection of law; the 37^th Congress prohibited slavery for ever in all the existing territory, and in all territory which may hereafter be acquired; thus stamping freedom for all, for ever, upon the public domain.

            “As the war progressed, it became more clearly apparent that the rebels hoped to win the Border slave States; that rebel sympathizers in those States hoped to join the rebel States; and that emancipation in loyal States would bring repose to them, and weaken the power of the Rebellion; the 37^th Congress, on the recommendation of the President, by the passage of a joint resolution, pledged the faith of the nation to aid loyal States to emancipate the slaves therein.

            “The hoe and spade of the rebel slave were hardly less potent for the Rebellion than the rifle and bayonet of the rebel soldier.  Slaves sowed and reaped for the rebels, enabling the rebel leaders to fill the wasting ranks of their armies, and feed them.  To weaken the military forces and the power of the Rebellion, the 37^th Congress decreed that all slaves of persons giving aid and comfort to the Rebellion, escaping from such persons, and taking refuge within

 

[280]

 

the lines of the army; all slaves captured from such persons, or deserted by them; all slaves of such persons, being within any place occupied by rebel forces, and afterwards occupied by the forces of the United States,—shall be captives of war, and shall be for ever free of their servitude, and not again held as slaves.

            “The provisions of the Fugitive-slave Act permitted disloyal masters to claim, and they did claim, the return of their fugitive bondmen; the 37^th Congress enacted that no fugitive should be surrendered until the claimant made oath that he had not given aid and comfort to the Rebellion.

            “The progress of the Rebellion demonstrated its power, and the needs of the imperiled nation.  To strengthen the physical forces of the United States, the 37^th Congress authorized the President to receive into the military service persons of African descent; and every such person mustered into the service, his mother, his wife and children, owing service or labor to any person who should give aid and comfort to the Rebellion, was made for ever free.

            “The African slave-trade had been carried on by slave pirates under the protection of the flag of the United States.  To extirpate from the seas that inhuman traffic, and to vindicate the sullied honor of the nation, the Administration early entered into treaty stipulations with the British Government for the mutual right of search within certain limits; and the 37^th Congress hastened to enact the appropriate legislation to carry the treaty into effect.

            “The slaveholding class, in the pride of power, persistently refused to recognize the independence of

 

[281]   

 

Hayti and Liberia; thus dealing unjustly towards those nations, to the detriment of the commercial interests of the country; the 37^th Congress recognized the independence of those republics by authorizing the President to establish diplomatic relations with them.

            “By the provisions of law, white male citizens alone were enrolled in the militia.  In the amendment to the acts for calling out the militia, the 37^th Congress provided for the enrollment and drafting of citizens, without regard to color; and, by the Enrollment Act, colored persons, free or slave, are enrolled and drafted the same as white men.  The 38^th Congress enacted that colored soldiers shall have the same pay, clothing, and rations, and be placed in all respects upon the same footing, as white soldiers.  To encourage enlistments, and to add emancipation, the 38^th Congress decreed that every slave mustered into the military service shall be free for ever; thus enabling every slave fit for military service to secure personal freedom.

            “By the provisions of the fugitive-slave acts, slave-masters could hunt their absconding bondmen, require the people to aid in their recapture, and have them returned at the expense of the nation.  The 38^th Congress erased all fugitive-slave acts from the statutes of the Republic.

            “The law of 1807 legalized the coastwise slave-trade; the 38^th Congress repealed that act, and made the trade illegal.

            “The courts of the United States receive such testimony as is permitted in the States where the courts are holden.  Several of the States exclude the testi-

 

[282]

 

mony of colored persons.  The 38^th Congress made it legal for colored persons to testify in all the courts of the United States.

 

            “Different views are entertained by public men relative to the reconstruction of the governments of the seceded States, and the validity of the President’s proclamation of emancipation.  The 38^th Congress passed a bill providing for the reconstruction of the governments of the rebel States, and for the emancipation of the slaves in those States; but it did not receive the approval of the President.

            “Colored persons were not permitted to carry the United States mails; the 38^th Congress repealed the prohibitory legislation, and made it lawful for persons of color to carry the mails.

            “Wives and children of colored persons in the military and naval service of the United States were often held as slaves; and, while husbands and fathers were absent fighting the battles of the country, these wives and children were sometimes removed and sold, and often treated with cruelty; the 38^th Congress made free the wives and children of all persons engaged in the military or naval service of the country.

            “The disorganization of the slave system, and the exigencies of civil war, have thrown thousands of freedmen upon the charity of the nation; to relieve their immediate needs, and to aid them through the transition period, the 38^th Congress established a Bureau of Freedmen.

            “The prohibition of slavery in the Territories, its abolition in the District of Columbia, the freedom of colored soldiers, their wives and children, emancipation

 

[283]

 

in Maryland, West Virginia, and Missouri, and by the re-organized State authorities of Virginia, Tennessee, and Louisiana, and the President’s Emancipation Proclamation, disorganized the slave system, and practically left few persons in bondage; but slavery still continued in Delaware and Kentucky, and the slave codes remain, unrepealed in the rebel States.  To annihilate the slave system, its codes and usages; to make slavery impossible, and freedom universal,—the 38^th Congress submitted to the people an anti-slavery amendment to the Constitution of the United States.  The adoption of that crowning measure assures freedom to all.

            “Such are the “ANTI-SLAVERY MEASURES” of the Thirty-seventh and Thirty-eighth Congresses during the past four crowded years.  Seldom in the history of nations is it given to any body of legislators or law-givers to enact or institute a series of measures so vast in their scope, so comprehensive in their character, so patriotic, just, and humane.

“But, while the 37^th and 38^th Congresses were enacting this anti-slavery legislation, other agencies were working to the consummation of the same end,—the complete and final abolition of slavery.  The President proclaims three and a half millions of bondmen in the rebel States henceforward and for ever free.  Maryland, Virginia, and Missouri adopt immediate and unconditional emancipation.  The partially re-organized rebel States of Virginia and Tennessee, Arkansas and Louisiana, accept and adopt the unrestricted abolition of slavery.  Illinois and other States hasten to blot from their statute-books their dishonoring black codes.

 

[284]

 

The Attorney-General officially pronounces the negro a citizen of the United States.  The negro, who had no status in the Supreme Court, is admitted by the Chief Justice to practice as an attorney before that august tribunal.  Christian men and women follow the loyal armies with the agencies of mental and moral instruction to fit and prepare the enfranchised freedmen for the duties of the higher condition of life now opening before them.”

            We cannot quit this subject without remarking on the striking character of the debates Mr. Wilson’s book records on these subjects.  The great majority of Congress utters aloud and with the consent, just, manly, noble, humane, large-hearted sentiments and resolves, while a poor wailing minority is picking up and retailing the old worn out jokes and sneers and incivilities and obscenities of the dying dragon of slavery.

            As a specimen of the utter naivete and ignorance of comity and good manners induced by slavery, in contrast with the courtesy and refinement of true republicanism, we give this fragment of a debate on the recognition of Hayti and Liberia.

            Mr. Davis, of Kentucky, after plaintively stating that he is weary, sick, disgusted, despondent with the introduction of slaves and slavery into this chamber, proceeds to state his terror lest should these measures take effect, these black representatives would have to be received on terms of equality with those of other nations.  Mr. Davis goes on to say:  “A big negro fellow, dressed out in his silver and gold lace, presented himself in the court of Louis Napoleon, I admit, and was received.  Now, sir, I want no such exhibition as

 

[285]

 

that in our country.  The American minister, Mr. Mason, was present on that occasion; and he was sleeved by some Englishman—I have forgotten his name—who was present, who pointed out to him the ambassador of Soulouque, and said, ‘What do you think of him?’  Mr. Mason turned round and said, ‘I think, clothes and all, he is worth a thousand dollars.’”

            Mr. Davis evidently considered this witticism of Mr. Mason’s as both a specimen of high bred taste and a settling argument.

            In reply, Mr. Sumner drily says:  “The Senator alludes to some possible difficulties, I hardly know how to characterize them, which may occur here in social life, should the Congress of these United States undertake at this late day, simply in harmony with the law of nations, and following the policy of civilized communities, to pass the bill under discussion.  I shall not follow the senator on those sensitive topics.  I content myself with a single remark.  I have more than once had the opportunity of meeting citizens of these republics; and I say nothing more than truth when I add, that I have found them so refined, and so full of self-respect, that I am led to believe no one of them charged with a mission from his government, will seek any society where he will not be entirely welcome.  Sir, the senator from Kentucky may banish all anxiety on that account.  No representative from Hayti or Liberia will trouble him.”

            Mr. Crittenden of Kentucky said:  “I will only say, sir, that I have an innate sort of confidence and pride that the race to which we belong is a superior race among the races of the earth, and I want to see that

 

[286]

 

pride maintained.  The Romans thought that no people on the face of the earth were equal to the citizens of Rome, and it made them the greatest people in the world.   *   *   *   The spectacle of such a diplomatic dignitary in our country, would, I apprehend, be offensive to the people for many reasons, and wound their habitual sense of superiority to the African race.”

            Mr. Thomas of Maine, on the other hand, presents the true basis of Christian chivalry:  “I have no desire to enter into the question of the relative capacity of races; but if the inferiority of the African race were established, the inference as to our duty would be very plain.  If this colony has been built up by an inferior race of men, they have upon us a yet stronger claim for our countenance, recognition, and, if need be, protection.  The instincts of the human mind and heart concur with the policy of men and governments to help and protect the weak.  I understand that to a child or to a woman I am to show a degree of forbearance, kindness, and of gentleness even, which I am not necessarily to extend to my equal.”

            In like manner contrast a passage of sentiment between two senators on the education bill.

            Mr. Carlile of Virginia, “did not see any good reason why the Congress of the United States should itself enter upon a scheme for educating negroes.”  He understood “the reason assigned for the government of a State undertaking the education of the citizens of the State is that the citizens in this country are the governors;” but he presumed “we have not yet reached the point when it is proposed to elevate to the condition of voters the negroes of the land.”

 

[287]

 

            Mr. Grimes in reply said, “It may be true, that, in that section of the country where the senator is most acquainted, the whole idea of education proceeds from the fact, that the person who is to be educated is merely to be educated because he is to exercise the elective franchise; but I thank God that I was raised in a section of the country where there are nobler and loftier sentiments entertained in regard to education.  We entertain the opinion that all human beings are accountable beings.  We believe that every man should be taught so that he may be able to read the law by which he is to be governed, and under which he may be punished.  We believe that every accountable being should be able to read the word of God, by which he should guide his steps in this life, and shall be judged in the life to come.  We believe that education is necessary in order to elevate the human race.  We believe that it is necessary in order to keep our jails and our penitentiaries and our alms-houses free from inmates.  In my section of the country, we do not educate any race upon any such low and groveling ideas as those that seem to be entertained by the senator from Virginia.”

            But the warmest battle was on the question of the right of colored persons to ride in the cars.  The chivalry maintained their side by such kind of language as this:  “Has any gentleman who was born a gentleman, or any man who has the instincts of a gentleman, felt himself degraded by the fact that he was not honored by a seat beside some free negro?  Has any lady in the United States felt herself aggrieved

 

[288]

 

that she was not honored with the company of Miss Dinah or Miss Chloe, on board these cars?”

            Again, in the course of the debate, another senator says of Mr. Sumner, “He may ride with negroes, if he thinks proper, so may I; but if I see proper not to do so, I shall follow my natural instincts, as he follows his.”

            “I shall vote for this amendment,” says Henry Wilson; “and my own observation convinces me that justice, not to say decency, requires that I should do so.  Some weeks ago, I rode to the capitol in one of these cars.  On the front part of the car, standing with the driver, were, I think, five colored clergymen of the Methodist Episcopal church, dressed like gentlemen, and behaving like gentlemen.  These clergymen were riding with the driver on the front platform, and inside the car were drunken loafers, conducting and behaving themselves so badly that the conductor threatened to turn them out.”

            “The senator from Illinois tells us,” said Mr. Wilson, “that the colored people have a legal right to ride in these cars now.  We know it; nobody doubts it; but this company into which we breathed the breath of life, outrages the rights of twenty-five thousand colored people in this District, in our presence, in defiance of our opinions.   *   *   *  I tell the senator from Illinois that I care far more for the rights of the humblest black child that treads the soil of the District of Columbia than I do for the prejudices of this corporation, and its friends and patrons.  The rights of the humblest colored man in the capital of this Christian nation are dearer to me than the commendations

 

[289]

 

or the thanks of all persons in the city of Washington who sanction this violation of the rights of a race.  I give this vote, not to offend this corporation, not to offend anybody in the District of Columbia, but to protect the rights of the poor and the lowly, trodden under the heel of power.  I trust we shall protect rights, if we do it over prejudices and over interests, until every man in this country is fully protected in all the rights that belong to beings made in the image of God.  Let the free man of this race be permitted to run the career of life; to make of himself all that God intended he should make, when he breathed into him the breath of life.”

            So there they had it, at the mouth of an educated northern working-man, who knew what man as man was worth, and the retiring senators, giving up the battle, wailed forth as follows:

            “Poor, helpless, despised, inferior race of white men, you have very little interest in this government, you are not worth

consideration in the legislation of this country; but let your superior Sambo’s interest come in question, and you will find the most tender interest on his behalf.  What a pity there is not somebody to lamp-black white men, so that their rights could be secured.”

            Mr. Powell thought that the Senator from Massachusetts, the next time one of his Ethiopian friends comes to complain to him on the subject, should bring an action for him in court, and adds, with the usual good taste of his party:   *   *  “The Senator has indicated to his fanatical brethren those people who meet in free love societies, the old ladies and the sensa-

 

[290]

 

tion preachers, and those who live on fanaticism, that he has offered it, and I see no reason why we should take up the time of the Senate in squabbling over the Senator’s amendments, introducing the negro into every wood-pile that comes along.”

            Mr. Saulsbury closes a discussion on negro testimony with the following pious ejaculation:  “He did not wish to say any more about the nigger aspect of the case.  It is here every day; and I suppose it will be here every day for years to come, till the Democratic party comes in power and wipes all legislation of this character out of the statute-book, which I trust in God they will do.”

            All this sort of talk, shaken in the face of the joyous band of brothers who were going on their way rejoicing, reminds us forcibly of John Bunyan’s description of the poor old toothless giant, who in his palmy days used to lunch upon pilgrims, tearing their flesh and cracking their bones in the most comfortable way possible, but who now having sustained many a severe brush, was so crippled with rheumatism that he could only sit in the mouth of his cave, mumbling, “You will never mend till more of you are burned.”

            Thank God for the day we live in, and for such men as Henry Wilson and his compeers of the 37^th and 38^th Congresses.  They have at last put our American Union in that condition which old Solon gave as his ideal of true Democracy, namely:

            A STATE WHERE AN INJURY TO THE MEANEST MEMBER IS FELT AS AN INJURY TO THE WHOLE.

 

 

[293]

 

CHAPTER VII.

 

HORACE GREELEY.

 

 

The Scotch-Irish Race in the United States—Mr. Greeley a Partly Reversed Specimen of it—His Birth and Boyhood—Learns to Read Books Upside Down—His Apprenticeship on a Newspaper—The Town Encyclopaedia—His Industry at his Trade—His First Experience of a Fugitive Slave Chase—His First Appearance in New York—The Work on the Polyglot Testament—Mr. Greeley as “the Ghost”—The First Cheap Daily Paper—The firm of Greeley & Story—The New Yorker, the Jeffersonian and the Log Cabin—Mr. Greeley as Editor of the New Yorker—Beginning of The Tribune—Mr. Greeley’s Theory of a Political Newspaper—His Love for The Tribune—The First Week of that Paper—The Attack of the Sun and its Result—Mr. McElrath’s Partnership—Mr. Greeley’s Fourierism—“The Bloody Sixth”—The Cooper Libel Suits—Mr. Greeley in Congress—He goes to Europe—His course in the Rebellion—His Ambition and Qualifications for Office—The Key-Note of his Character.

 

            No race has stronger characteristics, bodily or mental, than that powerful, obstinate, fiery, pious, humorous, honest, industrious, hard-headed, intelligent, thoughtful and reasoning people, the Scotch-Irish.  The vigorous qualities of the Scotch-Irish have left broad and deep traces upon the history of the United States.  As if with some hereditary instinct, they settled along the Allegheny ridge, principally from Pennsylvania to Georgia, in the fertile valleys and broader expanses of level land on either side, especially to the westward.  In the healthy and genial air of these regions, renowned for the handsomest breed of men and women in the world, the Scotch-Irish acted out with thorough freedom, all the vigorous and often violent impulses of their nature.  They were pioneers, Indian-fighters, politicians, theologians;

 

[294]

 

and they were as polemic in everything else as in theology.  Jackson and Calhoun were of this blood.  An observant traveler in Tennessee described to the writer the interest with which he found in that state literally hundreds of forms and faces with traits so like the lean erect figure, high narrow head, stiff black hair, and stern features of the fighting old President, that they might have been his brothers.  Many of our eminent Presbyterian theologians like the late Dr. Wilson, of Cincinnati, have been Scotch-Irish too, and with their spiritual weapons they have waged many a controversy as unyielding, as stern and as unsparing as the battle in which Jackson beat down Calhoun by showing him a halter, or as that brutal knife fight in which he and Thomas H. Benton nearly cut each other’s lives out.

            Horace Greeley is of this Scotch-Irish race, and after a rule which physiologists well know to be not very uncommon, he presents a direct reverse of many of its traits, more especially its physical ones.  Instead of a lean, erect person, dry hard muscles, a high narrow head, coarse stiff black hair, and a stern look, he tends to be fat, is shambling and bowed over in carrying himself, thinskinned and smooth and fair as a baby; with a wide, long, yet rounded head, silky-fine almost white hair, and a habitually meek sort of smile, which however must not be trusted to as an index of the mind within.  Meek as he looks, no man living is readier with a strong sharp answer.  Non-resistant as he is physically, there is not a more uncompromising an opponent and intense combatant in these United States.  Mentally, he shows a predominance of Scotch-

 

[295]

 

Irish blood modified by certain traits which reveal themselves in his readiness to receive new theories of life.

            Mr. Greeley was born Feb. 3d, 1811, at his father’s farm, in Amherst, New Hampshire.  The town was part of a district first settled by a small company of sixteen families of Scotch-Irish from Londonderry.  These were part of a considerable emigration in 1718 from that city, whose members at first endeavored to settle in Massachusetts; but they were so ill received by the Massachusetts settlers that they found it necessary to scatter away into distant parts of the country before they could find rest for the soles of their feet.

            The ancestors of Mr. Greeley were farmers, those of the name of Greeley being often also blacksmiths.  The boy was fully occupied with hard farm work, and he attended the American farmers’ college, the District School.  He had an intense natural love for acquiring knowledge, and learned to read of himself.  He could read any child’s book when he was three, and any ordinary book at four; and having, as his biographer, Mr. Parton, suggests, still an overplus of mental activity, he learned to read as readily with the book side ways or upside down, as right side up.

            Mr. Greeley, like a number of men who have grown up to become capable of a vast quantity of hard work and usefulness, was extremely feeble at birth, and was even thought scarcely likely to live when he first entered the world.  During his first year he was feeble and sickly.  His mother, who had lost her two children born next before him, seemed to be doubly fond of her weak little one, both for the sake of those that

 

[296]

 

were gone, and of his very weakness, and she kept him by her side much more closely than if he had been strong and well; and day after day, she sung and repeated to him an endless store of songs and ballads, stories and traditions.  This vivid oral literature doubtless had great influence in stimulating the child’s natural aptitude for mental activity.

            Mr. Greeley’s father was not a much better financier than his son.  In 1820, in spite of all the honest hard-work that he could do, he became bankrupt, and in 1821 moved to a new residence in Vermont.

            Mr. Greeley seems to have had such an inborn instinct after newspapers and newspaper work, as Mozart had for music and musical composition.  He himself says on this point, in his own “Recollections” in The New York Ledger, “Having loved and devoured newspapers—indeed every form of periodical—from childhood, I early resolved to be a printer if I could.”  When only eleven years old he applied to be received as an apprentice in a newspaper office at Whitehall, Vt., and was greatly cast down by being refused for his youth.  Four years afterwards, in the spring of 1826, he obtained employment in the office of the Northern Spectator, at East Poultney, Vt., and thus began his professional career.

            As a young man, Mr. Greeley was not only poorly but most extremely carelessly dressed; absent minded yet observant; awkward and indeed clownish in his manners; extremely fond of the game of checkers, at which he seldom found an equal; and of fishing and bee-hunting.  Fonder still he was of reading and acquiring general knowledge, for which a public library

 

[297]

 

in the town offered valuable advantages; and he very soon became, as a biographer says, a “town encyclopedia,” appealed to as a court of last resort, by every one who was at a loss for information.  In the local debating society of the place he was assiduous and prominent, and was noticeable both for the remarkable body of detailed facts which he could bring to bear upon the questions discussed, and for his thorough devotion to his argument.  Whatever his opinion was, he stuck to it against either reasoning or authority.

            In his calling as a printer, he was most laborious, and quickly became the most valuable hand in the office.  He also began here his experience as a writer—if that may be called written which was never set down with a pen.  For he used to compose condensations of news paragraphs, and even original paragraphs of his own, framing his sentences in his mind as he stood at the case, and setting them up in type entirely without the intermediate process of setting them down in manuscript.  This practice was exactly the way to cultivate economy, clearness, and directness of style; as it was necessary to know accurately what was to be said, or else the letters in the composing stick would have to be distributed and set up again; and it was natural to use the fewest and plainest possible words.

            While Horace was thus at work, his father had again removed beyond the Alleghanies, where he was doing his best to bring some new land under cultivation.  The son, meanwhile, and for some time after his apprenticeship too, used to send his father all the money that he could save from his scanty wages.  He con-

 

[298]

 

tinued to assist his father, indeed, until the latter was made permanently comfortable upon a valuable and well stocked farm; and even paid up some of his father’s old debts in New Hampshire thirty years after they were contracted.

            Mr. Greeley has recorded that while in Poultney he witnessed a fugitive slave chase.  New York had then yet a remainder of slavery in her, in the persons of a few colored people who had been under age when the state abolished slavery, and had been left by law to wait for their freedom until they should be twenty-eight years old.  Mr. Greeley tells the story in the N. Y. Ledger, in sarcastic and graphic words, as follows:

            “A young negro who must have been uninstructed in the sacredness of constitutional guaranties, the rights of property, &c., &c., &c., feloniously abstracted himself from his master in a neighboring New York town, and conveyed the chattel personal to our village; where he was at work when said master, with due process and following, came over to reclaim and recover the goods.  I never saw so large a number of men and boys so suddenly on our village-green, as his advent incited; and the result was a speedy disappearance of the chattel, and the return of his master, disconsolate and niggerless, to the place whence he came.  Everything on our side was impromptu and instinctive, and nobody suggested that envy or hate of the South, or of New York, or of the master, had impelled the rescue.  Our people hated injustice and oppression, and acted as if they couldn’t help it.”

            In June 1830, the Northern Spectator was discontinued, and our encyclopedic apprentice was turned

 

[299]

 

loose on the world.  Hereupon he traveled, partly on foot and partly by canal, to his father’s place in Western Pennsylvania.  Here he remained a while, and then after one or two unsuccessful attempts to find work, succeeded at Erie, Pa., where he was employed for seven months.  During this time his board with his employer having been part of his pay, he used for other personal expenses six dollars in cash.  The wages remaining due him amounted to just ninety-nine dollars.  Of this he now gave his father eighty-five, put the rest in his pocket and went to New York.

            He reached the city on Friday morning at sunrise, August 18^th, 1831, with ten dollars, his bundle, and his trade.  He engaged board and lodging at $2.50 a week, and hunted the printing offices for employment during that day and Saturday in vain; fell in with a fellow Vermonter early Monday morning, a journeyman printer like himself, and was by him presented to his foreman.  Now there was in the office a very difficult piece of composition, a polyglot testament, on which various printers had refused to work.  The applicant was, as he always had been, and will be, very queer looking; insomuch that while waiting for the foreman’s arrival, the other printers had been impelled to make many personal remarks about him.  But though equally entertained with his appearance, the foreman, rather to oblige the introducer than from any admiration of the new hand, permitted him a trial, and he was set at work on the terrible Polyglot.  We transcribe Mr. Parton’s lively account of the sequel:

            “After Horace had been at work an hour or two, Mr. West, the ‘boss,’ came into the office.  What his

 

[300]

 

feelings were when he saw the new man may be inferred from a little conversation on the subject which took place between him and the foreman:

            “’Did you hire that d----- fool?’ asked West, with no small irritation.

            “’Yes; we must have hands, and he’s the best I could get,’ said the foreman, justifying his conduct, though he was really ashamed of it.

            “’Well,’ said the master, ‘for Heaven’s sake pay him off to-night, and let him go about his business.’

            “Horace worked through the day with his usual intensity, and in perfect silence.  At night he presented to the foreman, as the custom then was, the ‘proof’ of his day’s work.  What astonishment was depicted in the good-looking countenance of that gentleman, when he discovered that the proof before him was greater in quantity and more correct than that of any other day’s work on the Polyglot!  There was no thought of sending the new journeyman about his business now.  He was an established man at once.  Thenceforward, for several months, Horace worked regularly and hard on the Testament, earning about six dollars a week.”

            While a journeyman here, he worked very hard indeed, as he was paid by the piece, and the work was necessarily slow.  At the same time, according to his habit, he was accustomed to talk very fluently, his first day’s silent labor having been an exception; and his voluble and earnest utterance, singular, high voice, fullness, accuracy, and readiness with facts, and positive though good-natured tenacious disputatiousness, together with his very marked personal traits, made him

 

[301]

 

the phenomenon of the office.  His complexion was so fair, and his hair so flaxen white, that the men nicknamed him “the Ghost.”  The mischievous juniors played him many tricks, some of them rough enough, but he only begged to be let alone, so that he might work, and they soon got tired of teasing from which there was no reaction.  Besides, he was forever lending them money, for like very many of the profession, the other men in the office were profuse with whatever funds were in hand, and often needy before pay-day; while his own unconscious parsimony in personal expenditures was to him a sort of Fortunatus’ purse—an unfailing fountain.

            For about a year and a half Mr. Greeley worked as a journeyman printer.  During 1832 he had become acquainted with a Mr. Story, an enterprising young printer, and also with Horatio D. Sheppard, the originator of the idea of a Cheap Daily Paper.  The three consulted and co-operated; in December the printing firm of Greeley & Story was formed, and on the first of January, 1833, the first number of the cheap New York Daily, “The Morning Post,” was issued, “price two cents,” Dr. Sheppard being editor.  Various disadvantages stopped the paper before the end of the third week, but the idea was a correct one.  The New York Sun, issued in accordance with it nine months later, is still a prosperous newspaper; and the great morning dallies of New York, including the Tribune, are radically upon the same model.

            Though this paper stopped, the job printing firm of Greeley & Story went on and made money.  At

 

[302]

 

Mr. Story’s death, July 9, 1833, his brother-in-law, Mr. Winchester, took his place in the office.  In 1834 the firm resolved to establish a weekly; and on March 22d, 1834, appeared the first number of the Weekly New Yorker, owned by the firm, and with Mr. Greeley as editor.  He had now found his proper work, and he has pursued it ever since with remarkable force, industry and success.

            This success, however, was only editorial, not financial, so far as the New Yorker was concerned.  The paper began with twelve subscribers, and without any flourishes or promises.  By its own literary, political and statistical value, its circulation rose in a year to 4,500, and afterwards to 9,000.  But when it stopped, Sept. 20, 1841, it left its editor laboring under troublesome debts, both receivable and payable.  The difficulty was manifold; its chief sources were, Mr. Greeley’s own deficiencies as a financier, supplying too many subscribers on credit, and the great business crash of 1837.

            During the existence of the New Yorker, Mr. Greeley also edited two short-lived but influential campaign political sheets.  One of these, the Jeffersonian, was published weekly, at Albany.  This was a Whig paper, which appeared during a year from March, 1838, and kept its editor over-busy, with the necessary weekly journey to Albany, and the double work.  The other was the Log Cabin, the well-known Harrison campaign paper, issued weekly during the exciting days of “Tippecanoe and Tyler too,” in 1840, and which was continued as a family paper for a year afterwards.  Of the very first number of this famous little sheet,

 

[303]

 

48,000 were sold, and the edition rapidly increased to nearly 90,000.  Neither of these two papers, however, made much money for their editor.  But during his labors on the three, the New Yorker, Jeffersonian, and Log Cabin, he had gained a standing as a political and statistical editor of force, information and ability.

            Mr. Greeley’s editorial work on the New Yorker was a sort of literary spring-time to him.  The paper itself was much more largely literary than the Tribune now is.  In his editorial writing in those days, moreover, there is a certain rhetorical plentifulness of expression which the seriousness and the pressures of an overcrowded life have long ago cut sharply and closely off; and he even frequently indulged in poetical compositions.  This ornamental material, however, was certainly not his happiest kind of effort.  Mr. Greeley does his best only by being wholly utilitarian.  Poetry and rhetoric appear as well from his mind as a great long red feather would, sticking out of his very oldest white hat.

            The great work of Mr. Greeley’s life, however—The New York Tribune—had not begun yet, though he was thirty years old.  Its commencement was announced in one of the last numbers of the Log Cabin, for April 10, 1841, and its first number appeared on the very day of the funeral solemnities with which New York honored the memory of President Harrison.  Mr. Greeley’s own account, in one of his articles in the New York Ledger, is an interesting statement of his Theory of a Political Newspaper.  He says:

            “My leading idea was the establishment of a journal removed alike from servile partizanship on the one

 

[304]

 

hand, and from gagged, mincing neutrality on the other.  Party spirit is so fierce and intolerant in this country, that the editor of a non-partizan sheet is restrained from saying what he thinks and feels on the most vital, imminent topics; while, on the other hand, a Democratic, Whig, or Republican journal is generally expected to praise or blame, like or dislike, eulogize or condemn, in precise accordance with the views and interest of its party.  I believed there was a happy medium between these extremes—a position from which a journalist might openly and heartily advocate the principles and commend the measures of that party to which his convictions allied him, yet dissent frankly from its course on a particular question, and even denounce its candidates if they were shown to be deficient in capacity, or (far worse) in integrity.  I felt that a journal thus loyal to its own convictions, yet ready to expose and condemn unworthy conduct or incidental error on the part of men attached to its party, must be far more effective, even party-wise, than though it might always be counted on to applaud or reprobate, bless or curse, as the party prejudices or immediate interest might seem to prescribe.”

            Mr. Greeley has now been the chief editor of the Tribune for twenty-six years, and the persistent love with which he still regards his gigantic child strikingly appears in the final paragraph of the same article:

            “Fame is a vapor; popularity and accident; riches take wings; the only earthly certainty is oblivion—no man can foresee what a day may bring forth; and those who cheer to-day will often curse to-morrow; and yet

 

[305]

 

I cherish the hope that the Journal I projected and established will live and flourish long after I shall have moldered into forgotten dust, being guided by a larger wisdom, a more unerring sagacity to discover the right, though not by a more unfaltering readiness to embrace and defend it at whatever personal cost; and that the stone which covers my ashes may bear to future eyes the still intelligible inscription, ‘Founder of THE NEW YORK TRIBUNE. ”

            The Tribune began with some 600 subscribers.  Of its first number 5,000 copies were printed, and, as Mr. Greeley himself once said, he “found some difficulty in giving them away.”  At the end of the first week the cash account stood, receipts, $92; expenditures, $525.  Now the proprietor’s whole money capital was $1,000, borrowed money.  But—as has more than once been the case with others—an unjust attack on the Tribune strengthened it.  An unprincipled attempt was made by the publisher of the Sun, to bribe and bully the newsmen and then to flog the newsboys out of selling the Tribune.  The Tribune was prompt in telling the story to the public, and the public showed that sense of justice so natural to all communities, by subscribing to it at the rate of three hundred a day for three weeks at a time.  In four weeks it sold an edition of six thousand, and in seven it sold eleven thousand, which was then all that it could print.  Its advertising patronage grew equally fast.  And what was infinitely more than this rush of subscribers, a steady and judicious business man became a partner with Mr. Greeley in the paper, at the end of July, not four months from its first issue.  This was Mr.

 

[306]

 

Thomas McElrath, whose sound business management undoubtedly supplied to the concern an element more indispensable to its continued prosperity, than any editorial ability whatever.

            The Tribune, as we have seen, like the infant Hercules in the old fable, successfully resisted an attempt to strangle it in its cradle.  From that time to this, the paper and its editor have lived in a healthy and invigorating atmosphere of violent attacks of all sorts, on grounds political, social, moral and religious.  The paper has not been found fault with, however, for being flat or feeble or empty.  The first noticeable disturbance after the Sun attack was the Fourierite controversy.  Perhaps Mr. Greeley’s Fourierism—or Socialism, as it might be better called—was the principal if not the sole basis of all the notorious uproars that have been made for a quarter of a century about his “isms,” and his being a “philosopher.”  During 1841 and several following years, the Tribune was the principal organ in the United States of the efforts then made to exemplify and prove in actual life the doctrines of Charles Fourier.  The paper was violently assaulted with the charge that these doctrines necessarily implied immorality and irreligion.  The Tribune never was particularly “orthodox,” and while it vigorously defended itself, it could not honestly in doing so say what would satisfy the stricter doctrinalists of the different orthodox religious denominations.  Moreover, the practical experiments made to organize Fourierite “phalanxes” and the like, all failed; so that in one sense, both the Fourierite movement was a failure, and The Tribune was vanquished in the discussion.

 

[307]

 

But the controversy was a great benefit to the cause of associated human effort; and there can be no doubt that the various endeavors at the present day in progress to apply the principle of association to the easing and improving of the various concerns of life, present a much more hopeful prospect than would have been the case without the ardent and energetic advocacy of The Tribune.

            The next quarrel was with “the Bloody Sixth,” as it was called, i. e. the low and rowdy politicians of the Sixth Ward, then the most corrupt part of the city.  These politicians and their followers, enraged at certain exposures of their misdeeds in the spring of 1842, demanded a retraction, and only getting a hotter denunciation than before, promised to come down and “smash the office.”  The whole establishment was promptly armed with muskets; arrangements were made for flinging bricks from the roof above and spurting steam from the engine boiler below; but the “Bloody Sixth” never came.

            The Cooper libel suits were in consequence of alleged libelous matter about J. Fenimore Cooper, who was a bitter tempered and quarrelsome man, and to the full as pertinacious as Mr. Greeley himself.  This matter was printed November 17, 1841.  The first suit in consequence was tried December 9, 1842.  The damages were laid at $3,000.  Cooper and Greeley each argued on his own side to the Court, and Cooper got a verdict for $200.  Mr. Greeley went home and wrote a long and sharp narrative of the whole, for which Cooper instantly brought another suit; but he found

 

[308]

 

that his prospect this time did not justify his perseverance, and the suit never came to trial.

            In 1844 Mr. Greeley worked with tremendous intensity for the election of Henry Clay, but to no purpose.  In February, 1845, the Tribune office was thoroughly burnt out, but fortunately with no serious loss.  The paper was throughout completely opposed to the Mexican War.  In 1848, and subsequently, the paper at first with hopeful enthusiasm and at last with sorrow chronicled the outbreak, progress and fate of the great Republican uprising in Europe.  During the same year Mr. Greeley served a three months’ term in Congress, signalizing himself by a persistent series of attacks both in the House and in his paper, on the existing practice in computing and paying mileage—a comparatively petty swindle, mean enough doubtless, in itself, but very far from being the national evil most prominently requiring a remedy.  This proceeding made Mr. Greeley a number of enemies, gained him some inefficient approbations, and did not cure the evil.  In 1857 he went to Europe, to see the “Crystal Palace” or World’s Fair at London, in that year.  He was a member of one of the “juries” which distributed premiums on that occasion; investigated industrial life in England with some care; and gave some significant and influential information about newspaper matters, in testifying before a parliamentary committee on the repeal of certain oppressive taxes on newspapers.  He made a short trip to France and Italy; and on his return home, reaching the dock at New York about 6 A. M., he had already made up the matter for an “extra,” while on board the steamer.

 

[309]

 

He rushed at once to the office, seizing the opportunity to “beat” the other morning papers, by an “exclusive” extra, sent off for the compositors, who had all gone to bed at their homes; began setting up the matter himself; worked away along with the rest until his exclusive extra was all ready, and then departed contentedly to his own home.

            Mr. Greeley had always been a natural abolitionist; but, with most of the Whig party, he had been willing to allow the question of slavery to remain in a secondary position for a long time.  He was however a willing, early, vigorous and useful member of the Republican party, when that party became an unavoidable national necessity, as the exponent of Freedom.  With that party he labored hard during the Fremont campaign, through the times of the Kansas wars, and for the election of Mr. Lincoln.  When the Rebellion broke out he stood by the nation to the best of his ability, and if he gave mistaken counsels at any time, his mistakes were the unavoidable results of his mental organization, and not in the least due to any conscious swerving from principle, either in ethics or in politics.

            Mr. Greeley has at various times been spoken of as a candidate for State offices, and he undoubtedly has a certain share of ambition for high political position—an ambition which is assuredly entitled to be excused if not respected by American citizens.  Yet any sound mind, it is believed, must be forced to the belief that his highest and fittest place is the Chief Editor’s chair in the office of The Tribune.  There he wields a great, a laboriously and honestly acquired influence, an in-

 

[310]

 

fluence of the greatest importance to Society.  His friends would be sorry to see him leave that station for any other.

            Mr. Greeley’s character and career as an editor and politician can be understood and appreciated by remembering his key note:—Benevolent ends, by utilitarian means.

            He desires the amelioration of all human conditions and the instrumentalities which he would propose are generally practical, common sense ones.  Of magnificence, of formalities, of all the conventional part of life, whether in public or private, he is by nature as utterly neglectful as he is of the dandy element in costume, but he has a solid and real appreciation of many appreciable things, which go to make up the sum total of human advancement and happiness.

 

 

 

[311]

 

CHAPTER VIII.

 

DAVID GLASCOE FARRAGUT.

 

The Lesson of the Rebellion to Monarchs—The Strength of the United States—The U. S. Naval Service—The Last War—State of the Navy in 1861—Admiral Farragut Represents the Old Navy and the New—Charlemagne’s Physician, Farraguth—The Admiral’s Letter about his Family—His Birth—His Cruise with Porter when a Boy of Nine—The Destruction of the Essex—Farragut in Peace Times—Expected to go with the South—Refuses, is Threatened, and goes North—The Opening of the Mississippi—The Bay Fight at Mobile—The Admiral’s Health—Farragut and the Tobacco Bishop.

 

            The course and character and result of the Rebellion taught many a great new lesson; in political morals and in political economy; in international law; in the theory of governing; in the significance of just principles on this earth.  Perhaps all those lessons, taught so tremendously to the civilized world, might be summed in one expression; the Astounding Strength of a Christian Republic.  For, whichever phase of the Rebellion we examine in considering it as a chapter of novelties in the world’s history, we still come back to that one splendid, heart-filling remembrance;—How unexpected, how unbelieved, how inexhaustible, how magnificent beyond all history, the strength of the United States!

            “There goes your Model Republic,” sneered all the Upper Classes of Europe, “knocked into splinters in the course of one man’s life!  A good riddance!”  And reactionary Europe set instantly to work to league

 

[312]

 

itself with our own traitors, now that the United States was dead, to bury it effectively.  But the Imperial Republic, even more utterly unconscious than its enemies, of what it could suffer and could do, stunned at first and reeling under a blow the most tremendous ever aimed at any government, clung close to Right and Justice, and rising in its own blood, went down wounded as it was, into the thunder and the mingled blinding lightning and darkness of the great conflict, unknowing and unfearing whether life or death was close before.  As its day, so was its strength.  As the nation’s need grew deeper and more desperate, in like measure the nation’s courage, the conscious calmness, the unmoved resolution, the knowledge of strength and wealth and power, grew more high and strong, and whereas the world knew that no nation had ever survived such an assault, and knew, it said, that ours would not, lo and behold, the United States achieved things beyond all comparison more unheard of, more wonderful, than even the treasonable explosion for whose deadly catastrophe all the monarchists stood joyfully waiting.  They were disappointed.  And ever since, they know that if the Rebellion was not the death-toll of Republics, it was the death-toll of many other things, and ever since, all the kings are setting their houses in order.

            There were three great national material instrumentalities which the Free Christian People of the United States created in their peril, being the sole means which could have won in the war, and being moreover exactly the means which England and Europe asserted that we were peculiarly unable to create or to use;

 

[313]

 

they were:  the Supply of Money; the Army on the land, and the Fleet on the sea.

            Of these three, the story of the fleet has a peculiar interest of its own.  The United States Navy was always a popular service in the country, for the adventurous genius and inventive faculties of our people, developed and stimulated by its successful prosecution of commerce, had easily dealt with the naval problems of fifty years ago.  In the war of 1812, the superior skill of our shipbuilders and sailors launched and navigated a small but swift and powerful and well managed navy, and the single common-sense application of sights for aiming, to our ship-guns, in like manner as to muskets, gave our sailors a murderous superiority in sea fights which won us many a victory.

            But in times of peace, a free nation almost necessarily falls behind a standing army nation in respect of military and naval mechanism and stored material and readiness of organization; and accordingly, after forty years of little but disuse, our navy, as the muscles of an arm shrink away if it is left unmoved, showed little of the latest improvements in construction and armament, and indeed there was very little navy to show at all.  At Mr. Lincoln’s inauguration, the whole navy of the United States consisted of seventy-six vessels, carrying 1,783 guns; and of these, only twelve were within reach, so effectively had Mr. Buchanan’s Secretary of the Navy, Toucey, dispersed them in readiness for the secession schemes of his fellows in the cabinet.  And even of those twelve, but a few were in Northern ports.  The navy conspirators had no mind to have a southern blockade brought down on them, and so took

 

[314]

 

good care to send our best ships on long fancy voyages to Japan or otherwise—and to clap on board of them certain officers whose loyalty and ability they wished to put out of the way.  Thus General Ripley found himself, to his indignation, over in Asia when the explosion took place.

            It was from this beginning—practically nothing—that the energy and skill of American inventors and seamen created a navy beyond comparison the strongest on the face of the earth, reaching a strength of 600 ships, and 51,000 men; which effectively maintained the most immense and difficult blockade of history; which performed with brilliant and glorious success, enterprises whose importance and danger are equal to any chronicled in the wonderful annals of the sea; which fully completed its own indispensable share in the work of subduing the rebellion; and which revolutionized the theory and practice of naval warfare.

            In this chapter of the history of the navy the most famous name is that of Admiral Farragut, not so much in consequence of any identification with the mechanical inventions of the day, as because his past professional career and his recent brilliant and daring victories, have linked together the elder with the younger fame of our navy, and have done it by the exercise of professional and personal courage and skill, rather than by the ingenious use of newly discovered scientific auxiliaries.  The hardy courage of unmailed breasts always appeals more strongly to admiration and sympathy, than that more thoughtful and doubtless wiser proceeding which would win fights from behind invulnerable protections.

 

[315]

 

            A friend of the writer was, during the Rebellion, investigating some subject connected with the history of medicine.  In one of the books he examined he found mention made of Charlemagne’s physician, a wonderfully skilful and learned man, named Farraguth.  Our famous Admiral was then in the Gulf of Mexico, engaged in the preparations for the attack on Mobile which took place during August of that year.  So odd was this coincidence, that its discoverer wrote to the Admiral to ask whether he knew anything of this mediaeval doctor, and received in reply a very friendly and agreeably written letter, from which some extracts may here be given without any violation of confidence, as giving the most authentic information about his ancestry.

            “My own name is probably Castilian.  My grandfather came from Ciudadela, in the island of Minorca.  I know nothing of the history of my family before they came to this country and settled in Florida.  You may remember that in the 17^th century, a colony settled there, and among them, I believe, was my grandfather.  My father served through the war of Independence, and was at the battle of the Cowpens.  Judge Anderson, formerly Comptroller of the Treasurer, has frequently told me that my father received his majority from George Washington on the same day with himself; and his children have always supposed that this promotion was for his good conduct in that fight.  Notwithstanding this statement   *   *   *   *   I have never been able to find my father’s name in any list of the officers of the Revolution.

 

[316]

 

            “With two men, Ogden and McKee, he was afterwards one of the early settlers of Tennessee.  Mr. McKee was a member of Congress from Alabama, and once stopped in Norfolk, where I was then residing, on purpose, as he said, to see me, as the son of his early friend.  He said he had heard that I was “a chip of the old block”—what sort of a block it was I know not.  This was thirty years ago.  My father settled twelve miles from Knoxville, at a place called Campbell’s Station, on the river, where Burnside had his fight.  Thence we moved to the South, about the time of the Wilkinson and Blennerhassett trouble.  My father was then appointed a master in the Navy, and sent to New Orleans in command of one of the gunboats.  Hence the impression that I am a native of New Orleans.  But all my father’s children were born in Tennessee, and as I have said in answer to enquiries on this subject, we only moved South to crush out a couple of rebellions.

            “My mother died of yellow fever the first summer in New Orleans, and my father settled at Pascagoula, in Mississippi.  He continued to serve throughout the ‘last war,’ and was at the battle of New Orleans, under Commodore Paterson, though very infirm at that time.  He died the following year, and my brothers and sisters married in and about New Orleans, where their descendants still remain.   *   *   *   *

            “As to the name, Gen. Goicouria, a Spanish hidalgo from Cuba, tells me it is Castilian, and is spelled in the same way as the old physician’s—Farraguth.”

            Admiral David Glascoe Farragut was born at Campbell’s Station, in East Tennessee, in 1801.  While only

 

[317]

 

a little boy, at nine years of age, his father, who had been a friend and shipmate of the hardy sea-king, Commodore Porter, procured him a midshipman’s berth under that commander, and the boy, accompanying Porter in the romantic cruise of the Essex, served a right desperate apprenticeship to his hazardous profession.  His first sea-fight was the short fierce combat of Porter in the Essex, on April 13^th, 1812, with the English sloop-of-war, Alert.  No sooner did the Alert spy the Essex, than she ran confidently close upon her broadside.  Porter, not a whit abashed, replied with such swift fury that the Englishman, smashed into drowning helplessness, and the seven feet of water in his hold, struck his colors in eight minutes, escaping out of the fight by surrender even more hastily than he had gone into it.

            In that desperate and bloody fight in Valparaiso harbor, when the British captain Hillyar, with double the force of the Essex, and by means of a most discreditable breach of the law of neutrality, made an end of the Essex, Midshipman Farragut, twelve years of age, stood by his commander to the very last.  When those who could swim ashore had been ordered overboard, Porter himself, having helped work the few remaining guns that could be fired, hauled down his flag, and surrendered the bloody wreck that was all he had left under him, for the sake of the helpless wounded men who must have sunk along with him.  Farragut was wounded, and was sent home with the other officers of the ship, on parole; and Porter, in his report to the Secretary of the Navy, made special

 

[318]

 

and honorable mention of the lad, and mentioned with the appropriate regret of a just and brave man, that the boy was “too young for promotion.”  Probably not another living man on the face of the earth had so early and so thorough a baptism of blood and fire, and bore himself through it so manlike.

            Commodore Porter had been so much interested in the youth that he gave him the means of pursuing an education in general studies and military tactics.  But Farragut’s vocation was the sea, and as soon as the war was over he got another ship.  Peace is the winter of soldiers and sailors; when they sit still and wait for the deadly harvest that brings them prosperity.  The times were as dull for Farragut as for the rest, and for forty-five years he was sailing about the world or quietly commanding at one or another station, and at long intervals rising by seniority from one grade to another.  In 1825 he became lieutenant, in 1841 commander, in 1851 captain.  When the rebellion came he was sixty years old, had been in the service forty-eight years, and to the country at large was utterly unknown.  This is not strange; for throughout all his youth and manhood he had no opportunity to show the heroic qualities which when a boy of twelve he had proved himself to possess even then in such manly measure.

            He was living at Norfolk; was a native of the South; and his second wife, with whom he was now living, was from a Norfolk family.  It was therefore taken for granted that Farragut would go with the South, and when he frankly avowed his patriotism, he was met with astonishment and then with threats.

 

[319]

 

They told him it would probably be unsafe for him to remain in the South, with such sentiments.  “Very well,” he replied, “I will go where I can live with such sentiments.”  Accordingly, he left Norfolk for the North on the night of April 18, 1861, the very night before rebels there fired the navy-yard.  He established himself for a time near Tarrytown, on the Hudson river.  The very air was full of suspicion in those days, and Captain Farragut being unknown to the people in the vicinity, and walking about in the fields alone a good deal, a report got out at one time among the neighbors that he was one of a gang that had arranged to cut the Croton Aqueduct and burn down New York.

            Farragut’s very first appointment was that to the command of the naval part of the New Orleans expedition, for which his orders reached him January 20, 1862, and on Feb. 3d, in his famous flag-ship, the Hartford, he sailed from Hampton Roads for Ship Island.

            The opening of the Mississippi river has passed into history.  Of all the series of strange and novel and desperate combats which accomplished the task, the passage of the forts and the capture of New Orleans was beyond comparison the most dangerous and difficult, and its success was the most brilliant.  The services which succeeded this were less showy, but included much that was excessively laborious, and that was dangerous enough for any ordinary ambition; and from beginning to end the whole task required not only high courage, indefatigable activity, incessant labor, and the ordinary professional knowledge

 

[320]

 

of a sailor, but an invention always ready to contrive new means for new ends, prompt judgment to adopt them if suggested by others, wisdom and tact in dealing with the rebel authorities, and patience in waiting for the co-operation of the military forces or the development of the plans of the government.  In carrying his fleet past Port Hudson and Vicksburg, in helping Grant to cross the river and take the latter place, in all his operations, whether alone or with the land commanders, Admiral Farragut gave proof of the possession of all these qualities.

            The “Bay Fight” at Mobile, and the resulting capture of Forts Powell and Gaines, was another scene as terrible as New Orleans, and still more splendidly illuminated by the perfect personal courage of the Admiral, who has already gone into history, song and painting, as he stood lashed in the rigging of the old Hartford, clear above the smoke of the battle, and, even when he saw the monitor Tecumseh sunk—the very ship he had been waiting for for months—yet ordered his wooden fleet straight forward despite forts, gunboats, ram and torpedoes, and won a second victory of that most glorious sort only possible to the high, clear and intelligent courage of a leader who is both truly heroic and truly wise.

            The fame which the Admiral earned in the war has been in some measure paid him, in the testimonials of admiration and respect which he has received both at home and abroad.  It would require a book to give account of the greetings and the thanks he has received from his own countrymen; and on the official voyage which he has made since the war to the prin-

 

[321]

 

cipal ports of Europe, as the representative of the naval power of the United States.  The civilities and attentions conferred upon himself and his officers, were not solely that formal politeness which one nation observes to another, but were in large measure the more enthusiastic acknowledgment which men pay to lofty personal qualities.

            Admiral Farragut is a man of remarkably pure and vigorous health, and though no longer young, is more elastic, vigorous and enduring than most young men.  His health and strength are the just recompense for a cleanly and temperate life.  He seems to have that sort of innate or constitutional abhorrence for every unclean thing, which has characterized some great reformers.  There is a pleasant story of a rebuke once administered by him in a most neat and decorous, but very effective manner, to a tobacco-smoking bishop, which conveys a good lesson.  At dinner with Farragut, and after the meal was over, the Bishop, about to select a cigar, offered the bunch to the sailor.  “Have a cigar, Admiral?”  said he.  “No, Bishop,” said the Admiral, with a quizzical glance, “I don’t smoke—I swear a little, sometimes.”

            We regret that the limits of our sketches do not allow us to do justice to those wonderful, inspiring, romantic scenes by which our navy gained possession of New Orleans and Mobile.  But if one wants to read them in poetry, terse and vivid, with all the fire of poetry and all the explicitness of prose, we beg them to read the “River Fight,” and “Bay Fight,” of Henry Brownell, who was in both scenes as a volunteer

 

[322]

 

officer.  There he will find Homeric military ardor baptized by Christian sentiment.

 

Full red the furnace fires must glow,

That melts the ore of mortal kind;

The mills of God are grinding slow,

But ah, how close they grind!

To-day the Dahlgren and the drum

Are dread Apostles of his name,

His kingdom here can only come

In chrism of blood and flame.

 

 

[325]

 

CHAPTER IX.

 

JOHN ALBION ANDREW.

 

Governor Andrew’s Death Caused by the War—The Governors Dr. Beecher Prayed for—Governor Andrew a Christian Governor—Gov. Andrew’s Birth—He goes to Boston to Study Law—Not Averse to Unfashionable and Unpopular Causes—His Cheerfulness and Social Accomplishments—His Sunday School Work—Lives Plainly—His Clear Foresight of the War—Sends a Thousand Men to Washington in One Day—Story of the Blue Overcoats—The Telegram for the Bodies of the Dead of Baltimore—Gov. Andrew’s Tender Care for the Poor—The British Minister and the Colored Women—The Governor’s Kindness to the Soldier’s Wife—His Biblical Proclamations—The Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1861—The Proclamation of 1862—His Interest in the Schools for the Richmond Poor—Cotton Mather’s Eulogy on Governor Winthrop—Gov. Andrew’s Farewell Address to the Massachusetts Legislature—State Gratitude to Governor Andrew’s Family.

 

            Among the many heroic men who have sacrificed their lives in the great battle of liberty in our country, there is no one who deserves a more honored memory than John A. Andrew, Governor of Massachusetts.

            We speak of him as dying in battle, for it is our conviction that Governor Andrew was as really a victim of the war as if, like Lincoln, he had been shot down by a bullet.  His death was caused by an over tax of the brain in the critical and incessant labors of the five years’ war.  He had been previously warned by a physician that any such strain would expose him to such a result, so that in meeting the duties and exigencies of his office at the time he did, he just as certainly knew that he was exposing himself to sudden death as the man who goes into battle.  He did not

 

[326]

 

fail till the battle was over and the victory won, then with a smile of peace on his lips, he went to rest by the side of Lincoln.

            It was a customary form in the prayers of the Rev. Dr. Beecher, to offer the petition that God would make our “Governors as at the first, and our counsellors as at the beginning.”  These words, spoken with a yearning memory of the old days of the pilgrim fathers, when religion was the law of the land, and the laws and ordinances of Christ were the standard of the government, found certainly a fulfillment in the exaltation of John A. Andrew to be the Governor of Massachusetts.

            It has been said of Lincoln by a French statesman that he presents to the world a new type of pure, Christian statesmanship.  In the same manner it may be said of John A. Andrew, that he presents a type of a consistently Christian State Governor.

            The noble men of America who have just consummated in the 37^th and 38^th Congresses the sublimest national and moral reform the world ever saw, are the spiritual children of the pilgrim fathers.  So are Garrison, Phillips, John Brown, and other external helpers in bringing on the great day of moral victory.  They were men either tracing their descent in lineal blood to Puritan parentage, or like Garrison, spiritually born of the eternal influences which they left in the air of the society they moulded.

            These sons of the Puritans do not, it is true, in all points hold the technical creed of their ancestors, any more than the Puritans held the creed of the generation just before them.  Progress was the root idea

 

[327]

 

with the Puritans, and as they stood far in advance in matters of opinion, so their sons in many respects stand at a different line from them; in this, quite as much as in anything else, proving their sonship.  The parting charge of the old pastor Robinson to the little band of pilgrims was of necessity a seed of changes of opinion as time should develop fit causes of change.

            “If God reveal anything unto you by any other instrument of his, be ready to receive it as ever you were to receive any truth by my ministry; for I am verily persuaded and confident that the Lord hath much truth yet to break forth from his holy word.  For my part, I cannot sufficiently bewail the condition of the reformed churches who are come to a period in their religion, and will go at present no further than the instruments of their first reformation.  The Lutherans cannot be drawn to go beyond what Luther said; and whatsoever part of his will our good God has imparted unto Calvin they will rather die than embrace it.  And the Calvinists you see stick fast where they were left by that great man of God, who yet saw not all things.”

            But that part of the Puritan idea which consisted in unhesitating loyalty to Jesus Christ as master in practical affairs, and an unflinching determination to apply his principles and precepts to the conduct of society, and to form and reform all things in the state by them, was that incorruptible seed which has descended from generation to generation in Massachusetts, and shown itself in the course of those noble men who have brought on and carried through the late great revolution.  This recent conflict has been in fact a great revival of religion, by which the precepts of the

 

[328]

 

Sermon on the Mount have been established in political forms.

            John Albion Andrew was born in the little town of Windham, Cumberland county, Maine.  It was like the most of the nests where New England greatness is hatched—a little, cold, poor, barren mountain town, where the winter rages for six months of the year.  We hear of him in these days as a sunny-faced, curly-headed boy, full of fun and frolic and kind-heartedness, and we can venture to say how he pattered bare-footed after the cows, in the dim grey of summer mornings, how he was forward to put on the tea-kettle for mother, and always inexhaustible in obligingness, how in winter he drew the girls to school on his sled, and was doughty and valiant in defending snow forts, and how his arm and prowess were always for the weak against the strong and for the right against the wrong.  All these inherent probabilities might be wrought into myths and narratives, which would truly represent the boy who was father to the man, John A. Andrew.

            He graduated from Bowdoin College in the class of 1837, and came to Boston to study law in the office of Henry H. Fuller, whence in 1840, he was admitted to the bar.

            During the earlier portions of his educational career, both in college and at the bar, he had no very brilliant successes.  He had little ambition to dazzle or shine, or seek for immediate effect; he was indifferent to academic honors, his heart and mind being set upon higher things.  He read and studied broadly and carefully, in reference to his whole manhood rather

 

[329]

 

than to the exigencies of a passing occasion.  Besides his legal studies, he was a widely read belles-lettres student, and his memory was most retentive of all sorts of literature, grave and gay, tragic and comic.  He was one that took the journey of life in a leisurely way, stopping to admire prospects and to gather the flowers as he went on.

            From the very earliest of his associations in Boston, he allied himself not only with popular and acceptable forms of philanthropy, but also with those which were under the ban of polite society.  One who knew him well says:  “Few men were connected with so many unpopular and unfashionable causes.  Indeed, it was only sufficient to know that an alliance with any cause was considered to involve some loss of social caste, or business patronage, to be pretty sure that John A. Andrew was allied with it.”

            His cheerful, jovial spirit, and the joyousness with which he accepted the reproach of a cause, took from it the air of martyrdom.  His exquisite flow of natural humor oiled and lubricated the play of his moral faculties, so that a gay laugh instead of an indignant denunciation would be the weapon with which he would meet injurious language or treatment heaped on him for conscience sake.  Like Lincoln, he had the happy faculty of being able to laugh where crying did no good, and the laughter of some good men, we doubt not, is just as sacred in heavenly eyes as the tears of others.  They who tried to put men under society’s ban for their conscientious opinions, got loss on their own side in excluding Andrew, since no man had in a higher degree all the arts and faculties of agreeable-

 

[330]

 

ness in society.  No man had a wider or more varied flow of conversation.  No man could tell a better story or sing a gayer song.  No man was more gifted with that electrical power of animal cheerfulness, which excites others to gayety and mirth.  In the intervals of the gravest cases, when pressed down, overwhelmed, and almost bewildered, he would still find spare hours when at the bedside of some desponding invalid, or in the cheerless chamber of old age, he would make all ring again with a flow of mimicry and wit and fun, as jolly as a bob-o-link on a clover head.

            Some of the most affecting testimonials to his worth come from these obscure and secluded sources.  One aged friend of seventy or more, tells how daily, amid all the cares of the state house and the war, he found some interval to come in and shed a light and cheerfulness in her shaded chamber.

            His pastor speaks of him as performing the duties of a Sunday school superintendent during the labors of his arduous station.  He was a lover of children and young people, and love made labor light.  While he did not hesitate, when necessary, to carry forward the great public cause on the Sabbath day, yet his heart and inclinations ever inclined him to the more purely devotional uses of those sacred hours.  The flame of devotion in his heart was ever burning beneath the crust of earthly cares, but ready to flame up brightly in those hours consecrated by the traditions of his Puritan education.

            In one respect Governor Andrew was not patterned on the old first magistrates of Massachusetts.  Massachusetts was at first decidedly an aristocratic commu-

 

[331]

 

nity.  A certain of idea rank and stateliness hedged in the office of the governor.  He stood above the people at an awful distance and moved among them as a sort of superior being.

            Nothing could be more opposed to the frank, companionable nature of Governor Andrew than any such idea.  He was a true democrat to the tips of his finger nails, and considered a Governor only as the servant of the people.  In this respect, more truly than even the first Puritan governors, did he express the idea given by Christ of rank and dignity, “Whosoever will be chief among you let him be your servant.”

            Governor Andrew from the first rejected and disclaimed everything which seemed to mark him out from the people by outward superiority.  He chose to live in a small, plain house, in a retired and by no means fashionable part of the city, and to conduct all his family arrangements on a scale of the utmost simplicity.  When the idea was suggested to him that the Governor of Massachusetts ought to have some extra provision to enable him to appear with more worldly pomp and stateliness, he repelled it with energy, “Never, while the country was struggling under such burdens, and her brave men bearing such privations in the field, would he accept of anything more than the plain average comforts of a citizen.”  The usual traditional formulas and ceremonials of his position were only irksome and embarrassing to him.  One of his aids relates that being induced by urgent solicitation to have the accustomed military coat of the Governor of Massachusetts, with all its gold lace and buttons, he wore it twice, and then returning with his

 

[332]

 

aids to his private cabinet, he pulled it off and threw it impatiently into a corner, saying, “Lie there, old coat—you won’t find me wearing you again, soon.”  The ceremonies on public occasions were always irksome and fatiguing to him, and he would recreate himself by singing “Johnny Schmauker” with his aids in his private apartments afterwards.  We think good Governor Winthrop would have rolled up his eyes in horror at such carelessness of etiquette and station.

            As a public man, Governor Andrew was distinguished for quickness, perspicasity, and energy.  The electric, social element of his being made him an apt reader of human nature, and gave him that prophetic insight into what would arise from the doings of men, which enabled him to see afar off and provide for possible emergencies.  Thus at the time he was appointed Governor, nothing was farther from the thoughts of the body of Northern men than that there could ever be really and in fact a war in America.  All the war talk and war threats that had come from the South had been pleasantly laughed at, as mere political catch words and nursery tales meant to frighten children.

            But Andrew felt the atmosphere chilling with the coming storm, and from the moment of his election, he began making active preparations for war, which were at the time as much laughed at as Noah’s for the flood.

            But the time came which the laughers and skeptics said would not come, and behold on the 15^th of April, the President’s requisition for troops!  Thanks to the previous steps taken by Governor Andrew, the Mas-

 

[333]

 

sachusetts sixth regiment started from Boston in the afternoon of the 17^th, leaving the 4^th all but ready to follow.  Only one day was necessary to get a thousand men started—and this company was the first that entered Washington in uniform and with all the moral effect of uniformed soldiers.  This leads us to the celebrated story of the blue overcoats, which is this:  Shortly after Lincoln’s election, Benjamin F. Butler took tea with Jefferson Davis in Washington, and there satisfied himself in personal conversation that a war must be the result of the machinations that were going on.  He posted to Boston and communicated what he knew to Governor Andrew, who immediately called a secret session of the legislature in which he told the crisis and asked for an appropriation to get troops in readiness.  They voted twenty-five thousand dollars which Governor Andrew put into arms, ammunition and stores for an immediate equipment for the field.  Among other things, he had two or three thousand army overcoats made and stored in the State house.

            When the call came, the sixth regiment had not half a quota, but was immediately made up by the fiery zeal of enlisting citizens, who contended for places and even paid large bounties to buy the chance to go.  They came into Boston an army of zealous new recruits.  The Governor uniformed them at one stroke with his overcoats, and had each man’s outfit ready for him so that in one day they were marching from Boston to the capital; and in six days, on Sunday, he was able to announce to the government that the whole quota of men required of Massachusetts were already

 

[334]

 

either in Washington or in Fortress Monroe, on their way thither.

            When news came back of the fight in Baltimore, and the murder of some of his brave men, Andrew sent a telegram which showed that if he did not care to wear the uniform of a Massachusetts Governor, he knew how to assert the honor of Massachusetts, and to make other States feel that she had a Chief Magistrate in whose sight the blood of every Massachusetts man was sacred.

            He telegraphed to the Mayor of Baltimore:

            “I pray you let the bodies of our Massachusetts soldiers, dead in Baltimore, be laid out, preserved in ice, and tenderly sent forward by express to me.  All expenses will be paid by the commonwealth.”

            The tender and fatherly feeling expressed in this telegram is the key note to all Governor Andrew’s conduct of the war.  Though he would not waste one cent on the trappings of rank, or his own personal dignity or convenience, he gave unlimited orders for marks of tender and delicate devotion to even the remains of the brave who had fallen for their country.

            In the same manner he gave himself no rest, in his labors for the families of the brave men who were in the field.  This interest was the deeper, the humbler the walk in life of its objects.

            The British minister, Sir Frederick Bruce, once called upon him at the State House, and found the room nearly filled with colored women who had come to hear news of fathers, brothers and sons enlisted in the black regiments of Massachusetts.  He waited patiently while the Governor inquired into the sorrows

 

[335]

 

and grievances, and listened to the perplexities of these poor anxious souls, and tried in his hopeful cheery way to smooth away difficulties and inspire hope.  It was not till the humblest and poorest had had their say, that the turn of the British Minister came, who, as he shook the Governor’s hand, said that the scene before him had given him a new idea of the paternal character of a Republican Government.

            Of a like nature is another anecdote, one of many which since the Governor’s death, have risen like flowers upon his grave.

            A poor woman, the wife of a soldier, came to his room to have some business done in relation to the pension of a poorer sister.  The Governor told her that her application must be made at another bureau in another part of the State house.  Observing something of delicacy and timidity in her air, he asked her where she lived and finding it out of Boston, enquired if she had any friends or relations in the city with whom she could rest during the hours before the opening of the office.  Finding that she was utterly a stranger in Boston, and evidently in delicate health, the Governor provided her a sofa in a private nook and told her to rest herself, and offered her from his own frugal stores a glass of wine and a cracker for refreshment.  The fatherly kindness and consideration of his manner was more even, than the favors he gave.

            His sympathy with the soldiers in the field was a sort of personal identification.  He put himself into the Massachusetts army and could say as Paul said of the churches:  “who is weak, and I am not weak?  who

 

[336]

 

is offended, and I burn not?”  One incident illustrative of this is thus related by Edwin Whipple in his eulogy:

            Receiving, in depth of winter, an urgent request from the War Office that a regiment, not yet properly equipped, should be sent immediately to Washington, he despatched it on the assurance that all its wants should be supplied on its arrival.  Hearing that it had been stopped on the way, and that it was undergoing cruel privations, he started instantly for the camp, determined at least to share the misery he might not be able to relieve; and he would not budge an inch until the regiment was sent on to its destination.  Indeed he would have blushed to enter heaven, carrying thither the thought that he had regarded his own comfort rather than the least duty he owed to the poorest soldier-citizen.

            The proclamations of Governors, Presidents and public men have generally been mere stately generalities and formalities.  But with the great stirring of the deeper religious feelings of the community, these papers on the part of our public men have become individual and human—animated by a deeply religious spirit.

            The proclamations of Governor Andrew for the usual State Thanksgivings and fasts, customary in Massachusetts were peculiar and unusual documents, and show more than any thing else how strongly the spirit and traditions of his old Puritan ancestry wrought in him, and how completely his mind was permeated with the Hebraistic imagery of the Old Testament.

            His first thanksgiving proclamation after the commencement of the war, is a document worth preserving entire.

 

[337]

 

            By His Excellency John A. Andrew, Governor:  A proclamation for a day of Public Thanksgiving and Praise.

 

            “The example of the Fathers, and the dictates of piety and gratitude, summon the people of Massachusetts, at this, the harvest season, crowning the year with the rich proofs of the Wisdom and Love of God, to join in a solemn and joyful act of united Praise and Thanksgiving to the Bountiful Giver of every good and perfect gift.

            “I do, therefore, with the advice and consent of the Council, appoint Thursday, the twenty-first day of November next—the same being the anniversary of that day, in the year of our Lord sixteen hundred and twenty, on which the Pilgrims of Massachusetts, on board the May Flower, united themselves in a solemn and written compact of government—to be observed by the people of Massachusetts as a day of Public Thanksgiving and Praise.  And I invoke its observance by all people with devout and religious joy.

            “Sing aloud unto God, our strength; make a joyful noise unto the God of Jacob.

            “Take a Psalm and bring hither the timbrel, the pleasant harp with psaltery.

            “Blow up the trumpet in the new moon, in the time appointed, on our solemn feast day.

            “For this was a statute for Israel, and a law of the God of Jacob.  Psalms 81, v. 1 to 4.

            “O bless our God, ye people, and make the voice of his praise to be heard:

            “Which holdeth our soul in life, and suffereth not our feet to be moved.

 

[338]

 

            “For thou, O God, hath proved us; thou hast tried us, as silver is tried.  Psalms 66, v. 8 and 9.

            “Let us rejoice in God and be thankful for the fullness with which he has blessed us in our basket and in our store, giving large rewards to the toil of the husband-man, so that ‘our oaths drop fatness.’

            “For the many and gentle alleviations of the hardships which in the present time of public disorder have afflicted the various pursuits of industry.

            “For the early evidence of the reviving energies of the business of the people:

            “For the measure of success which has attended the enterprise of those who go down to the sea in ships, of those who search the depths of the ocean to add to the food of man, and of those whose busy skill and handicraft combine to prepare for various use the crops of the earth and sea:

            “For the advantages of sound learning, placed within the reach of all children of the people, and the freedom and alacrity with which these advantages are embraced and improved:

            “For the opportunities of religious instruction and worship, universally enjoyed by consciences untrammeled by any human authority:

            “For the redemption of the world by Jesus Christ, for the means of grace and the hope of glory:

            “And with one accord let us bless and praise God for the oneness of heart, mind and purpose in which he has united the people of this ancient Commonwealth for the defence of the rights, liberties, and honor, of our beloved country.

 

[339]

 

            “May we stand forever in the same mind, remembering the devoted lives of our fathers, the precious inheritance of freedom received at their hands, the weight of glory which awaits the faithful, and the infinity of blessing which it is our privilege, if we will, to transmit to the countless generations of the future.

            “And while our tears flow, in a stream of cordial sympathy, with the daughters of our people, just now bereft, by the violence of the wicked and rebellious, of the fathers and husbands and brothers and sons, whose heroic blood has made verily sacred the soil of Virginia, and mingling with the waters of the Potomac, has made the river now and forever ours; let our souls arise to God on the wings of Praise, in thanksgiving that He has again granted to us the privilege of living unselfishly, and of dying nobly, in a grand and righteous cause:

            “For the precious and rare possession of so much devoted valor and heroism:

            “For the sentiment of pious duty which distinguished our fathers in the camp and in the field:

            “And for the sweet and blessed consolations which accompany the memories of these dear sons of Massachusetts on to immortality:

            “And in our praise let us also be penitent.  Let us ‘seek the truth and ensue it,’ and prepare our minds for whatever duty shall be manifested hereafter.

            “May the controversy in which we stand be found worthy in its consummation of the heroic sacrifices of the people and the precious blood of their sons, of the doctrine and faith of the fathers, and consistent with the honor of God and with justice to all men.

 

[340]

 

            “And,

            “’Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered; let them also that hate him, flee before him.’

            “’As smoke is driven away, so drive those away.’  Psalms, 68, v. 1 and 2.

            “’Scatter them by thy power, and bring them down, O Lord, our shield.’  Psalms, 59, v. 11.

            Given at the Council Chamber, this thirty-first day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-one, and the eighty-sixth of the Independence of the United States of America.

                                                                                                                        JOHN A. ANDREW.

 

“By His Excellency the Governor, with the advice and consent of the Council.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                Oliver Warner, Secretary.

            “God save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”

 

            The next year, 1862, the annual thanksgiving proclamation has the following characteristic close:

            “Rising to the height of our great occasion, re-enforced by courage, conviction and faith, it has been the privilege of our country to perceive, in the workings of Providence, the opening ways of a sublime Duty.  And to Him who hath never deserted the faithful, unto Him ‘who gathereth together the outcasts of Israel, who healeth the broken in heart,’ we owe a new song of thanksgiving.  ‘He sheweth his word unto Jacob, his statutes and his judgments unto Israel.  He has not dealt so with any nation.’

            “Putting aside all fear of man, which bringeth a snare, may this people put on the strength which is the divine promise and gift to the faithful and obedi-

 

[341]

 

ent; ‘Let the high praises of God be in their mouth, and a two edged sword in their hand.’  Not with malice and wickedness, but with sincerity and truth, let us keep this feast; and while we ‘eat the fat and drink the sweet, forget not to send a portion to him for whom nothing is prepared.’  Let us remember on that day the claims of all who are poor, or desolate, or oppressed, and pledge the devotion of our lives to the rescue of our country from the evils of rebellion, oppression and wrong; and may we all so order our conduct hereafter, that we may neither be ashamed to live, nor afraid to die.”

            When the war was over, and the victory won, the generous and brotherly spirit of Governor Andrew showed itself in the instant outflowing of charity towards our misguided and suffering brethren, and he was one of the first and warmest to respond to the cry for aid to the starving thousands at the South.  “I was for a vigorous prosecution of the war while there was a war,” he said, “but now the war is over, I am for a vigorous prosecution of the peace.”

            It is not generally known that the moment the national flag made Richmond a safe place to be visited by northern men, teachers were at once sent from Boston to found a series of common schools for the poor white children of Richmond.  The building formerly employed as a laboratory for the preparing of torpedos and other implements of war, was converted into a school room for these poor vagrants, who had suffered from cold, hunger and neglect during the chances of the war.  The teachers carried with them not only school books for the children, but gifts of

 

[342]

 

clothing and supplies of food, whereby they carried comfort to many a poor family.  In this most peculiarly Christian work, Governor Andrew sympathized deeply.  His was a nature that, while it could be surpassed by none in energetic resistance to wrong, was ever longing the rather to express itself in deeds of kindness.

            Governor Andrew’s farewell address to the legislature of Massachusetts was a state paper worthy of the State and worthy of him.  We shall make a few extracts:

            “At the end of five years of executive administration, I appear before a convention of the two Houses of her General Court, in the execution of a final duty.  For nearly all that period, the Commonwealth, as a loyal State of the American Union, has been occupied within her sphere of co-operation, in helping to maintain, by arms, the power of the nation, the liberties of the people, and the rights of human nature.

            “Having contributed to the army and the navy—including regulars, volunteers, seamen and marines, men of all arms, and officers of all grades, and of the various terms of service—an aggregate of one hundred and fifty-nine thousand one hundred and sixty-five men; and having expended for the war, out of her own treasury, twenty-seven million seven hundred and five thousand one hundred and nine dollars,—besides the expenditures of her cities and towns, she has maintained, by the unfailing energy and economy of her sons and daughters, her industry and thrift even in the waste of war.  She has paid promptly, and in gold, all interest on her bonds—including the old and

 

[343]

 

the new—guarding her faith and honor with every public creditor, while still fighting the public enemy; and now, at last, in retiring from her service, I confess the satisfaction of having first seen all of her regiments and batteries (save two battalions) returned and mustered out of the army; and of leaving her treasury provided for, by the fortunate and profitable negotiation of all the permanent loan needed or foreseen—with her financial credit maintained at home and abroad, her public securities unsurpassed, if even equaled, in value in the money market of the world by those of any State or of the Nation.

          *                         *                         *                         *                         *                         *                    *

            “But, perhaps, before descending for the last time from this venerable seat, I may be indulged in some allusion to the broad field of thought and statesmanship, to which the war itself has conducted us.  As I leave the Temple where, humbled by my unworthiness, I have stood so long, like a priest of Israel sprinkling the blood of the holy sacrifice on the altar—I would fain contemplate the solemn and manly duties which remain to us who survive the slain, in honor of their memory and in obedience of God.”

            The Governor then goes on to state his views of reconstruction, and we will say no state paper ever more truly expressed the Christian idea of statesmanship as applied to the most profound problem of modern times.

            In conclusion, it seems to us that Governor Andrew so fully lived in the spirit of the old Christian Governors of Massachusetts, that the words of Cotton Mather, in his mourning for Governor Winthrop, fully

 

[344]

 

apply to him:  “We are now,” he says, “to mourn for a governor who has been to us a friend in his counsel for all things, help for our bodies by physic, for our estate by law, and of whom there was no fear of his becoming an enemy, like the friends of David; a governor who hath been unto us as a brother; not usurping authority over the church; often speaking his advice, and often contradicted, even by young men, and some of low degree; yet not replying, but offering satisfaction when any supposed offences have arisen; a governor who has been to us as a mother, parent-like distributing his goods to brethren and neighbors at his first coming, and gently bearing our infirmities without taking notice of them.”

            It is pleasant to record for the honor of republics, that while the disinterestedness of Governor Andrew had left him in honorable poverty, the contributions of Boston and Massachusetts immediately flowed in to supply to his family that estate which their father’s patriotism and devotion did not allow him to seek for them.  There must have been thousands of grateful hearts in Massachusetts, in homes of comparative indigence whence have come joyful contributions to that testimonial of Massachusetts to her beloved and faithful citizen Governor.