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That episode ended, he returned to store-keeping; but he had come to see that the law was the surest road to political preferment, and so he spent such leisure as he had in study, and in 1836 was admitted to the bar. As has been remarked before, the requirements for admission were anything but prohibitory, most lawyers sharing the oft-quoted opinion of Patrick Henry that the only way to learn law was to practise it. Lincoln decided to establish himself at Springfield, opened an office there, and for the next twenty years, practised law with considerable success, riding from one court to another, and gradually extending his circle of acquaintances. He even became prosperous enough to marry, and in 1842, after a courtship of the most peculiar description, married a Miss Mary Todd—a young woman somewhat above him in social station, and possessed of a sharp tongue and uncertain temper which often tried him severely.
It was inevitable, of course, that he should become interested again in politics, and he threw in his fortunes with the Whig Party, serving two or three terms in the state legislature and one in Congress. All of this did much to temper and chasten his native coarseness and uncouthness, but he was still just an average lawyer and politician, with no evidence of greatness about him, and many evidences of commonness. Then, suddenly, in 1858, he stood forth as a national figure, in a contest with one of the most noteworthy men in public life, Stephen A. Douglas.
Douglas was an aggressive, tireless and brilliant political leader, the acknowledged head of the Democratic party, and had represented Illinois in the Senate for many years. He had a great ambition to be President, had missed the nomination in 1852 and 1856, but was determined to secure it in 1860, and was carefully building to that end. His term as senator expired in 1858, and his re-election seemed essential to his success. Of his re-election he had no doubt, for Illinois had always been a Democratic state, though it was becoming somewhat divided in opinion. The southern part was largely pro-slavery, but the northern part, including the rapidly-growing city of Chicago, was inclined the other way. This division of opinion made Douglas's part an increasingly difficult one, for pro-slave and anti-slave sentiment were as irreconcilable as fire and water.
Lincoln, meanwhile, had been active in the formation of the new Republican party in the state, had made a number of strong speeches, and, on June 16, 1858, the Republican convention resolved that: "Hon. Abraham Lincoln is our first and only choice for United States senator to fill the vacancy about to be created by the expiration of Mr. Douglas's term of office." A month later, Lincoln challenged Douglas to a series of joint debates. Douglas at once accepted, never doubting his ability to overwhelm his obscure opponent, and the famous duel began which was to rivet national attention and give Lincoln a national prominence.
The challenge on Lincoln's part was a piece of superb generalship. In such a contest, he had everything to gain and nothing to lose. Whatever the result, the fact that he had crossed swords with so renowned a man as Stephen A. Douglas would give him a kind of reflected glory. But in addition to that, he had the better side of the question. His course was simple; he was seeking the support of anti-slavery people; Douglas's task was much more complex, for he wished to offend neither northern nor southern Democrats, and he soon found himself offending both. To carry water on both shoulders is always a risky thing to attempt, and Douglas soon found himself fettered by the awkward position he was forced to maintain; while Lincoln, free from any such handicap, could strike with all his strength.
His stand from the first was a bold one—so bold that many of his followers regarded it with consternation and disapproval. In his speech accepting the nomination, he had said, "I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. It will become all one thing or all the other," and he pursued this line of argument in the debates alleging that the purpose of the pro-slavery men was to make slavery perpetual and universal, and pointing to recent history in proof of the assertion. When asked by Douglas whether he considered the negro his equal, he answered: "In the right to eat the bread which his own hand earns, he is my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man." He was not an abolitionist, and declared more than once that he had "no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists," that he had "no lawful right to do so," but only to prohibit it in "any new country which is not already cursed with the actual presence of the evil."
Even so skillful a debater as Douglas soon found himself hard put to it to answer Lincoln's arguments, without offending one or the other of the powerful factions whose support he must have to reach the presidency. At the beginning, his experience and adroitness gave him an advantage, which, however, Lincoln's earnestness and directness soon overcame. Tens of thousands of people gathered to hear the debates, they were printed from end to end of the country, and Lincoln loomed larger than ever before the nation; but so far as the immediate result was concerned, Douglas was the victor, for the election gave him a majority of the legislature, and he was chosen to succeed himself in the Senate.
Yet more than once he must have regretted that he had consented to cross swords with his lank opponent, for he had been forced into many an awkward corner. There is a popular tradition that the presidential nomination came to Lincoln unsought; but this is anything but true. On the contrary, in those debates with Douglas, he was consciously laying the foundation for his candidacy two years later. He used every effort to drive Douglas to admissions and statements which would tell against him in a presidential campaign, while he himself took a position which would insure his popularity with the Republican party. So his defeat at the time was of no great moment to him.
He had gained an entrance to the national arena, and he took care to remain before the public. He made speeches in Ohio, in Kansas, and even in New York and throughout New England, everywhere making a powerful impression. To disunion and secession he referred only once or twice, for he perceived a truth which, even yet, some of us are reluctant to admit: that every nation has a right to maintain by force, if it can, its own integrity, and that a portion of a nation may sometimes be justified in struggling for independent national existence. The whole justification of such a struggle lies in whether its cause and basis is right or wrong. So, beneath the question of disunion, was the question as to whether slavery was right or wrong. On this question, of course, northern opinion was practically all one way, while even in the South there were many enemies of the institution. The world was outgrowing what was really a survival of the dark ages.
When the campaign for the presidential nomination opened in the winter of 1859-1860, Lincoln was early in the field and did everything possible to win support. He secured the Illinois delegates without difficulty, and when the national convention met at Chicago, in May, the contest soon narrowed down to one between Lincoln and William H. Seward. Let it be said, at once, that Seward deserved the nomination, if high service and party loyalty and distinguished ability counted for anything, and it looked for a time as though he were going to get it, for on the first ballot he received 71 more votes than Lincoln. But in the course of his public career he had made enemies who were anxious for his defeat, his campaign managers were too confident or too clumsy to take advantage of opportunity; Lincoln's friends were busy, and by some expert trading, of which, be it said in justice to Lincoln, he himself was ignorant, succeeded in securing for him a majority of the votes on the third ballot.
So, blindly and almost by chance, was the nomination secured of the one man fitted to meet the crisis. The only other event in American history to be compared with it in sheer wisdom was the selection of Washington to head the Revolutionary army—a selection made primarily, not because of Washington's fitness for the task, but to heal sectional differences and win the support of the South to a war waged largely in the North.
The nomination, so curiously made, was received with anything but enthusiasm by the country at large. "Honest Abe, the Rail-Splitter," might appeal to some, but there was a general doubt whether, after all, rail-splitting, however honorable in itself, was the best training for a President. However, the anti-slavery feeling was a tie that bound together people of the most diverse opinions about other things, and a spirited canvass was made, greatly assisted by the final and suicidal split in the ranks of the Democracy, which placed in nomination two men, Lincoln's old antagonist, Stephen A. Douglas, representing the northern or moderate element of the party, and John C. Breckenridge, of Kentucky, representing the southern, or extreme pro-slavery element. And this was just the corner into which Lincoln had hoped, all along, to drive his opponents. Had the party been united, he would have been hopelessly defeated, for in the election which followed, he received only a little more than one third of the popular vote; but this was sufficient to give him the northern states, with 180 electoral votes. But let us remember that, in 1860, Abraham Lincoln was the choice for President of very much less than half the people of the country.
The succeeding four months witnessed the peculiar spectacle of the South leisurely completing its arrangements for secession, and perfecting its civil and military organization, while the North, under a discredited ruler of whom it could not rid itself until March 4th, was unable to make any counter-preparation or to do anything to prevent the diversion of a large portion of the arms and munitions of the country into the southern states. It gave the southern leaders, too, opportunity to work upon the feelings of their people, more than half of whom, in the fall of 1860, were opposed to disunion. It should not be forgotten that, however fully the South came afterwards to acquiesce in the policy of secession, it was, in its inception, a plan of the politicians, undertaken, to a great extent, for purposes of self-aggrandizement. They controlled the conventions which, in every case except that of Texas, decided whether or not the state should secede. "We can make better terms out of the Union than in it," was a favorite argument, and many of them dreamed of the establishment of a great slave empire, in which they would play the leading parts.
To the southern leaders, then, the election of Lincoln was the striking of the appointed hour for rebellion. South Carolina led the way, declaring, on December 17, 1860, that the "Union now subsisting between South Carolina and other states, under the name of the United States of America, is hereby dissolved." Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas followed. Opinion at the North was divided as to the proper course to follow. Horace Greeley, in the New York Tribune, said that the South had as good a right to secede from the Union as the colonies had to secede from Great Britain, and, as Greeley afterwards observed, the Tribune had plenty of company in these sentiments. Meanwhile the Southern Confederacy had been formed, Jefferson Davis elected President, and steps taken at once for the organization of an army.
Everyone was waiting anxiously for the inauguration of the new President—waiting to see what his course would be. They were not left long in doubt. His inaugural address was earnest and direct. He said, "The union of these States is perpetual. No State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union. I shall take care that the laws of the Union are faithfully executed in all the States." It was, in effect, a declaration of war, and was so received by the South. Whether or not it was the constitutional attitude need not concern us now.
The story of Lincoln's life for the next five years is the story of the Civil War. How Lincoln grew and broadened in those fateful years, how he won men by his deep humanity, his complete understanding, his ready sympathy; how, once having undertaken the task of conquering rebellion, he never faltered nor turned back despite the awful sacrifices which the conflict demanded; all this has passed into the commonplaces of history. No man ever had a harder task, and no other man could have accomplished it so well.
The emancipation of the slaves, which has loomed so large in history, was in reality, merely an incident, a war measure, taken to weaken the enemy and justifiable, perhaps, only on that ground; the preliminary proclamation, indeed, proposed to liberate the slaves only in such states as were in rebellion on the following first of January. Nor did emancipation create any great popular enthusiasm. The congressional elections which followed it showed a great reaction against anti-slavery. The Democrats carried Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois. For a time the administration was fighting for its life, and won by an alarmingly small margin.
Before the year had elapsed, however, there was a great reversal in public opinion, and at the succeeding election, Lincoln received 212 out of 233 electoral votes. The end of the Confederacy was by this time in sight. A month after his second inauguration, Richmond fell, and five days later, Lee surrendered his army to General Grant. Lincoln at once paid a visit to Richmond and then returned to Washington for the last act of the drama.
The fourteenth of April was Good Friday, and the President arranged to take a small party to Ford's theatre to witness a performance of a farce comedy called "Our American Cousin." The President entered his box about nine o'clock and was given a tumultuous reception. Then the play went forward quietly, until suddenly the audience was startled by a pistol shot, followed by a woman's scream. At the same instant, a man was seen to leap from the President's box to the stage. Pausing only to wave a dagger which he carried in his hand and to shout, "Sic semper tyrannis!" the man disappeared behind the scenes. Amid the confusion, no efficient pursuit was made. The President had been shot through the head, the bullet passing through the brain. Unconsciousness, of course, came instantly, and death followed in a few hours.
Eleven days later, the murderer, an actor by the name of John Wilkes Booth, was surrounded in a barn where he had taken refuge; he refused to come out, and the barn was set on fire. Soon afterwards, the assassin was brought forth with a bullet at the base of his brain, whether fired by himself or one of the besieging soldiers was never certainly known.
It is startling to contemplate the fearful responsibility which Booth assumed when he fired that shot. So far from benefiting the South, he did it incalculable harm, for the North was thoroughly aroused by the deed. Thousands and thousands flocked to see the dead President as he lay in state at the Capitol, and in the larger cities in which his funeral procession paused on its way to his home in Springfield. The whole country was in mourning, as for its father; business was practically suspended, and the people seemed stunned by the great calamity. That so gentle a man should have been murdered wakened, deep down in the heart of the North, a fierce resentment; the feelings of kindliness for a vanquished foe were, for the moment, swept away in anger; and the North turned upon the South with stern face and shining eyes. The wild and foolish assassin brought down upon the heads of his own people such a wrath as the great conflict had not awakened. We shall see how bitter was the retribution.
Not then so fully as now was Lincoln's greatness understood. He has come to personify for us the triumphs and glories, the sadness and the pathos, of the great struggle which he guided. His final martyrdom seems almost a fitting crown for his achievements. It has, without doubt, done much to secure him the exalted niche which he occupies in the hearts of the American people, whom, in a way, he died to save. Had he lived through the troubled period of Reconstruction which followed, he might have emerged with a fame less clear and shining; and yet the hand which guided the country through four years of Civil War, was without doubt the one best fitted to save it from the misery and disgrace which lay in store for it. But speculations as to what might have been are vain and idle. What was, we know; and above the clouds of conflict, Lincoln's figure looms, serene and venerable. Two of his own utterances reveal him as the words of no other man can—his address on the battlefield of Gettysburg, and his address at his second inauguration—but two months after he was laid to rest, James Russell Lowell, at the services in commemoration of the three hundredth anniversary of Harvard College, paid him one of the most eloquent tributes ever paid any man, concluding with the words:
"Great captains, with their guns and drums; Disturb our judgment for the hour, But at last silence comes; These all are gone, and, standing like a tower, Our children shall behold his fame, The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man; Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame; New birth of our new soil, the first American."
On the ticket with Lincoln, the Republicans had placed, as a sop to such pro-slavery sentiment as still existed at the North, a southerner and state rights Democrat named Andrew Johnson. By one of those singular chances of history, Johnson's origin and early years had been very much like Lincoln's. He, too, was born of a "poor white" family; first seeing the light in North Carolina about six weeks before Abraham Lincoln opened his eyes in that rude log cabin in Kentucky. His condition was, if anything, even more hopeless and degraded than Lincoln's, and if any one had prophesied that these two ignorant and poverty-stricken children would one day rise, side by side, to the greatest position in the Republic, he would have been regarded, and justly, as a hopeless madman. But not even to a madman did any such wild idea occur. "Poor whites" were despised throughout the South, even by the slaves; if there was, in the whole United States, any law of caste, it was against these ignorant and shiftless people; and Andrew Johnson, at the age of fifteen, was little better than a young savage. He had never gone to school, he had never seen a book. But one day, he heard a man reading aloud, and the wonder of it quickened a new purpose within him. He induced a friend to teach him the alphabet, and then, borrowing the book, he laboriously taught himself to read. So there was something more than "poor white" in him, after all.
By the time he was eighteen, he had had enough of his shiftless surroundings, and struck out for himself, journeyed across the mountains to Greenville, Tennessee, met there a girl of sixteen named Eliza McCardle, and, with youth's sublime improvidence, married her! As it happened, he did well, for his wife had a fair education, and night after night taught him patiently, until he could read fairly well and write a little. I like to think of that family group, so different from most, and to admire that girl-wife teaching her husband the rudiments of education.
Already, as a result of his lowly birth and the class prejudice he everywhere encountered, young Johnson had conceived that hatred of the ruling class at the South which was to influence his after life so deeply. He had a certain rude eloquence which appealed to the lower classes of the people, and, in 1835, succeeded in gaining an election to the state legislature. He nursed his political prospects carefully, and eight years later, was sent to Congress. He was afterwards twice governor of Tennessee.
It has been said that secession was, in the beginning, a policy of the ruling class in the South and not of the people. It is not surprising, then, that Johnson should have arrayed himself against it, and fought it with all his might. This position made him so prominent, that on March 4, 1862, Lincoln appointed him military-governor of Tennessee—a position which was exactly to Johnson's taste and which he filled well. In this position, he seemed the embodiment of the Union element of the South, and at their national convention in 1864, the Republicans decided that the President's policy of reconstruction for the South would be greatly aided by the presence of a southern man on the ticket, and Johnson was thereupon chosen for the office of Vice-President. On the same day that Lincoln was inaugurated for the second time, Johnson took the oath of office in the Senate chamber, and delivered a speech which created a sensation. He declared, in effect, that Tennessee had never been out of the Union, that she was electing representatives who would soon mingle with their brothers from the North at Washington, and that she was entitled to every privilege which the northern states enjoyed.
Three hours after the death of the President, Andrew Johnson took the oath of office as his successor, but he was regarded with suspicion at both North and South—at the North, because he was believed to be at heart pro-slavery; at the South because of his well-known animosity toward the aristocratic and ruling class. He was also known to be stubborn, high-tempered and intemperate, and he and Congress were soon at sword's point. Johnson was of the opinion that the question of suffrage for the negroes should be left to the several states; a majority of Congress were determined to exact this for their own protection. This was embodied in the so-called Civil Rights Bill, conferring citizenship upon colored men. It was promptly vetoed by the President, and was passed over his veto; soon afterwards the fourteenth amendment was passed, conferring the suffrage upon all citizens of the United States without regard to color or previous condition of servitude. It also was vetoed, and passed over the veto. Johnson was hailed as a traitor by Republicans, and the campaign against him culminated in his impeachment by Congress early in 1868. The trial which followed was the most bitter in the history of the Senate, but Andrew Johnson was acquitted by the failure of the prosecution to secure the two-thirds vote necessary for conviction by a single vote, thirty-five senators voting for conviction and nineteen for acquittal.
Johnson's friends were jubilant, but his power had vanished. The seceded states one by one came back into the Union in accordance with the Reconstruction act which Johnson had vetoed. He failed of the nomination on the Democratic ticket, and after the inauguration of his successor, at once returned to his old home in Tennessee. There he attempted to secure the nomination for United States senator, but his influence was gone and he was defeated. So ended his public life.
It has been rather the fashion to picture Johnson, as an intemperate and bull-headed ignoramus, but such a characterization is far from fair. But for Lincoln's assassination, some such policy of reconstruction as Johnson advocated would probably have been carried out, instead of the policy of fanatics like Thaddeus Stevens, which left the South a prey to the carpet-bagger and the ignorant negro for over a decade. Johnson himself might have accomplished more if he had been of a less violent disposition; but he was ignorant of diplomacy, incapable of compromise, and so was worsted in the fight. However we may disagree with his policy and dislike his character, let us at least not forget that picture of the "poor white" boy teaching himself to read; and that other of the girl-wife patiently instructing him in the rudiments of writing.
* * * * *
A successful war inevitably gives to its commanders a tremendous popular prestige. We have seen how the battle of New Orleans made Andrew Jackson a national hero, how William Henry Harrison loomed large after the battle of Tippecanoe, and how Zachary Taylor was chosen President as a result of his victories in Mexico. The country was now to undergo another period of military domination, longer lived than those others, as the Civil War was greater than them—a period from which it has even yet not fully recovered.
In 1868, the Republican party nominated unanimously for President the general who had pushed the war to a successful finish, and who had received Lee's surrender, Ulysses Simpson Grant, and he was elected by an overwhelming majority. For the first time in the history of the country, a man had been elected President without regard to his qualifications for the office, for even Jackson had had many years' experience in public affairs. Of such qualifications, Grant had very few. He was egotistical, a poor judge of men, without experience in statesmanship, and unwilling to submit to guidance. As a result, his administration was marked by inefficiency and extravagance, and ended in a swirl of scandal.
Born in Ohio in 1822, and graduated at West Point, he had served through the war with Mexico, resigned from the army, remained in obscurity for six years, during which he made an unsuccessful attempt to support himself in civil life, and entered the army again at the outbreak of the Civil War. From the first he was successful more than any other of the Union generals, not so much because of military genius as from a certain tenacity of purpose with which he fairly wore out the enemy. But a people discouraged by reverses were not disposed to inquire too closely into the reason of his victories, and early in 1864, after a brilliant campaign along the Mississippi, he had been appointed commander-in-chief of the Union army, and began that series of operations against Richmond which cost the North so dear, but which resulted in the fall of the capital of the Confederacy and in Lee's surrender.
A bearded, square-jawed, silent man, he caught the public fancy by two messages, the one of "Unconditional surrender," with which he had answered the demand for terms on the part of the Confederates whom he had entrapped in Fort Donelson; the other, the famous: "I propose to fight it out on this line, if it takes all summer," with which he started his campaign in the Wilderness. Both were characteristic, and if Grant had retired from public life at the close of the Civil War, or had been content to remain commander-in-chief of the army of the United States, his fame would probably have been brighter than it is to-day.
His training, such as it was, had been wholly military and his inaugural address showed his profound ignorance of the work which lay before him—an ignorance all the more profound and unreachable because of his serene unconsciousness of it. He fell at once an easy prey to political demagogues, and before the close of his first administration, demoralization was widespread throughout the government. A large portion of the Republican party, realizing his unfitness for the office, opposed his renomination, and when they saw his nomination was inevitable, broke away and named a ticket of their own, but Grant's victory was a sweeping one.
With this stamp of public approval, the boodlers became bolder and great scandals followed, involving many members of Congress and even some members of the cabinet, but not the President himself, of whose personal honesty there was never any doubt, and in 1873, came the worst panic the country had ever experienced. A political reaction followed, and in 1874 the Democrats carried the country, gaining the House of Representatives by a majority of nearly a hundred.
Following his retirement from office in 1877, Grant made a tour of the world, returning in 1879, to be again a candidate for the presidency, and coming very near to getting the nomination. It was characteristic of the man's egotism that, even yet, he did not realize his unfitness for the office, but thought himself great enough to disregard the precedent which Washington had established. He lived five years longer, the last years of his life rendered miserable by cancer of the throat, which finally killed him.
In the summer of 1876, the Republicans nominated Rutherford B. Hayes, at that time Governor of Ohio, as their candidate for President—a nomination which was a surprise to the country, which had confidently expected that of James G. Blaine. Hayes was by no means a national figure, although he had served in the Union army, had been in Congress, and, as has been said, was governor of Ohio at the time of his nomination. Nor was he a man of more than very ordinary ability, upright, honest, and mediocre. The Democratic candidate was Samuel J. Tilden, a political star of the first magnitude, and the contest which followed was unprecedented in American history.
Tilden received a popular majority of half a million votes, and 184 electoral votes, out of the 185 necessary to elect, without counting the votes from Florida, South Carolina and Louisiana, all of which he had carried on the face of the returns. The Republicans disputed the vote in these states, however, and by the inexorable use of party machinery and carpet-bag government, declared Hayes elected. For a time, so manifest was the partisan bias of this decision, the country seemed on the verge of another Civil War, but Tilden led in wiser council, and Hayes was permitted to take his seat. It is the only instance in a national election where the will of the people at the polls has been defied and overridden.
Hayes was a sincere and honest man, and he felt keenly the cloud which the manner of his election cast over his administration. He was never popular with his party, and no doubt he felt that the debt he owed it for getting him his seat was a doubtful one. His administration was noteworthy principally because he destroyed the last vestiges of carpet-bag government in the South, and left the southern states to work out their own destiny unhampered. He was not even considered for a renomination, and spent the remainder of his life quietly in his Ohio home.
Hayes's successor was another so-called "dark horse," that is, a man of minor importance, whose nomination, was due to the fact that the party leaders could not agree upon any of the more prominent candidates. They were Grant, Blaine and John Sherman, and after thirty-five ballots, it was evident that a "dark horse" must be found. The choice fell upon James Abram Garfield, who was not prominent enough to have made any enemies, and who was as astonished as was the country at large when it heard the news.
Garfield was born in Ohio in 1831, in a little log cabin and to a position in the world not greatly different to Lincoln's. While laboring at various rough trades, he succeeded in preparing himself for college, worked his way through, got into politics, served through the Civil War, and later for eighteen years in Congress, where he made a creditable but by no means brilliant record. He was elected President by a small majority, and enraged the many enemies of James G. Blaine by selecting that astute politician as his secretary of state. One of these, a rattle-brained New Yorker named Charles J. Guiteau, approached the President on July 2, 1881, as he was waiting at a railroad station in Washington, about to start on a journey, and shot him through the body. Death followed, after a painful struggle, two months later.
Obscure, in a sense, as Garfield had been, the man who succeeded him was immeasurably more so. Chester Alan Arthur was a successful New York lawyer, who had dabbled in politics and held some minor appointive offices, his selection as Vice-President being due to the desire of the Republican managers to throw a sop to the Empire State. His administration, however, while marked by no great or stirring event, was for the most part wise and conservative, but James G. Blaine had by this time secured complete control of the party, and Arthur had no chance for the nomination for President. He died of apoplexy within two years of his retirement.
* * * * *
The Republican party had been supreme in the national government for a quarter of a century, and there seemed no reason to doubt that Blaine, its candidate in the campaign of 1884, would at last realize his consuming ambition to be elected President. He had an immense personal prestige, he had outlived the taint of corruption attached to him during the administration of Grant, and he had for years been preparing and strengthening himself for this contest. So he entered it confidently.
But a new issue had arisen—that of the protective tariff, which, originally a war revenue measure, had been formally adopted as a principle of Republicanism, which was hailed by its adherents as a new and brilliant economic device for enriching everybody at nobody's expense, and which had really enriched a few at the expense of the many. The Democrats, with considerable hesitation and ambiguity, pronounced against it, arraigned the Republican party for corruption, and named as their nominee Grover Cleveland, of New York.
Cleveland was born in New Jersey in 1837, the son of a clergyman whose early death threw him upon his own resources. He started west in search of employment, stopped at Buffalo, and afterwards made it his home. He studied law while working as a clerk and copyist, was admitted to the bar in 1859, and in the late seventies was elected mayor of Buffalo on a reform ticket. Almost at once, the country's eyes were fastened upon him. Elected as a reform mayor, he continued to be one after his induction into office. He actually seemed to think that the promises and pledges made by him during his campaign were still binding upon him, and astounded the politicians by proceeding to carry those promises out. So scathing were the veto messages he sent in, one after another, to a corrupt council, that they awakened admiration and respect even among his opponents. The messages, written in the plainest of plain English, aroused the people of the city to the way in which they had been robbed by dishonest officials, they rallied behind him, and his reputation was made. In 1882, his party wanted a reform candidate for governor, and they naturally turned to Cleveland, and he was elected by a plurality of two hundred thousand.
He found the same condition of things on a larger scale at Albany as at Buffalo—a corrupt machine paying political debts with public money—and here, again, he showed the same astonishing regard for pre-election pledges, the same belief in his famous declaration that "a public office is a public trust," and bill after bill was vetoed, while the people applauded. And with every veto came a message stating its reasons in language which did not mince words and which all could understand. He showed himself not only to be entirely beyond the control of the political machine of his own party, but also to possess remarkable moral courage, and he became naturally and inevitably the Democratic candidate for President, since the Democratic platform was in the main an arraignment of Republican corruption and moral decay. The campaign which followed was a bitter one; but Blaine had estranged a large portion of his party, he made a number of bad blunders, and Cleveland was elected. The old party founded by Jefferson, which, beginning with Jefferson's administration, had ruled the country uninterruptedly for forty years, was returned to power, and on an issue which would have delighted Jefferson's heart.
Much to the dismay and disappointment of the politicians, the new President made no clean sweep of Republican officeholders. He took the unheard-of ground that, in the public service, as in any other, good work merited advancement, no matter what the politics of the individual might be. He made some changes, as a matter of course, but he was from the first sturdily in favor of civil service reform. It is worth remarking that a Democratic President was the first to take a decided stand against the principle of "to the victors belong the spoils," first put into practice by another Democratic President, Andrew Jackson, over fifty years before.
His stand, too, on the pension question was startling in its audacity. The shadow of the Civil War still hung over the country; the soldiers who had served in that war had formed themselves into a great, semi-political organization, known as the Grand Army of the Republic, and worked unceasingly for increased pensions, which Congress had found itself unable to refuse. More than that, the members of Congress were in the habit of passing hundreds of special bills, giving pensions to men whose claims had been rejected by the pension department, as not coming within the law. Cleveland took the stand that, unless the soldier had been disabled by the war, he had no just claim to government support, and he vetoed scores of private pension bills, many of which were shown to be fraudulent.
In other ways, his remarkable strength of personality soon became apparent, and his determination to do what he thought his duty, regardless of consequences. His message of December, 1887, fairly startled the country. It was devoted entirely to a denunciation of the high tariff laws, a subject on which the Democratic leaders had deemed it prudent to maintain a discreet silence since the preceding election, and which many of them hoped would be forgotten by the public. But Cleveland's message brought the question squarely to the front, and made it the one issue of the campaign which followed. Cleveland would have been elected but for the traitorous conduct of the leaders in New York, who had never forgiven him for the way in which, as governor, he had scourged them. New York State was lost to him, and his opponent, Benjamin Harrison, was elected, although his popular vote fell below that of Cleveland by over a hundred thousand.
But Cleveland had his revenge four years later, when, in spite of the protests of the leaders from his own state of New York, he was again nominated on a platform denouncing the tariff, and defeated Harrison by an overwhelming majority. And now came one of those strange instances of party perfidy and party suicide, of which the country has just witnessed a second example. In accordance with the platform pledges, a bill to lower the tariff was at once framed in the House and adopted; but the Senate, although Democratic in complexion, so altered it that it fell far short of carrying out the party pledges. The leader in the Senate was Arthur P. Gorman, of Maryland, and to him chiefly was due this act of treachery. The President refused to sign the bill, and it became a law without his signature. There can be little question that it was the failure of the Democratic party to fulfil its pledges at that critical time which led to its subsequent disruption and defeat.
Twice more did Cleveland startle the country with his extraordinary decision of character. In the summer of 1894, a great railroad strike, centering at Chicago, occasioned an outbreak of violence, which the governor of Illinois did nothing to quell. The President, therefore, declaring that the rioters had no right to interfere with the United States mails, ordered national troops to the scene to maintain order. A year later, when the British Government, involved in a boundary dispute with Venezuela, declared that it did not accept the Monroe Doctrine and would not submit the dispute to arbitration, the President sent a message to Congress, declaring that the Monroe Doctrine must be upheld at whatever cost. The country was thrilled from end to end, the President's course approved, and Great Britain at last consented to arbitration.
And yet, when Cleveland left the presidential chair for the second time, he had entirely lost control of and sympathy with his own party. He had shown little tact in his dealings with the party leaders. He seemed to forget that, after all, these leaders had certain rights and privileges which should be respected; he sometimes blundered through very anxiety to be right. You have heard some men called so upright that they leaned over backward—well, that, occasionally, was Cleveland's fault. He was subjected to such a storm of abuse as no other ex-President ever had to endure. That he felt it keenly there can be no question; but in the years which followed, his sturdy and unassailable character came to be recognized and appreciated, and his death, in the summer of 1908, was the occasion of deep and widespread sorrow.
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We have told how, in 1888, Cleveland was defeated for the presidency by Benjamin Harrison. Harrison was a grandson of the old warrior of Tippecanoe, William Henry Harrison, the successful candidate of the Whig party forty-eight years before. He was an able but not brilliant man, had served through the Civil War, and was afterwards elected senator from Indiana, to which state he had removed from Ohio at an early age. The platform on which he was elected pledged the party to the protective tariff principle, and a high tariff measure, known as the McKinley Bill, was passed, raising duties to a point higher than had ever before been known in the history of the United States.
The Dependent Pension Bill, which Cleveland had vetoed, and which gave a pension to every Union soldier who was from any cause unable to earn a living, was also passed. But these policies did not appeal to the public; besides which, Harrison, although a man of integrity and ability, was popular with neither the rank nor file of his party, through a total lack of personal magnetism, and though he received the nomination, Cleveland easily defeated him. The remainder of his life was passed quietly at his Indiana home.
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We have seen how Cleveland's independence and want of tact estranged him from his party, and the party itself was soon to run upon virtual shipwreck, under the guidance of strange leaders. A word must be said, in this place, of the extraordinary man who led it three times to defeat.
When the Democratic national convention met in Chicago in 1896, one of the delegates from Nebraska was a brilliant and eloquent lawyer named William Jennings Bryan. He had gained some prominence in his state, and had served in Congress for four years, but he was practically unknown when he arose before the convention and made a free-silver speech which fairly carried the delegates off their feet. Good oratory is rare at any time; its power can hardly be overestimated, especially in swaying a crowd; and Bryan was one of the greatest orators that ever addressed a convention.
His nomination for the Presidency followed, and the result was the practical dismemberment of the Democratic party. For Bryan was a Populist, as far as possible removed from the fundamental principles of Democracy, advocating strange socialistic measures; and the conservative element of the party regarded him and his theories with such distrust that it put another ticket in the field, and he was badly beaten. Twice more he led the party in presidential campaigns, each time being defeated more decisively than the last. His engaging personality, his ready oratory, and his supreme gifts as a politician won for him a vast number of devoted friends, who believed, and who still believe, in him absolutely; but the country at large, apparently, will have none of him.
* * * * *
The Republican nominee in 1896 was William McKinley, of Ohio, best known as the framer of the McKinley tariff bill. Born in Ohio in 1843, he had served through the Civil War, had been a member of Congress and twice governor of Ohio. He was a thorough party man, and modified his former views on the silver question to conform with the platform on which he was nominated; his campaign manager, Mark Hanna, was one of the most astute politicians the country had ever produced, and raised a campaign fund of unprecedented magnitude; all of which, combined with the disintegration of the Democratic party, gave McKinley a notable victory.
The great event of his first administration was the war with Spain, undertaken to free Cuba, into which McKinley, be it said to his credit, was driven unwillingly by public clamor, cunningly fostered by a portion of the press. Its close saw the purchase of the Philippines, and the entrance of the United States upon a colonial policy believed by many to be wholly contrary to the spirit of its founders.
There was never any question of McKinley's renomination, for his prestige and personal popularity were immense, and his victory was again decisive. He had broadened rapidly, had gained in statesmanship, had acquired a truer insight into the country's needs, and was now freed, to a great extent, from party obligations. Great hopes were built upon his second administration, and they would no doubt have been fulfilled, in part at least; but a few months after his inauguration, he was shot through the body by an irresponsible anarchist while holding a public reception at Buffalo, and died within the week. The years which have elapsed since his death enable us to view him more calmly than was possible while he lived, and the country has come to recognize in him an honest and well-meaning man, of more than ordinary ability, who might have risen to true statesmanship and won for himself a high place in the country's history had he been spared.
On the ticket with McKinley, a young New Yorker named Theodore Roosevelt had been elected Vice-President. Roosevelt had long been prominent in his native state as an enthusiastic reformer, had made a sensational record in the war with Spain, and, on his return home, had been elected governor by popular clamor, rather than by the will of the politicians, to whom his rough-and-ready methods were extremely repugnant. So when the national convention was about to be held, they conceived the great idea of removing him from state politics and putting him on the shelf, so to speak, by electing him Vice-President, and the plan was carried out in spite of Roosevelt's protests. Alas for the politicians! It was with a sort of poetic justice that he took the oath as President on the day of McKinley's death, September 14, 1901, while they were still rubbing their eyes and wondering what had happened.
His evident honesty of purpose, combined with an impulsive and energetic temperament, which led him into various indiscretions, soon made him a popular hero. He was a sort of Andrew Jackson over again, and in 1904, he was sent back to the presidency by an overwhelming majority. For a time he was, indeed, the central figure of the republic. His energy was remarkable; he had a hand in everything; but many people, after a time, grew weary of so tumultuous and strenuous a life, and drew away from him, while still more were estranged by the undignified and violent controversies in which he became entangled. It is too soon, however, to attempt to give a true estimate of him. Indeed, he is as yet only in mid-career; and what his years to come will accomplish cannot be even guessed.
Despite his controversies with the leaders of his party, he retained sufficient power to dictate the nomination of his successor, William Howard Taft, an experienced jurist and administrator, who is but just entering upon his work as these lines are written, but to whom the American people are looking hopefully for a wise and moderate administration.
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So stands the history of the rulers of the nation. As one looks back at them, one perceives a certain rhythmical rise and fall of merit and attainment, which may roughly be represented thus:
Washington freed us from the power of England; Lincoln freed us from the power of slavery; the third man in this great trio will be he who will solve the vast economic problems which are the overshadowing issues of our day. Will he be a Democrat or Republican—or of some new party yet to be born? In any event, let us hope that Fate will not long withhold him!
SUMMARY
LINCOLN, ABRAHAM. Born in Hardin County, Kentucky, February 12, 1809; served in Black Hawk war, 1832; admitted to the bar, 1836; began practice of law at Springfield, Illinois, 1837; Whig member Illinois legislature, 1834-42; member of Congress, 1847-49; Republican candidate for United States senator and held series of debates with Stephen A. Douglas, 1858; elected President, 1860; inaugurated, March 4, 1861; re-elected President, 1864; began second term, March 4, 1865; entered Richmond with Federal army, April 4, 1865; shot by John Wilkes Booth, at Ford's Theatre, Washington, April 14, 1865, and died the following day.
JOHNSON, ANDREW. Born at Raleigh, North Carolina, December 29, 1808; member of Congress from Tennessee, 1843-53; governor of Tennessee, 1853-57; United States senator, 1857-62; military governor of Tennessee, 1862-64; inaugurated Vice-President, March 4, 1865; succeeded Lincoln as President, April 15, 1865; impeached by Congress for high crimes and misdemeanors, but acquitted after a trial lasting from March 23 to May 26, 1868; United States senator from Tennessee, 1875; died in Carter County, Tennessee, July 31, 1875.
GRANT, ULYSSES SIMPSON. Born at Point Pleasant, Clermont County, Ohio, April 27, 1822; graduated at West Point, 1843; served through Mexican war, 1846-48; left the army in 1854, and settled in St. Louis; removed to Galena, Illinois, 1860; appointed colonel, June 17, 1861; brigadier-general, August 7, 1861; captured Fort Donelson, February 16, 1862; promoted to major-general of volunteers and made commander of the Army of the District of West Tennessee, March, 1862; gained battle of Shiloh, April 6-7, 1862; captured Vicksburg, July 4, 1863, and made major-general in the regular army; won battle of Chattanooga, November 23-25, 1863; made lieutenant-general and commander-in-chief of American armies, March, 1864; took up his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac, fought battles of Wilderness, and received Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House, April 9, 1865; made general, July 25, 1866; elected President, 1868, and re-elected, 1872; made tour of the world, 1877-79; unsuccessful candidate for nomination for presidency, 1880; made general on the retired list, March 4, 1885; died at Mount McGregor, New York, July 23, 1885.
HAYES, RUTHERFORD BIRCHARD. Born at Delaware, Ohio, October 4, 1822; served in the Union army during the Civil War, being brevetted major-general of volunteers in 1864; member of Congress from Ohio, 1865-67; governor of Ohio, 1868-72 and 1876; Republican candidate for President, 1876; declared elected by the Electoral Commission, March 2, 1877, and served, 1877-81; died at Fremont, Ohio, January 17, 1893.
GARFIELD, JAMES ABRAM. Born at Orange, Cuyahoga County, Ohio, November 19, 1831; instructor in and later president of Hiram College, Ohio, 1856-61; joined the Union army as lieutenant-colonel of volunteers, 1861; defeated General Humphrey Marshall at the battle of Middle Creek, January 10, 1862; promoted brigadier-general, 1862; promoted major-general, 1863; member of Congress, 1863-80; elected United States senator, 1880; elected President, 1880; inaugurated, March 4, 1881; shot in Washington by Guiteau, July 2, 1881; died at Elberon, New Jersey, September 19, 1881.
ARTHUR, CHESTER ALAN. Born at Fairfield, Vermont, October 5, 1830; graduated at Union College, 1848; taught school and practiced law in New York City; inspector-general of New York troops, 1862; collector of the port of New York, 1871-78; elected Vice-President, 1880; succeeded Garfield as President, September 20, 1881, serving to March 4, 1885; defeated for Republican nomination, 1884; died at New York, November 18, 1886.
CLEVELAND, GROVER. Born at Caldwell, Essex County, New Jersey, March 18, 1837; studied law at Buffalo, New York, and admitted to the bar, 1859; assistant district attorney of Erie County, 1863-66; sheriff of Erie County, 1871-74; Democratic mayor of Buffalo, 1882; governor of New York, 1883-84; elected President, 1884; served as President, 1885-89; advocated a reduction of the tariff in his message to Congress in December, 1887; defeated for re-election, 1888; re-elected President, 1892; served, 1893-97; died at Princeton, New Jersey, June 24, 1908.
HARRISON, BENJAMIN. Born at North Bend, Ohio, August 20, 1833; graduated at Miami University, 1852; studied law and practiced at Indianapolis; served in Civil War and was brevetted brigadier-general; United States senator, 1881-87; elected President, 1888; defeated for re-election, 1892; died at Indianapolis, March 13, 1901.
MCKINLEY, WILLIAM. Born at Niles, Trumbull County, Ohio, January 29, 1844; served in the Civil War, attaining the rank of major; member of Congress, 1877-91; elected governor of Ohio, 1891; re-elected, 1893; elected President, 1896; re-elected, 1900; shot by an assassin at Buffalo, New York, and died there, September 14, 1901.
ROOSEVELT, THEODORE. Born at New York City, October 27, 1858; graduated at Harvard, 1880; New York state assemblyman, 1882-84; resided on North Dakota ranch, 1884-86; national Civil Service Commissioner, 1889-95; president New York Police Board, 1895-97; assistant secretary of the navy, 1897-98; resigned to organize regiment of Rough Riders and served through war with Spain; governor of New York, 1899-1900; elected Vice-President, 1900; succeeded to presidency on death of McKinley, September 14, 1901; elected President, 1904; retired from presidency, March 4, 1909.
TAFT, WILLIAM HOWARD. Born at Cincinnati, Ohio, September 15, 1857; graduated at Yale, 1878; admitted to bar, 1880; judge Superior Court, 1887-90; solicitor-general of the United States, 1890-92; United States circuit judge, 1892-1900; President Philippine Commission, 1900-04; secretary of war, 1904-08; elected President, 1908; inaugurated, March 4, 1909.
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CHAPTER V
STATESMEN
If one were asked to name the most remarkable all-around genius this country has produced, the answer would be Benjamin Franklin—whose life was perhaps the fullest, happiest and most useful ever lived in America. There are half a dozen chapters of this series in which he might rightfully find a place, and in which, indeed, it will be necessary to refer to him, for he was an inventor, a scientist, a man of letters, a philanthropist, a man of affairs, a reformer, and a great many other things besides. But first and greatest of all, he was a benign, humorous, kind-hearted philosopher, who devoted the greater portion of his life to the service of his country and of humanity.
Benjamin Franklin was born at Boston in 1706, the fifteenth of a family of seventeen children. His father was a soap-boiler, and was kept pretty busy providing for his family, none of whom, with the exception of Benjamin, ever attained any especial distinction; this being one of those mysteries of nature, which no one has ever been able to explain, and yet which happens so often—the production of an eagle in a brood of common barnyard fowls—a miracle, however, which never happens except when the barnyard fowls are of the human species. Benjamin himself, at first, was only an ugly duckling in no way remarkable.
At the age of ten, he was apprenticed to his brother, who was a printer, and needed a boy to do the dirty work around the office, and thought there was no need of paying good money to an outsider, when it might just as well be kept in the family. So Benjamin went to work sweeping out, and washing up the dirty presses, and making himself generally useful during the day; but—and here is the first gleam of the eagle's feather—instead of going to bed with the sun as most boys did, he sat up most of the night reading such books and papers as he was able to get hold of at the office, or himself writing short articles for the paper which his brother published. These he slipped unsigned under the front door of the office, so that his brother would not suspect they came from him; for no man is a prophet to his own family, and these contributions would have promptly gone into the waste basket had his brother suspected their source. As it was, however, they were printed, and not until Benjamin revealed their authorship did his brother discover how bad they were.
After he had served in the printing office for seven years, Benjamin came to the conclusion that his family would never appreciate him at his real worth. He was like most boys in this, differing from them only in being right. So he sold some of his books, and without saying anything to his father or brother, who would probably have reasoned him out of his purpose with a cowhide whip, he hid himself on board a boat bound for New York. Arrived there, he soon discovered that printers and budding geniuses were in no great demand, and so proceeded on to Philadelphia, partly on foot and partly by water.
Everyone knows the story of how he landed there, with only a few pennies in his pocket, but with a sublime confidence in his ability to make more; how he proceeded to the nearest bakeshop, asked for three pennies' worth of bread, and when he was given three loaves, took them rather than reveal his ignorance by confessing that he really wanted only one loaf, and walked up Market street, with a loaf under each arm, and eating the third. He has told the story in his inimitable way in his autobiography, a work which gives him high place among American men of letters. Small wonder that red-cheeked Deborah Reed smiled at him from the door of her father's house—but Franklin saw the smile and remembered it, and though it brought them both distress enough at first, he asked Deborah to be his wife, six years later, and she consented, and a good wife she made him. Years afterward, when he was Ambassador to France and the pet of the French court, the centre of perhaps the most brilliant and witty circle in Europe, the talk, one day, chanced to turn upon tailors, of whom the company expressed the utmost detestation. Franklin listened with a quiet smile, which some one at last observed.
"Don't you agree," he was asked, "that tailors are a conscienceless and extortionate class?"
"No," he answered, still smiling; "how could I? You see, I'm in love with mine."
And he told proudly and with shining eyes how the clothes he wore had been spun into thread and woven into cloth and cut out and fitted and sewed together by his wife's own hands; and it was no doubt Deborah he had in mind when he said: "God bless all good women who help men to do their work."
The young adventurer had no difficulty in finding employment as a printer, for printers were in demand in that Quaker city. He prospered from the first, and at the age of twenty-four, had a little business of his own, and was editing the Pennsylvania Gazette. Two years later, he began the publication of an almanac purporting to be written by one Richard Saunders, and which soon won an immense reputation as "Poor Richard's Almanac." As an almanac, it did not differ much from others, but, in addition to the usual information about the tides and changes of the moon and seasons of the year, it contained a wealth of wise and witty sayings, many of which have passed into proverbs and are in common use to-day. Here are a few of them:
Virtue and a trade are a child's best portions.
Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.
The way to be safe is never to be secure.
When you are good to others, you are best to yourself.
Well done is better than well said.
God helps them that help themselves.
Wish not so much to live long as to live well.
He that won't be counselled can't be helped.
That he was a philosopher in deed as well as in word was soon to be proved, for, at the age of forty-two, he did the wisest thing a man can do, but for which very few have courage. He had won an established position in the world and as much wealth as he felt he needed, so he sold his business, intending to devote the remainder of his life to science, of which he had always been passionately fond. Already he had founded the Philadelphia Library and the American Philosophical Society, had invented the Franklin stove, and served as postmaster of Philadelphia, and a few years later, he established the institution which is now the University of Pennsylvania. It was at about this time that, by experimenting with a kite, he proved lightning to be a discharge of electricity, and suggested the use of lightning rods.
But his scientific studies were destined to be interrupted, for his country called him, and the remainder of his life was passed in her service, first as agent in London for Pennsylvania, where he did everything possible to avert the Revolution; then as a member of the Continental Congress, and one of the committee of five which drew up the Declaration of Independence; then as ambassador to France, where, practically unaided, he succeeded in effecting the alliance between the two countries which secured the independence of the colonies; and finally as President of Pennsylvania and a member of the Constitutional Convention. His last public act was to petition Congress to abolish slavery in the United States. If one were asked to name the three men who did most to secure the independence of their country, they would be George Washington, who fought her battles, Robert Morris, who financed them, and Benjamin Franklin, who secured the aid of France. When Thomas Jefferson, who had been selected as minister to France, appeared at the court of Louis XVI, he presented his papers to the Comte de Vergennes.
"You replace Mr. Franklin?" inquired the nobleman, glancing at the papers.
"No, monsieur," Jefferson replied, "I succeed him. No one could replace him."
And that answer had more truth than wit.
Honors came to Franklin such as no other American has ever received, but he remained from first to last the same quiet, deep-hearted, and unselfish man, whose chief motive was the promotion of human welfare. He had his faults and made his mistakes; but time has sloughed them all away, and there are few sources of inspiration which can compare with the study of his life.
* * * * *
No family has loomed larger in American affairs than the Adams family of Massachusetts. John Adams, President himself and living to see his own son President—an experience which, probably no other man will ever enjoy—had a second cousin who played a much more important part than he did in securing the independence of the United States. His name was Samuel Adams, and when he graduated from Harvard in 1740, at the age of eighteen, his thesis discussed the question, "Whether it be lawful to resist the supreme magistrate if the commonwealth cannot otherwise be preserved," and answered it in the affirmative.
Samuel Adams was a silent, stern and deeply religious man, something of a dreamer, a bad manager and constantly in debt; but he was perhaps the first in America to conceive the idea of absolute independence from Great Britain, and he worked for this end unceasingly and to good purpose. The wealthy John Hancock was one of his converts, and it was partly to warn these two of the troops sent out to capture them that Paul Revere took that famous ride to Lexington on the night of April 18, 1775. A month later, when General Gage offered amnesty to all the rebels, Hancock and Adams were especially excepted.
It was Samuel Adams who, perceiving that Virginia was apt to be lukewarm in aiding a war which was to be fought mostly in the North, suggested the appointment of Virginia's favorite son, George Washington, as commander-in-chief of the American army, and who seconded the motion to that effect made by John Adams. He lived to see his dream of independence realized, and his grave in the old Granary burying ground at Boston is one of the pilgrimage places of America.
With his name that of John Hancock is, as we have seen, closely associated. The worldly circumstances of the two were very different, for Samuel Adams was always poor, while John Hancock had fallen heir to one of the greatest fortunes in New England. He was only twenty-seven at the time, and his fortune made a fool of him, as sudden wealth has a way of doing. It was at this time, being young and impressionable, he met Samuel Adams, a silent and reserved man, fifteen years his senior and regarded by his neighbors as a harmless crank. But there was something about him which touched Hancock's imagination—and touched his pocketbook, too, for about the first thing Adams did was to borrow money from him.
Hancock was no doubt glad to lend the money, for he had more than he knew what to do with, and spent it in such a lavish manner that he was soon one of the most popular men in Boston. So when one of his ships was seized for smuggling in a cargo of wine, all his friends and employees got together and paraded the streets, and a lot of boys and loafers joined them, for drink was flowing freely, and pretty soon there was a riot, and the troops were called out and fired a volley and killed five men, and the rest of the mob decided that it was time to go home, and went. And that was the Boston massacre about which you have heard so much that it would almost seem to rank with that of St. Bartholomew. But, as the Irishman remarked, the man who gets his finger pinched makes a lot more racket than the one who gets his head cut off; and the Boston massacre, for all the hullabaloo that was raised about it, was merely an insignificant street riot. No doubt Samuel Adams did his full share in fanning that little spark into a conflagration!
For Adams had acquired great influence over Hancock, and that vapid young man was fond of being seen in the company of the older one. Adams was anxious to secure Hancock for the revolutionary cause, and soon had him so hopelessly entangled that there was no escape for him. On the anniversary of the Boston massacre, he persuaded Hancock to deliver a revolutionary speech, which he had himself prepared, and after that there was a British order out for Hancock's arrest; Adams contrived that Hancock should be one of the three delegates from Massachusetts to the Continental Congress—John and Samuel Adams were the other two—and Hancock was deeply impressed by the honor; at the second Congress, Adams saw to it that his friend was chosen President. In consequence, Hancock was the first signer of the Declaration of Independence, the incident which is the best known in his career. He signed the document in great sprawly letters, remarking grandiloquently, as he did so, "I guess King George can read that without spectacles," and for many years, "John Hancock" was the synonym for a bold signature. He was afterwards governor of Massachusetts for more than a decade, and on one occasion attempted to snub Washington, with very poor success. His body lies in the old Granary burying-ground, only a step from that of Samuel Adams.
* * * * *
One day, while Thomas Jefferson was a student at William and Mary College, at Williamsburg, a young friend named Patrick Henry dropped in to see him, and announced that he had come to Williamsburg to be admitted to the bar.
"How long have you studied law?" Jefferson inquired.
"Oh, for over six weeks," Henry answered.
The story goes that Jefferson advised his friend to go home and study for at least a fortnight longer; but Henry declared that the only way to learn law was to practice it, and went ahead and took the examination, such as it was, and passed!
That was in 1760, and Patrick Henry was twenty-four years old at the time. He had been a wild boy, cared little for books, and had failed as a farmer and as a merchant before turning to law as a last resort. Nor as a lawyer was he a great success, the truth being that he lacked the industry and diligence which are essential to success in any profession; but he had one supreme gift, that of lofty and impassioned oratory. In 1765, as a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, he made the rafters ring and his auditors turn pale by his famous speech against the stamp act; as a delegate to the Continental Congress in 1774, he made the only real speech of the Congress, arousing the delegates from an attitude of mutual suspicion to one of patriotic ardor for a common cause.
"Government," said he, "is dissolved. Where are your landmarks, your boundaries of colonies? The distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, and New Englanders are no more. I am not a Virginian, but an American."
Samuel Adams said afterwards that, but for that speech, which drew the delegates together and made them forget their differences, the Congress would probably have ended in a wrangle. And a year later, again in Virginia, in defense of his resolution to arm the militia, he gave utterance to the most famous speech of all, starting quietly with the sentence, "Mr. President, it is natural for man to indulge in the illusions of hope," and ending with the tremendous cry: "I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!"
That was the supreme moment of Patrick Henry's life. He did a great work after that, as member of the Continental Congress, as commander-in-chief of the Virginia forces, and as governor of the Commonwealth, but never again did he come so near the stars—as, indeed, few men ever do.
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You have all heard the story of Damon and Pythias, true type of devoted friendship, and history abounds in such examples; but sometimes it shows a darker side, and the controlling force in two men's lives will be hate instead of love, and the end will be shipwreck and tragedy. Such a story we are to tell briefly here of the lives of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr.
They were born a year apart. Burr in 1756, at Newark, New Jersey; Hamilton, in 1757, on the little West Indian island of Nevis. Burr was of a distinguished ancestry, his grandfather being the famous Jonathan Edwards; Hamilton's father was an obscure planter whose first name has been lost to history. Burr graduated at Princeton, entered the army, rose to the rank of lieutenant-colonel, and resigned in 1777 to study law, being admitted to the New York bar five years later. Hamilton was sent to New York, entered King's, now Columbia, College, got caught in the rising tide of Revolution, proved himself uncommonly ready with tongue and pen, enlisted, saw the battles of Long Island, Trenton, and Princeton, was appointed aide-de-camp to Washington and acted as his secretary, filling the post admirably, but resigned in a fit of pique over a fancied slight, and repaired to New York to study law. Such, in outline, is the history of these two men until Fate threw them in each other's way.
New York City was the arena where the battle was fought. Within a few years, Hamilton and Burr were the most famous men in the town. They resembled each other strongly in temperament and disposition; each was "passionate, brooking no rivalry; ambitious, faltering at no obstacle; proud with a fiery and aggressive pride; eloquent with the quick wit, the natural vivacity, and the lofty certainty of the true orator." They were too nearly alike to be friends; they became instinctive enemies. Each felt that the other was in the way.
For sixteen years, Burr practiced law in New York, growing steadily in influence. For five of those years, Hamilton did the same. They were the foremost lawyers in the city. No man could stand before them, and when they met on opposite sides of a case, it was, indeed, a meeting of giants. But in 1789, Washington appointed Hamilton his secretary of the treasury, and leaving New York, Hamilton applied himself to the great task of establishing the public credit, laying the basis for the financial system of the nation, which endures until this day. It was a splendid task, splendidly performed, and Hamilton emerged from it the leader of the powerful Federal party.
In 1800, two men were candidates for the presidency. One was Thomas Jefferson and the other was Aaron Burr. Instead of being overwhelmed by the great Virginian, Burr received an equal number of electoral votes, and the contest was referred to Congress for decision. As a Federalist, Burr felt that he should have Hamilton's support, but Hamilton used his great influence against him, stigmatizing him as "a dangerous man," and Jefferson was elected. Four years later, Burr was a candidate for governor of New York, and again Hamilton openly, bitterly, and successfully opposed him, again speaking of him as "a dangerous man."
Smarting under the sting of this second defeat, Burr sent a note to Hamilton asking if the expression, "a dangerous man," referred to him politically or personally. Hamilton sent a sneering reply, and expressed himself as willing to abide by the consequences. It was "fighting language between fighting men"—a quarrel which Hamilton had been seeking for five years and which he had done everything in his power to provoke—and Burr promptly sent a challenge. Hamilton as promptly accepted it, named pistols at ten paces as the weapons, and at seven o'clock on the morning of July 11, 1804, the two men faced each other on the heights of Weehawken, overlooking New York bay. Both fired at the word; Burr's bullet passed through Hamilton's body; Hamilton's cut a twig above Burr's head. Hamilton died next day, and Burr, his political career at an end, buried himself in the West.
Three years later, he was arrested, charged with treason, for attempting to found an independent state within the borders of the Union. He had a wild dream of establishing a great empire to the west of the Mississippi, and had collected arms and men for the expedition, and was on his way down the Mississippi when he was arrested and taken back to Richmond for trial. But his plan could not be proved to be treasonable; indeed, his arrest was due more to the animosity which Jefferson felt toward him, than from any other cause, and, brought to trial a year later, he was acquitted. But his reputation was ruined, there was no hope for him in public life, and his remaining years were spent quietly in the practice of his profession, partly abroad and partly in New York.
It has been too much the habit to picture Burr as a thoroughgoing scoundrel who murdered an innocent man and conspired against his country. As a matter of fact, he did neither. Of the charge of treason he was acquitted, even at a time when public feeling ran high against him, and in the quarrel with Hamilton, it was Hamilton who was at all times the aggressor. Both were brilliant, accomplished and courtly men—even, perhaps, men of genius—but Fate spread a net for their feet, blindly they stumbled into it, and, too proud to retrace their steps, pushed on to the tragic end.
The presiding judge at Burr's trial, not the least of whose achievements was the holding level of the scales of justice on that memorable occasion, was the last of that great school of statesmen who had fought for their country's independence, and who had seen the states united under a common Constitution. John Marshall lived well into the nineteenth century, and his great work was to interpret that Constitution to the country, to give it the meaning which it has for us to-day. Marshall was a Virginian, was just of age at the outbreak of the Revolution, and served in the American army for five years, enlisting as a private and rising to the rank of captain. At the close of the war, he studied law, gained a prominent place in the politics of his state, drew the attention of Washington by his unusual ability, and in 1800 was appointed by him secretary of state. A year later he was made chief justice of the Supreme Court—an appointment little less than inspired in its wisdom.
For thirty-four years, John Marshall occupied that exalted position, interpreting to the new country its organic law, and the decisions handed down by him remain the standard authority on constitutional questions. In clearness of thought, breadth of view, and strength of logic they have never been surpassed. His service to his country was of incalculable value, for he built for the national government a firm, foundation which has stood unshaken through the years.
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So we come to a new era in American history—an era marked by unexampled bitterness of feeling and culminating in the great struggle for the preservation of the Union. Across this era, three mighty giants cast their shadows—Henry Clay and Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun.
Closely and curiously intertwined were the destinies of these three men, Clay was born in 1777; Webster and Calhoun five years later. Calhoun and Clay were Irishmen and hated England; Webster was a Scotchman, and Scotchmen were usually Tories. Calhoun and Clay were southerners, but with a difference, for Calhoun was born in the very sanctum sanctorum of the South, South Carolina, while Clay's life was spent in the border state of Kentucky, so removed from the South that it did not secede from the Union. Webster was a product of Massachusetts. Calhoun and Webster were, in temperament and belief, as far apart as the poles; Clay stood between them, "the great compromiser." Calhoun and Webster were greater than Clay, for they possessed a larger genius and a broader culture; and Webster was a greater man than Calhoun, because he possessed the truer vision. Calhoun died in 1850; Clay and Webster in 1852. For the forty years previous to that, these three men were in every way the most famous and conspicuous in America. Others flashed, meteor-like, into a brief brilliance; but these three burned steady as the stars. They had no real rivals. And yet, though each of them was consumed by an ambition to be President, not one was able to realize that ambition, and their last years were embittered by defeat.
As has been said, Clay was the smallest man of the three. His reputation rests, not upon constructive statesmanship, but upon his ability as a party leader, in which respect he has had few equals in American history, and upon his success in proposing compromises. Born in Virginia, and admitted to the bar in 1797, he moved the same year to Lexington, Kentucky, where his practice brought him rapid and brilliant success. His personality, too, won him many friends, and it was so all his life. "To come within reach of the snare of his speech was to love him," and even to this day Kentucky believes that no statesman ever lived who equalled this adopted son of hers, nor doubts the entire sincerity of his famous boast that he would rather be right than President.
Of course he got into politics. That was his natural and inevitable field. As early as 1806 he was sent to the Senate, and afterwards to the House, of which he was speaker for thirteen years. Three times was he a candidate for the presidency, defeated once by John Quincy Adams, once by Andrew Jackson, and once, when victory seemed almost his, by William Henry Harrison. That other great party leader, James G. Blaine, was to meet a similar fate years later. Henry Clay lacked the deep foresight, the prophetic intuition necessary to statesmanship of the first rank, and some of the achievements which he considered the greatest of his life were in reality blunders which had afterwards to be corrected. But as a compromiser, as a rider of troubled waters, and a pilot at a time when shipwreck seemed imminent and unavoidable, he proved his consummate ability, and merits the gratitude of his country.
Henry Clay and Daniel Webster were leaders in the same great party, and were, for the most part, personal friends as well as political allies. But Webster overshadowed Clay in intellect, however he may have been outdistanced by him in political astuteness. If Clay were the fox, Webster was the lion. As a constitutional lawyer, he has never been excelled; as an orator, no other American has ever equalled him. He had in supreme degree the orator's equipment of a dominant and impressive personality, a moving voice, an eloquent countenance, and a command of words little less than inspired. The last sentences of his reply to Hayne have come ringing down the years, and stand unequalled as sheer eloquence:
"When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the Republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured, bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory as 'What is all this worth'? nor those other words of delusion and folly, 'Liberty first and Union afterwards'; but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart—Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!"
The great audience that listened spellbound to that oration, arose and left the Capitol like persons in a dream. Never were they to forget the effect of that tremendous speech.
But the last years of his life were ruined by his ambition to be President. In spite of his commanding talents, or, perhaps, because of them, he never at any time had a chance of receiving the nomination of his party, and his final defeat in 1852, by Winfield Scott, practically killed him.
Webster was the son of a New Hampshire farmer, who managed to send him to Dartmouth College, from which he graduated in 1801. Four years later he was admitted to the bar at Boston, and in 1812 he was elected to Congress. We find him at once violently opposing the second war with England, for which Clay was working so aggressively. For ten years after that, he devoted himself to the practice of his profession, and soon became the foremost lawyer of New England, especially on constitutional questions. In 1823, he was again sent to Congress; entered the Senate in 1828, and remained in public life practically until his death.
It was in 1830 that he delivered the speech already referred to—perhaps the most remarkable ever heard within the walls of the Capitol. Senator Hayne, of South Carolina, had made a remarkable address, lasting two days, advocating the right of a state to render null and void an unconstitutional law of Congress—in other words, the right of secession from the Union. Two days later, Webster rose to reply. His appearance, always impressive, was unusually so that day; his argument, always close-knit and logical, was the very summation of these qualities; his words seemed edged with fire as he argued that the Constitution is supreme, the Union indissoluble, and that no state has, or can have the right to resist or nullify a national law. It was the greatest oration of America's greatest orator.
Of its effect upon the people who heard it we have spoken; throughout the country it produced a profound impression. The North felt that a new prophet had arisen; the South, a new foeman. The great advocate of nullification, however, was not Hayne, who would be scarcely remembered to-day but for the fact that it was to him Webster addressed his reply, but that formidable giant of a man, John C. Calhoun—the man whom the South felt to be her peculiar representative on the question of state rights, of nullification, and, at last, of slavery. His fate was one of the saddest in American history, for the cause he fought for was a doomed cause, and as he sank into his grave, he saw tottering down upon him the great structure which he had devoted his whole life to upholding.
Not much is known of Calhoun's youth. He was the grandson of an Irish immigrant who had settled in South Carolina, graduated from Yale in 1804, studied law, was admitted to the bar, and, returning to his native state, was, in 1811, elected a member of Congress. That was the beginning of a public career which was to last until his death.
Almost from the first, he was consumed with an ambition to be President, and perhaps would have been, but for an incident so trivial that, under ordinary circumstances, it would have had no consequences. In 1818, as Monroe's secretary of war, Calhoun had occasion at a cabinet meeting to express some censure of Andrew Jackson's conduct of the Seminole war—a censure which was deserved, since Jackson had violated the law of nations in pursuing his enemy into a foreign country. Twelve years later, when Jackson was President and Calhoun, as Vice-President, was in direct line of succession, so to speak, Jackson heard of Calhoun's remarks, flew into a violent rage, came out as Calhoun's declared enemy, and dealt the death-blow to his presidential aspirations.
Smarting from this injustice, Calhoun turned his attention to the question of state sovereignty, and in February, 1833, South Carolina passed the nullification ordinance to which we have already referred. Calhoun at once resigned the vice-presidency and took his seat in the Senate, prepared to defend the attitude of his state. But Jackson did not wait for that. Seeing that here was an opportunity to strike his enemy, he ordered troops to South Carolina, and threatened to hang Calhoun as high as Haman—a threat which he very possibly would have attempted to carry out had not hostilities been averted by the genius for compromise of Henry Clay. From that time forward, Calhoun became the high priest of the doctrine of state rights and the great defender of slavery. He fought inch by inch the growing sentiment against it; he knew it was a losing fight, and almost the last words uttered by his dying lips were, "The South! The poor South! God knows what will become of her!"
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The great triumvirate left no successors to compare with them in prestige or power. Two survivals from the war of 1812 were still on the scene, Thomas Hart Benton and Lewis Cass. Benton was a North Carolina man who had removed to Nashville, and at the outbreak of the war, enlisted under Andrew Jackson, and got into a disgraceful street fight with him, in the course of which Jackson was nearly killed. Strange to say, that doughty old hero chose to forget the matter long years afterwards, when Benton was in the Senate—a Union senator from the slave state of Missouri.
Cass also served through the war, but at the North; was involved in Hull's surrender of Detroit and broke his sword in rage at the disgrace of it; and was afterwards governor of Michigan and Jackson's secretary of war; then, in 1848, Democratic nominee for President and defeated because of Martin Van Buren's disaffection; finally, in 1857, Buchanan's secretary of state, resigning, in 1860, because that shilly-shally President could not make up his mind to send reinforcements to Bob Anderson at Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbor. A man who played many parts, filled many positions, and filled them well, Cass's name deserves to be more widely remembered than it is.
In those days, a strange, pompous and ineffective figure was flitting across the stage, impressing men with a respect and significance which it did not possess, its name, Stephen A. Douglas, nicknamed "The Little Giant," but giant in little else than power to create disturbance. Perhaps no other man ever possessed that power in quite the same degree; nor possessed in a greater degree that fascination of personality which makes friends and gains adherents.
Consumed by a gnawing desire of the presidency, beaten for the nomination in 1852, destroying the serenity of the land two years later by contending that Congress had no right to limit slavery in the territories, in the vain hope of winning southern support, but finding himself instead dubbed traitor and Judas Iscariot, receiving thirty pieces of silver from a club of Ohio women, travelling from Boston to Chicago "by the light of his own effigies," which yelling crowds were burning at the stake, and finally hooted off the stage in his own city, certainly it would seem that Douglas's public career was over forever.
But he managed to live down his blunder and to regain much of his old strength by reason of his winning personality; yet made another blunder when he agreed to meet Abraham Lincoln in debate—and one which cost him the presidency. For his opponent drove him into corners from which he could find no way out except at the risk of offending the South. In those days, one had to be either for or against slavery; there was no middle course, and the man who attempted to find one, fell between two stools, as Douglas himself soon learned.
Last scene of all, pitted against that same Abraham Lincoln who had greased the plank for him and shorn him of his southern support, in the presidential contest of 1860, defeated and wounded to death by it, for he knew that never again would he be within sight of that long-sought prize; yet rising nobly at the last to a height of purest patriotism, declaring for the Union, pledging his support to Lincoln, pointing the way of duty to his million followers, and destroying at a blow the South's hope of a divided North—let us do Stephen A. Douglas, that justice, and render him that meed of praise; for whatever the mistakes and turnings and evasions of his career, that last great work of his outweighed them all.
A man who had a great reputation in his own day as an orator and statesman, but whose polished periods appeal less and less to succeeding generations was Edward Everett—an evidence, perhaps, that the head alone can never win lasting fame. Everett was a New Englander; a Harvard man, graduating with the highest honors; and two years later, pastor of a Unitarian church in Boston. There his eloquence soon attracted attention, and won him a wide reputation. At the age of twenty-one, he was appointed professor of Greek at Harvard; and in 1824, at the age of thirty, he was chosen to represent the Boston district in Congress. He remained there for ten years, served four terms as governor of Massachusetts, was ambassador to England, and then, president of Harvard from 1846-1849; was appointed secretary of state on the death of Daniel Webster in 1852; and finally, in the following year, was elected to the Senate, but was soon forced to resign on account of ill-health.
Soon afterwards, he threw himself into the project to purchase Mount Vernon by private subscription, delivered his oration on Washington 122 times, netting more than $58,000 toward the project; obtained another $10,000 from the Public Ledger by writing for it a weekly article for the period of a year, and added $3,000 more, secured from the readers of that paper. From that time on, he delivered various lectures for philanthropic causes, the receipts aggregating nearly a hundred thousand dollars. They are little read to-day because, in spite of his erudition, polish and high attainments, Everett really had no new message to deliver.
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With the coming of the Civil War, another triumvirate emerges to control the destinies of the nation—Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner and William Henry Seward. Stevens and Seward had been introduced to politics by the ineffectual and absurd anti-Masonic party, which flitted across the stage in the early thirties. In 1851, Massachusetts rebuked Daniel Webster for his supposed surrender to the slavery party, made in hope of attaining the presidency, by placing Sumner in his seat in the Senate, and retiring him to private life, where he still remained the most commanding figure in the country. |
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