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AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ANDREW DICKSON WHITE
WITH PORTRAITS
VOLUME I
NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1905
Copyright, 1904, 1905, by
THE CENTURY CO.
——
Published March, 1905
THE DE VINNE PRESS
TO MY OLD STUDENTS THIS RECORD OF MY LIFE IS INSCRIBED WITH MOST KINDLY RECOLLECTIONS AND BEST WISHES
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART I—ENVIRONMENT AND EDUCATION CHAPTER I. BOYHOOD IN CENTRAL NEW YORK—1832-1850
The ``Military Tract'' of New York. A settlement on the headwaters of the Susquehanna. Arrival of my grandfathers and grandmothers. Growth of the new settlement. First recollections of it. General character of my environment. My father and mother. Cortland Academy. Its twofold effect upon me. First schooling. Methods in primary studies. Physical education. Removal to Syracuse. The Syracuse Academy. Joseph Allen and Professor Root; their influence; moral side of the education thus obtained. General education outside the school. Removal to a ``classical school''; a catastrophe. James W. Hoyt and his influence. My early love for classical studies. Discovery of Scott's novels. ``The Gallery of British Artists.'' Effect of sundry conventions, public meetings, and lectures. Am sent to Geneva College; treatment of faculty by students. A ``Second Adventist'' meeting; Howell and Clark; my first meeting with Judge Folger. Philosophy of student dissipation at that place and time.
CHAPTER II. YALE AND EUROPE—1850-1857
My coup d'
PART II—POLITICAL LIFE CHAPTER III. FROM JACKSON TO FILLMORE—1832-1851
Political division in my family; differences between my father and grandfather; election of Andrew Jackson. First recollections of American politics, Martin Van Buren. Campaign of 1840; campaign songs and follies. Efforts by the Democrats; General Crary of Michigan; Corwin's speech. The Ogle gold-spoon speech. The Sub-Treasury Question. Election of General Harrison; his death. Disappointment in President Tyler. Carelessness of nominating conventions as to the second place upon the ticket. Campaign of 1844. Clay, Birney, and Polk. Growth of anti-slavery feeling. Senator Hale's lecture. Henry Clay's proposal, The campaign of 1848; General Taylor vs. General Cass. My recollections of them both. State Conventions at this period. Governor Bouck; his civility to Bishop Hughes. Fernando Wood; his method of breaking up a State Convention. Charles O'Conor and John Van Buren; boyish adhesion to Martin Van Buren against General Taylor; Taylor's election; his death. My recollections of Millard Fillmore. The Fugitive Slave Law.
CHAPTER IV. EARLY MANHOOD—1851-1857
``Jerry'', his sudden fame. Speeches of Daniel Webster and Henry Clay at Syracuse on the Fugitive Slave Law ; their prophecies. The ``Jerry Rescue.'' Trials of the rescuers. My attendance at one of them. Bishop Loguen's prayer and Gerrit Smith's speech. Characteristics of Gerrit Smith. Effects of the rescue trials. Main difficulty of the anti-slavery party. ``Fool reformers.'' Nominations of Scott and Pierce; their qualities. Senator Douglas. Abolition of the Missouri Compromise. Growth of ill feeling between North and South. Pro-slavery tendencies at Yale. Stand against these taken by President Woolsey and Leonard Bacon. My candidacy or editorship of the ``Yale Literary Magazine.'' Opposition on account of my anti-Slavery ideas. My election. Temptations to palter with my conscience; victory over them. Professor Hadley's view of duty to the Fugitive Slave Law. Lack of opportunity to present my ideas. My chance on Commencement Day. ``Modern Oracles.'' Effect of my speech on Governor Seymour. Invitation to his legation at St. Petersburg after my graduation. Effect upon me of Governor Seymour's ideas regarding Jefferson. Difficulties in discussing the slavery question. My first discovery as to the value of political criticism in newspapers. Return to America. Presidential campaign of 1856. Nomination of Fr
CHAPTER V. THE CIVIL WAR PERIOD—1857-1864.
My arrival at the University of Michigan. Political side of professorial life. General purpose of my lectures in the university and throughout the State. My articles in the ``Atlantic Monthly.'' President Buchanan, John Brown Stephen A. Douglas, and others. The Chicago Convention. Nomination of Lincoln. Disappointment of my New York friends. Speeches by Carl Schurz. Election of Lincoln. Beginnings of Civil War. My advice to students. Reverses; Bull Run. George Sumner's view. Preparation for the conflict. Depth of feeling. Pouring out of my students into the army. Kirby Smith. Conduct of the British Government. Break in my health. Thurlow Weed's advice to me. My work in London. Discouragements there. My published answer to Dr. Russell. Experiences in Ireland and France. My horror of the French Emperor. Effort to influence opinion in Germany. William Walton Murphy; his interview with Baron Rothschild. Fourth of July celebration at Heidelberg in 1863. Turning of the contest in favor of the United States. My election to the Senate of the State of New York.
CHAPTER VI. SENATORSHIP AT ALBANY—1864-1865
My arrival at Albany as State Senator. My unfitness. Efforts to become acquainted with State questions. New acquaintances. Governor Horatio Seymour, Charles James Folger, Ezra Cornell, and others on the Republican side; Henry C. Murphy and Thomas C. Fields on the Democratic side. Daniel Manning. Position assigned me on committees. My maiden speech. Relations with Governor Seymour. My chairmanship of the Committee on Education. The Morrill Act of 1862. Mr. Cornell and myself at loggerheads Codification of the Educational Laws. State Normal School Bill. Special Committee on the New York Health Department. Revelations made to the Committee. The Ward's Island matter. Last great effort of the State in behalf of the Union. The Bounty Bill. Opposition of Horace Greeley to it. Embarrassment caused by him at that period. Senator Allaben's speech against the Bounty Bill. His reference to French Assignats; my answer; results; later development of this speech into a political pamphlet on ``Paper Money Inflation in France.'' Baltimore Convention of 1864; its curious characteristics; impression made upon me by it. Breckinridge, Curtis, and Raymond. Renomination of Lincoln; my meeting him at the White House. Sundry peculiarities then revealed by him. His election.
CHAPTER VII. SENATORSHIP AT ALBANY—1865-1867
My second year in the State Senate. Struggle for the Charter of Cornell University. News of Lee's surrender. Assassination of Lincoln. Service over his remains at the Capitol in Albany. My address. Question of my renomination. Elements against me; the Tammany influence; sundry priests in New York, and clergymen throughout the State. Senatorial convention; David J. Mitchell; my renomination and election. My third year of service, 1866. Speech on the Health Department in New York; monstrous iniquities in that Department; success in replacing it with a better system. My Phi Beta Kappa address at Yale; its purpose. My election to a Professorship at Yale; reasons for declining it. State Senate sits as Court to try a judge; his offense; pathetic complications; his removal from office. Arrival of President Johnson, Secretary Seward, General Grant, and Admiral Farragut in Albany; their reception by the Governor and Senate; impressions made on me thereby; part taken by Governor Fenton and Secretary Seward; Judge Folger's remark to me. Ingratitude of the State thus far to its two greatest Governors, DeWitt Clinton and Seward.
CHAPTER VIII. ROSCOE CONKLING AND JUDGE FOLGER—1867-1868
Fourth year in the State Senate, 1867. Election of a United States Senator; feeling throughout the State regarding Senators Morgan and Harris; Mr. Cornell's expression of it. The candidates; characteristics of Senator Harris, of Judge Davis, of Roscoe Conkling. Services and characteristics of the latter which led me to support him; hostility of Tammany henchmen to us both. The legislative caucus. Presentation of candidates; my presentation of Mr. Conkling; reception by the audience of my main argument; Mr. Conkling elected. Difficulties between Judge Folger and myself; question as to testimony in criminal cases; Judge Folger's view of it; his vexation at my obtaining a majority against him. Calling of the Constitutional Convention, Judge Folger's candidacy for its Presidency; curious reason for Horace Greeley's opposition to him. Another cause of separation between Judge Folger and myself. Defeat of the Sodus Canal Bill. Constitutional Convention eminent men in it; Greeley's position in it; his agency in bringing the Convention into disrepute; his later regret at his success; the new Constitution voted down. Visit to Agassiz at Nahant. A day with Longfellow. His remark regarding Mr. Greeley. Meeting with Judge Rockwood Hoar at Harvard. Boylston prize competition; the successful contestant; Judge Hoar's remark regarding one of the speakers. My part in sundry political meetings. Visit to Senator Conkling. Rebuff at one of my meetings; its effect upon me.
CHAPTER IX. GENERAL GRANT AND SANTO DOMINGO—1868-1871
Distraction from politics by Cornell University work during two or three years following my senatorial term. Visits to scientific and technical schools in Europe. The second political campaign of General Grant. My visit to Auburn; Mr. Seward's speech; its unfortunate characteristics; Mr. Cornell's remark on my proposal to call Mr. Seward as a commencement orator. Great services of Seward. State Judiciary Convention of 1870; my part in it; nomination of Judge Andrews and Judge Folger; my part in the latter; its effect on my relations with Folger. Closer acquaintance with General Grant. Visit to Dr. Henry Field at Stockbridge; Burton Harrison's account of the collapse of the Confederacy and the flight of Jefferson Davis. Story told me by William Preston Johnston throwing light on the Confederacy in its last hours. Delegacy to the State Republican Convention of 1870. Am named as Commissioner to Santo Domingo. First meeting with Senator Charles Sumner. My acquaintance with Senator McDougal. His strange characteristics. His famous plea for drunkenness. My absence in the West Indies.
CHAPTER X. THE GREELEY CAMPAIGN—1872
First meeting with John Hay. Speech of Horace Greeley on his return from the South; his discussion of national affairs; his manner and surroundings; last hours and death of Samuel J. May. The Prudence Crandall portrait. Addresses at the Yale alumni dinner. Dinner with Longfellow at Craigie House. The State Convention of 1871; my chairmanship and presidency of it. My speech; appointment of committees; anti-administration demonstration; a stormy session; retirement of the anti-administration forces; attacks in consequence; rally of old friends to my support. Examples of the futility of such attacks; Senator Carpenter, Governor Seward, Senator Conklin. My efforts to interest Conkling in a reform of the civil service. Republican National Convention at Philadelphia in 1872; ability of sundry colored delegates; nomination of Grant and Wilson. Mr. Greeley's death. Characteristics of General Grant as President. Reflections on the campaign. Questions asked me by a leading London journalist regarding the election. My first meeting with Samuel J. Tilden; low ebb of his fortunes at that period. The culmination of Tweed. Thomas Nast. Meeting of the Electoral College at Albany; the ``Winged Victory'' and General Grant's credentials. My first experience of ``Reconstruction'' in the South; visit to the State Capitol of South Carolina; rulings of the colored Speaker of the House, fulfilment of Thomas Jefferson's inspired prophecy.
CHAPTER XI. GRANT, HAYES, AND GARFIELD—1871-1881
Sundry visits to Washington during General Grant's presidency. Impression made by President Grant; visit to him in company with Agassiz; characteristics shown by him at Long Branch; his dealing with one newspaper correspondent and story regarding another. His visit to me at Cornell; his remark regarding the annexation of Santo Domingo, far-sighted reason assigned for it; his feeling regarding a third presidential term. My journey with him upon the Rhine. Walks and talks with him in Paris. Persons met at Senator Conkling's. Story told by Senator Carpenter. The ``Greenback Craze''; its spirit; its strength. Wretched character of the old banking system. Ability and force of Mr. Conkling's speech at Ithaca. Its effect. My previous relations with Garfield. Character and effect of his speech at Ithaca; his final address to the students of the University. Our midnight conversation. President Hayes; impressions regarding him; attacks upon him; favorable judgment upon him by observant foreigners, excellent impression made by him upon me at this time and at a later period. The assassination of General Garfield. Difficulties which thickened about him toward the end of his career. Characteristics of President Arthur. Ground taken in my public address at Ithaca at the service in commemoration of Garfield.
CHAPTER XII. ARTHUR, CLEVELAND, AND BLAINE—1881-1884
President Arthur; course before his Presidency; qualities revealed afterward; curious circumstances of his nomination. Reform of the Civil Service. My article in the ``North American Review.'' Renewal of my acquaintance with Mr. Evarts; his witty stories. My efforts to interest Senator Platt in civil-service reform; his slow progress in this respect. Wayne MacVeagh; Judge Biddle's remark at his table on American feeling regarding capital punishment. Great defeat of the Republican party in 1882. Judge Folger's unfortunate campaign. Election of Mr. Cleveland. My address on ``The New Germany'' at New York. Meeting with General McDowell, the injustice of popular judgment upon him. Revelation of Tammany frauds. Grover Cleveland, his early life; his visit to the University; impression made upon me by him. Senator Morrill's visit; tribute paid him by the University authorities. My address at Yale on ``The Message of the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth.'' Addresses by Carl Schurz and myself at the funeral of Edward Lasker. Election as a delegate at large to the National Republican Convention at Chicago, 1884. Difficulties regarding Mr. Blaine; vain efforts to nominate another candidate; George William Curtis and his characteristics; tyranny over the Convention by the gallery mob; nomination of Blaine and Logan. Nomination of Mr. Cleveland by the Democrats. Tyranny by the Chicago mob at that convention also. Open letter to Theodore Roosevelt in favor of Mr. Blaine. Private letter to Mr. Blaine in favor of a reform of the Civil Service. His acceptance of its suggestions. Wretched character of the campaign. Presidency of the Republican mass meeting at Syracuse; experience with a Kentucky orator. Election of Mr. Cleveland.
CHAPTER XIII. HENDRICKS, JOHN SHERMAN, BANCROFT, AND OTHERS—1884-1891
Renewal of my acquaintance with Mr. Cleveland at Washington. Meeting with Mr. Blaine; his fascinating qualities; his self-control. William Walter Phelps; his arguments regarding the treatment of Congressional speakers by the press. Senator Randall Gibson; meeting at his house with Vice-President Hendricks; evident disappointment of the Vice-President; his view of civil-service reform; defense of it by Senator Butler of South Carolina; reminiscences of odd senators by Senator Jones of Florida; Gibson's opinion of John Sherman. President Cleveland's mode of treating office-beggars and the like; Senator Sawyer's story; Secretary Fairchild's remark; Senators Sherman and Vance. Secretary Bayard's criticism of applicants for office. Senator Butler's remark on secession. Renewal of my acquaintance with George Bancroft. Goldwin Smith in Washington; his favorable opinion of American crowds. Chief Justice Waite. General Sheridan; his account of the battle of Gravelotte; discussion between Sheridan and Goldwin Smith regarding sundry points in military history. General Schenck; his reminiscences of Corwin Everett, and others. Resignation of my presidency at Cornell, 1885. President Cleveland's tender of an Interstate Railway commissionership, my declination. Departure for Europe. Am tendered nomination for Congress; my discussion of the matter in London with President Porter of Yale and others; declination. Visit to Washington under the administration of General Harrison, January, 1891; presentation of proposals to him regarding civil-service reform; his speech in reply.
CHAPTER XIV. MCKINLEY AND ROOSEVELT—1891-1904
Candidacy for the governorship of New York; Mr. Platt's relation to it; my reluctance and opposition; decision of the Rochester Convention in favor of Mr. Fassett; natural reasons for this. Lectures at Stanford University. Visit to Mexico and California with Mr. Andrew Carnegie and his party. President Harrison tenders me the position of minister to Russia; my retention in office by Mr. Cleveland. My stay in Italy 1894-1895. President Cleveland appoints me upon the Venezuelan Boundary Commission, December, 1895. Presidential campaign of 1896. My unexpected part in it; nomination of Mr. Bryan by Democrats; publication of my open letter to sundry Democrats, republication of my ``Paper Money Inflation in France,'' and its circulation as a campaign document; election of Mr. McKinley. My address before the State Universities of Wisconsin and Minnesota; strongly favorable impression made upon me by them; meeting with Mr. Ignatius Donnelly, his public address to me in the State House of Minnesota. My addresses at Harvard, Yale, and elsewhere. Am appointed by President McKinley ambassador to Germany; question of my asking sanction of Mr. Platt; how settled. Renomination of McKinley with Mr. Roosevelt as Vice-President. I revisit America; day with Mr. Roosevelt, visits to Washington; my impressions of President McKinley; his conversation; his coolness; tributes from his Cabinet; Secretary Hay's testimony, Mr. McKinley's refusal to make speeches during his second campaign; his reasons; his re
PART III—AS UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR CHAPTER XV. LIFE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN—1857-1864
Early ideals. Gradual changes in these. Attractions of journalism then and now. New views of life opened to me at Paris and Berlin. Dreams of aiding the beginnings of a better system of university education in the United States. Shortcomings of American instruction, especially regarding history, political science, and literature, at that period. My article on ``German Instruction in General History'' in ``The New Englander.'' Influence of Stanley's ``Life of Arnold.'' Turning point in my life at the Yale Commencement of 1856; Dr. Wayland's speech. Election to the professorship of history and English literature at the University of Michigan; my first work in it; sundry efforts toward reforms, text-books, social relations with students; use of the Abb
CHAPTER XVI. UNIVERSITY LIFE IN THE WEST— 1857-1864
Some difficulties; youthfulness; struggle against various combinations, my victory; an enemy made a friend. Lectures throughout Michigan; main purpose in these; a storm aroused; vigorous attack upon my politico-economical views; happy results; revenge upon my assailant; discussion in a County Court House. Breadth and strength then given to my ideas regarding university education. President Tappan. Henry Simmons Frieze. Brunnow. Chief Justice Cooley. Judge Campbell. Distinguishing feature of the University of Michigan in those days. Dr. Tappan's good sense in administration; one typical example. Unworthy treatment of him by the Legislature; some causes of this. Opposition to the State University by the small sectarian colleges. Dr. Tappan's prophecy to sundry demagogues; its fulfilment. Sundry defects of his qualities; the ``Winchell War,'' ``Armed Neutrality.'' Retirement of President Tappan; its painful circumstances; amends made later by the citizens of Michigan. The little city of Ann Arbor; origin of its name. Recreations, tree planting on the campus; results of this. Exodus of students into the Civil War. Lectures continued after my resignation. My affectionate relations with the institution.
PART IV—AS UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT CHAPTER XVII. EVOLUTION OF ``THE CORNELL IDEA''— 1850-1865
Development of my ideas on university organization at Hobart College, at Yale, and abroad. Their further evolution at the University of Michigan. President Tappan's influence. My plan of a university at Syracuse. Discussions with George William Curtis. Proposal to Gerrit Smith; its failure. A new opportunity opens.
CHAPTER XVIII. EZRA CORNELL—1864-1874
Ezra Cornell. My first impressions regarding him. His public library. Temporary estrangement between us; regarding the Land Grant Fund. Our conversation regarding his intended gift. The State Agricultural College and the ``People's College''; his final proposal. Drafting of the Cornell University Charter. His foresight. His views of university education. Struggle for the charter in the Legislature; our efforts to overcome the coalition against us; bitter attacks on him; final struggle in the Assembly, Senate, and before the Board of Regents. Mr. Cornell's location of the endowment lands. He nominates me to the University Presidency. His constant liberality and labors. His previous life; growth of his fortune; his noble use of it; sundry original ways of his; his enjoyment of the university in its early days; his mixture of idealism and common sense. First celebration of Founder's Day. His resistance to unreason. Bitter attacks upon him in sundry newspapers and in the Legislature; the investigation; his triumph. His minor characteristics; the motto ``True and Firm'' on his house. His last days and hours. His political ideas. His quaint sayings; intellectual and moral characteristics; equanimity; religious convictions.
CHAPTER XIX. ORGANIZATION OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY— 1865-1868
Virtual Presidency of Cornell during two years before my actual election. Division of labor between Mr. Cornell and myself. My success in thwarting efforts to scatter the Land Grant Fund, and in impressing three points on the Legislature. Support given by Horace Greeley to the third of these. Judge Folger's opposition. Sudden death of Dr. Willard and its effects. Our compromise with Judge Folger. The founding of Willard Asylum. Continued opposition to us. Election to the Presidency of the University. Pressure of my own business. Presentation of my ``Plan of Organization.'' Selection of Professors; difficulty of such selection in those days as compared with these; system suggested; system adopted. Resident and non- resident professorships. Erection of university buildings; difficulty arising from a requirement of our charter; general building plan adopted. My visit to European technical institutions; choice of foreign professors; purchases of books, apparatus, etc.
CHAPTER XX. THE FIRST YEARS OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY— 1868-1870
Formal opening of the University October 7, 1868. Difficulties, mishaps, calamities, obstacles. Effect of these on Mr. Cornell and myself. Opening ceremonies of the morning; Mr. Cornell's speech and my own; effect of Mr. Cornell's broken health upon me. The first ringing of the chime; effect of George W. Curtis's oration; my realization of our difficulties; Mr. Cornell's physical condition; inadequacy of our resources; impossibility of selling lands; our necessary unreadiness; haste compelled by our charter. Mr. Cornell's letter to the ``New York Tribune'' regarding student labor. Dreamers and schemers. Efforts by ``hack'' politicians. Attacks by the press, denominational and secular. Friction in the University machinery. Difficulty of the students in choosing courses; improvement in these days consequent upon improvement of schools. My reprint of John Foster's ``Essay on Decision of Character''; its good effects. Compensations; character of the students; few infractions of discipline; causes of this; effects of liberty of choice between courses of study. My success in preventing the use of the faculty as policemen; the Campus Bridge case. Sundry trials of students by the faculty; the Dundee Lecture case; the ``Mock Programme'' case; a suspension of class officers; revelation in all this of a spirit of justice among students. Athletics and their effects. Boating; General Grant's remark to me on the Springfield regatta; Cornell's double success at Saratoga; letter from a Princeton graduate. General improvement in American university students during the second half of the nineteenth century.
CHAPTER XXI. DIFFICULTIES AND DANGERS AT CORNELL— 1868-1872
Questions regarding courses of instruction. Evils of the old system of assigning them entirely to resident professors. Literary instruction at Yale; George William Curtis and John Lord. Our general scheme. The Arts Course; clinching it into our system; purchase of the Anthon Library; charges against us on this score; our vindication. The courses in literature, science and philosophy; influence of one of Herbert Spencer's ideas upon the formation of all these; influence of my own experience. Professor Wilder; his services against fustian and ``tall talk.'' The course in literature; use made of it in promoting the general culture of students. Technical departments; Civil Engineering; incidental question of creed in electing a professor to it. Department of Agriculture; its difficulties; three professors who tided it through. Department of Mechanic Arts; its peculiar difficulties and dangers; Mr. Cornell's view regarding college shop work for bread winning; necessity for practical work in connection with theoretical; mode of bringing about this connection. Mr. Sibley's gift. Delay in recognition of our success. Department of Architecture; origin of my ideas on this subject; the Trustees accept my architectural library and establish the Department.
CHAPTER XXII. FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF UNIVERSITY COURSES-1870-1872
Establishment of Laboratories. Governor Cleveland's visit. Department of Electrical Engineering; its origin. Department of Political Science and History. Influence of my legislative experience upon it; my report on the Paris Exposition, and address at Johns Hopkins; a beginning made; excellent work done by Frank Sanborn. Provision for Political Economy; presentation of both sides of controverted questions. Instruction in History; my own part in it; its growth; George Lincoln Burr called into it; lectures by Goldwin Smith, Freeman, Froude, and others. Instruction in American History; calling of George W. Greene and Theodore Dwight as Non-Resident, and finally of Moses Coit Tyler as Resident Professor. Difficulties in some of these Departments. Reaction, ``The Oscillatory Law of Human Progress.'' ``Joe'' Sheldon's ``Professorship of Horse Sense'' needed. First gift of a building—McGraw Hall. Curious passage in a speech at the laying of its corner-stone. Military Instruction; peculiar clause regarding it in our Charter; our broad construction of it; my reasons for this. The Conferring of Degrees; abuse at sundry American institutions in conferring honorary degrees why Cornell University confers none. Regular Degrees; theory originally proposed; theory adopted; recent change in practice.
CHAPTER XXIII. ``CO-EDUCATION'' AND AN UNSECTARIAN PULPIT—1871-1904
Admission of women. The Cortland Free Scholarship; the Sage gift; difficulties and success. Establishment of Sage Chapel; condition named by me for its acceptance; character of the building. Establishment of a preachership; my suggestions regarding it accepted; Phillips Brooks preaches the first sermon, 1875; results of this system. Establishment of Barnes Hall; its origin and development; services it has rendered. Development of sundry minor ideas in building up the University; efforts to develop a recognition of historical and commemorative features; portraits, tablets, memorial windows, etc. The beautiful work of Robert Richardson. The Memorial Chapel. Efforts to preserve the beauty of the grounds and original plan of buildings; constant necessity for such efforts; dangers threatening the original plan.
CHAPTER XXIV. ROCKS, STORMS, AND PERIL—1868-1874
Difficulties and discouragements. Very serious character of some of these. Financial difficulties; our approach, at times, to ruin. Splendid gifts; their continuance, the ``Ostrander Elms''; encouragement thus given. Difficulties arising from our Charter; short time allowed us for opening the University, general plans laid down for us. Advice, comments, etc., from friends and enemies; remark of the Johns Hopkins trustees as to their freedom from oppressive supervision and control; my envy of them. Large expenditure demanded. Mr. Cornell's burdens. Installation of a ``Business Manager.'' My suspicion as to our finances. Mr. Cornell's optimism. Discovery of a large debt; Mr. Cornell's noble proposal; the debt cleared in fifteen minutes by four men. Ultimate result of this subscription; worst calamities to Cornell its greatest blessings; example of this in the founding of fellowships and scholarships. Successful financial management ever since. Financial difficulties arising from the burden of the University lands on Mr. Cornell, and from his promotion of local railways; his good reasons for undertaking these. Entanglement of the University affairs with those of the State and of Mr. Cornell. Narrow escape of the institution from a fatal result. Judge Finch as an adviser; his extrication of the University and of Mr. Cornell's family; interwoven interests disentangled. Death of Mr. Cornell, December, 1875. My depression at this period; refuge in historical work. Another calamity. Munificence of John McGraw; interest shown in the institution by his daughter; her relations to the University; her death; her bequest; my misgivings as to our Charter; personal complications between the McGraw heirs and some of our trustees; efforts to bring about a settlement thwarted; ill success of the University in the ensuing litigation. Disappointment at this prodigious loss. Compensations for it. Splendid gifts from Mr. Henry W. Sage, Messrs. Dean and Wm. H. Sage, and others. Continuance of sectarian attacks; virulent outbursts; we stand on the defensive. I finally take the offensive in a lecture on ``The Battle-fields of Science''; its purpose, its reception when repeated and when published; kindness of President Woolsey in the matter. Gradual expansion of the lecture into a history of ``The Warfare of Science with Theology''; filtration of the ideas it represents into public opinion; effect of this in smoothing the way for the University.
CHAPTER XXV. CONCLUDING YEARS—1881-1885
Evolution of the University administration. The Trustees; new method of selecting them; Alumni trustees. The Executive Committee. The Faculty method of its selection; its harmony. The Students; system of taking them into our confidence. Alumni associations. Engrossing nature of the administration. Collateral duties. Addresses to the Legislature, to associations, to other institutions of learning. Duties as Professor. Delegation of sundry administrative details. Inaccessibility of the University in those days; difficulties in winter. Am appointed Commissioner to Santo Domingo in 1870; to a commissionership at the Paris Exposition in 1877, and as Minister to Germany in 1879-1881. Test of the University organization during these absences; opportunity thus given the University Faculty to take responsibility in University government. Ill results, in sundry other institutions, of holding the President alone responsible. General good results of our system. Difficulties finally arising. My return. The four years of my presidency afterward. Resignation in 1885. Kindness of trustees and students. Am requested to name my successor, and I nominate Charles Kendall Adams. Transfer of my historical library to the University. Two visits to Europe; reasons for them. Lectures at various universities after my return. Resumption of diplomatic duties. Continued relations to the University. My feelings toward it on nearing the end of life.
PART V—IN THE DIPLOMATIC SERVICE CHAPTER XXVI. AS ATTACH<E'> AT ST. PETERSBURG—1854-1855
My first studies in History and International Law. Am appointed attach
CHAPTER XXVII. AS ATTACH<E'> AND BEARER OF DESPATCHES IN WAR-TIME—1855
Blockade of the Neva by the allied fleet. A great opportunity lost. Russian caricatures during the Crimean War. Visit to Moscow. Curious features in the Kremlin, the statue of Napoleon; the Crown, Sceptre, and Constitution of Poland. Evidences of official stupidity. Journey from St. Petersburg to Warsaw. Contest with the officials at the frontier; my victory. Journey across the continent; scene in a railway carriage between Strasburg and Paris. Delivery of my despatches in Paris. Baron Seebach. The French Exposition of 1855. Arrival of Horace Greeley; comical features in his Parisian life; his arrest and imprisonment; his efforts to learn French in prison and after his release, especially at the Cr
CHAPTER XXVIII. AS COMMISSIONER TO SANTO DOMINGO—1871
Propositions for the annexation of Santo Domingo to the United States. I am appointed one of three Commissioners to visit the island. Position taken by Senator Sumner; my relations with him; my efforts to reconcile him with the Grant Administration; effort of Gerrit Smith. Speeches of Senator Schurz. Conversations with Admiral Porter, Benjamin F. Butler, and others. Discussions with President Grant; his charge to me. Enlistment of scientific experts. Direction of them. Our residence at Santo Domingo city. President Baez; his conversations. Condition of the Republic; its denudation. Anxiety of the clergy for connection with the United States. My negotiation with the Papal Nuncio and Vicar Apostolic; his earnest desire for annexation. Reasons for this. My expedition across the island. Mishaps. Interview with guerrilla general in the mountains. His gift. Vain efforts at diplomacy. Our official inquiries regarding earthquakes; pious view taken by the Vicar of Cotuy. Visit to Vega. Aid given me by the French Vicar. Arrival at Puerto Plata. My stay at the Vice-President's house; a tropical catastrophe; public dinner and speech under difficulties. Journey in the Nantasket to Port-au-Prince. Scenes in the Haitian capital; evidences of revolution; unlimited paper money; effect of these experiences on Frederick Douglass. Visit to Jamaica; interview with President Geffrard. Experience of the Commission with a newspaper reporter. Landing at Charleston. Journey to Washington. Refusal of dinner to Douglass on the Potomac steamer. Discovery regarding an assertion in Mr. Sumner's speech on Santo Domingo; his injustice. Difference of opinion in drawing up our report; we present no recommendation but simply a statement of facts. Reasons why the annexation was not accomplished.
CHAPTER XXIX. AS COMMISSIONER TO THE PARIS EXPOSITION—1878
Previous experience on the Educational Jury at the Philadelphia Exposition. Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil; curious revelation of his character at Booth's Theater; my after acquaintance with him. Don Juan Marin, his fine characteristics; his lesson to an American crowd. Levasseur of the French Institute. Millet. Gardner Hubbard. My honorary commissionership to the Paris Exposition. Previous troubles of our Commissioner-General at the Vienna Exposition. Necessity of avoiding these at Paris. Membership of the upper jury. Meissonier. Tresca. Jules Simon. Wischniegradsky. Difficulty regarding the Edison exhibit. My social life in Paris. The sculptor Story and Judge Daly. A Swiss-American juryman's efforts to secure the Legion of Honor. A Fourth of July jubilation; light thrown by it on the ``Temperance Question.'' Henri Martin. Jules Simon pilots me in Paris. Sainte-Clair Deville. Pasteur. Desjardins. Drouyn de Lhuys. The reform school at Mettray. My visit to Thiers; his relations to France as historian and statesman. Duruy; his remark on rapid changes in French Ministries. Convention on copyright. Victor Hugo. Louis Blanc, his opinion of Thiers. Troubles of the American Minister; a socially ambitious American lady; vexatious plague thus revealed.
CHAPTER XXX. AS MINISTER TO GERMANY—1879-1881
Am appointed by President Hayes. Receiving instructions in Washington. Mr. Secretary Evarts. Interesting stay in London. The Lord Mayor at Guildhall. Speeches by Beaconsfield and others. An animated automaton. An evening drive with Browning. Arrival in Berlin. Golden wedding festivities of the Emperor William I. Audiences with various members of the imperial family. Wedding ceremonies of Prince William, now Emperor William II. Usual topic of the American representative on presenting his Letter of Credence from the President to the Prussian monarch. Prince Bismarck; his greeting; questions regarding German-Americans. Other difficulties. Baron von B
CHAPTER XXXI. MEN OF NOTE IN BERLIN AND ELSEWHERE— 1879-1881
My relations with professors at the Berlin University. Lepsius, Curtius, Gneist, Von Sybel, Droysen. Hermann Grimm and his wife. Treitschke. Statements of Du Bois-Reymond regarding the expulsion of the Huguenots from France. Helmholtz and Hoffmann; a Scotch experience of the latter. Acquaintance with professors at other universities. Literary men of Berlin. Auerbach. His story of unveiling the Spinoza statue. Rodenberg. Berlin artists. Knaus; curious beginning of my acquaintance with him. Carl Becker. Anton von Werner; his statement regarding his painting the ``Proclamation of the Empire at Versailles.'' Adolf Menzel; visit to his studio; his quaint discussions of his own pictures. Pilgrimage to Oberammergau, impressions, my acquaintance with the ``Christus'' and the ``Judas''; popular prejudice against the latter. Excursion to France. Talks with President Gr
CHAPTER XXXII. MY RECOLLECTIONS OF BISMARCK—1879-1881
My first sight of him. First interview with him. His feeling toward German-Americans. His conversation on American questions. A family dinner at his house. His discussion of various subjects; his opinions of Thiers and others, conversation on travel; his opinions of England and Englishmen; curious reminiscences of his own life; kindly recollections of Bancroft, Bayard Taylor, and Motley. Visit to him with William D. Kelly; our walk and talk in the garden. Bismarck's view of financial questions. Mr. Kelly's letter to the American papers; its effect in Germany. Bismarck's diplomatic dinners; part taken in them by the Reichshunde. The Rudhardt episode. Scene in the Prussian House of Lords. Bismarck's treatment of Lasker; his rejection of our Congressional Resolutions. Usual absence of Bismarck from Court. Reasons for it. Festivities at the marriage of the present Emperor William. A Fackeltanz. Bismarck's fits of despondency; remark by Gneist. Gneist's story illustrating Bismarck's drinking habits. Difficulties in German-American ``military cases'' after Baron von B
LIST OF PORTRAITS OF THE AUTHOR
VOLUME I
ITHACA, 1905 Photograph by Robinson, Ithaca
SARATOGA, 1842 From a daguerreotype
CORNELL UNIVERSITY, 1878 Photograph by Sarony, New York
VOLUME II
THE HAGUE, 1899 Photograph by Zimmermans, The Hague
OXFORD, 1902 Photograph by Robinson, Ithaca
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ANDREW DICKSON WHITE
PART I ENVIRONMENT AND EDUCATION
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ANDREW DICKSON WHITE
CHAPTER I
BOYHOOD IN CENTRAL NEW YORK—1832-1850
At the close of the Revolution which separated the colonies from the mother country, the legislature of New York set apart nearly two million acres of land, in the heart of the State, as bounty to be divided among her soldiers who had taken part in the war; and this ``Military Tract,'' having been duly divided into townships, an ill- inspired official, in lack of names for so many divisions, sprinkled over the whole region the contents of his classical dictionary. Thus it was that there fell to a beautiful valley upon the headwaters of the Susquehanna the name of ``Homer.'' Fortunately the surveyor-general left to the mountains, lakes, and rivers the names the Indians had given them, and so there was still some poetical element remaining in the midst of that unfortunate nomenclature. The counties, too, as a rule, took Indian names, so that the town of Homer, with its neighbors, Tully, Pompey, Fabius, Lysander, and the rest, were embedded in the county of Onondaga, in the neighborhood of lakes Otisco and Skaneateles, and of the rivers Tioughnioga and Susquehanna.
Hither came, toward the close of the eighteenth century, a body of sturdy New Englanders, and, among them, my grandfathers and grandmothers. Those on my father's side: Asa White and Clara Keep, from Munson, Massa- chusetts; those on my mother's side, Andrew Dickson, from Middlefield, Massachusetts, and Ruth Hall from Guilford, Connecticut. They were all of ``good stock.'' When I was ten years old I saw my great-grandfather at Middlefield, eighty-two years of age, sturdy and vigorous; he had mowed a broad field the day before, and he walked four miles to church the day after. He had done his duty manfully during the war, had been a member of the ``Great and General Court'' of Massachusetts, and had held various other offices, which showed that he enjoyed the confidence of his fellow-citizens. As to the other side of the house, there was a tradition that we came from Peregrine White of the Mayflower; but I have never had time to find whether my doubts on the subject were well founded or not. Enough for me to know that my yeomen ancestors did their duty in war and peace, were honest, straightforward, God-fearing men and women, who owned their own lands, and never knew what it was to cringe before any human being.
These New Englanders literally made the New York wilderness to blossom as the rose; and Homer, at my birth in 1832, about forty years after the first settlers came, was, in its way, one of the prettiest villages imaginable. In the heart of it was the ``Green,'' and along the middle of this a line of church edifices, and the academy. In front of the green, parallel to the river, ran, north and south, the broad main street, beautifully shaded with maples, and on either side of this, in the middle of the village, were stores, shops, and the main taverns; while north and south of these were large and pleasant dwellings, each in its own garden or grove or orchard, and separated from the street by light palings,—all, without exception, neat, trim, and tidy.
My first recollections are of a big, comfortable house of brick, in what is now called ``colonial style,'' with a ``stoop,'' long and broad, on its southern side, which in summer was shaded with honeysuckles. Spreading out southward from this was a spacious garden filled with old-fashioned flowers, and in this I learned to walk. To this hour the perfume of a pink brings the whole scene before me, and proves the justice of Oliver Wendell Holmes's saying that we remember past scenes more vividly by the sense of smell than by the sense of sight.
I can claim no merit for clambering out of poverty. My childhood was happy; my surroundings wholesome; I was brought up neither in poverty nor riches; my parents were what were called ``well-to-do-people''; everything about me was good and substantial; but our mode of life was frugal; waste or extravagance or pretense was not permitted for a moment. My paternal grandfather had been, in the early years of the century, the richest man in the township; but some time before my birth he had become one of the poorest; for a fire had consumed his mills, there was no insurance, and his health gave way. On my father, Horace White, had fallen, therefore, the main care of his father's family. It was to the young man, apparently, a great calamity:—that which grieved him most being that it took him—a boy not far in his teens—out of school. But he met the emergency manfully, was soon known far and wide for his energy, ability, and integrity, and long before he had reached middle age was considered one of the leading men of business in the county.
My mother had a more serene career. In another part of these Reminiscences, saying something of my religious and political development, I shall speak again of her and of her parents. Suffice it here that her father prospered as a man of business, was known as ``Colonel,'' and also as ``Squire'' Dickson, and represented his county in the State legislature. He died when I was about three years old, and I vaguely remember being brought to him as he lay upon his death-bed. On one account, above all others, I have long looked back to him with pride. For the first public care of the early settlers had been a church, and the second a school. This school had been speedily developed into Cortland Academy, which soon became fa- mous throughout all that region, and, as a boy of five or six years of age, I was very proud to read on the corner- stone of the Academy building my grandfather's name among those of the original founders.
Not unlikely there thus came into my blood the strain which has led me ever since to feel that the building up of goodly institutions is more honorable than any other work,—an idea which was at the bottom of my efforts in developing the University of Michigan, and in founding Cornell University.
To Cortland Academy students came from far and near; and it soon began sending young men into the foremost places of State and Church. At an early day, too, it began receiving young women and sending them forth to become the best of matrons. As my family left the place when I was seven years old I was never within its walls as a student, but it acted powerfully on my education in two ways,—it gave my mother the best of her education, and it gave to me a respect for scholarship. The library and collections, though small, suggested pursuits better than the scramble for place or pelf; the public exercises, two or three times a year, led my thoughts, no matter how vaguely, into higher regions, and I shall never forget the awe which came over me when as a child, I saw Principal Woolworth, with his best students around him on the green, making astronomical observations through a small telescope.
Thus began my education into that great truth, so imperfectly understood, as yet, in our country, that stores, shops, hotels, facilities for travel and traffic are not the highest things in civilization.
This idea was strengthened in the family. Devoted as my father was to business, he always showed the greatest respect for men of thought. I have known him, even when most absorbed in his pursuits, to watch occasions for walking homeward with a clergyman or teacher, whose conversation he especially prized. There was scant respect in the family for the petty politicians of the region; but there was great respect for the instructors of the academy, and for any college professor who happened to be traveling through the town. I am now in my sixty-eighth year, and I write these lines from the American Embassy in Berlin. It is my duty here, as it has been at other European capitals, to meet various high officials; but that old feeling, engendered in my childhood, continues, and I bow to the representatives of the universities,—to the leaders in science, literature, and art, with a feeling of awe and respect far greater than to their so-called superiors,—princelings and high military or civil officials.
Influences of a more direct sort came from a primary school. To this I was taken, when about three years old, for a reason which may strike the present generation as curious. The colored servant who had charge of me wished to learn to read—so she slipped into the school and took me with her. As a result, though my memory runs back distinctly to events near the beginning of my fourth year, it holds not the faintest recollection of a time when I could not read easily. The only studies which I recall with distinctness, as carried on before my seventh year, are arithmetic and geography. As to the former, the multiplication-table was chanted in chorus by the whole body of children, a rhythmical and varied movement of the arms being carried on at the same time. These exercises gave us pleasure and fastened the tables in our minds. As to geography, that gave pleasure in another way. The books contained pictures which stimulated my imagination and prompted me to read the adjacent text. There was no over-pressure. Mental recreation and information were obtained in a loose way from ``Rollo Books,'' ``Peter Parley Books,'' ``Sanford and Merton,'' the ``Children's Magazine,'' and the like. I now think it a pity that I was not allowed to read, instead of these, the novels of Scott and Cooper, which I discovered later. I devoutly thank Heaven that no such thing as a sensation newspaper was ever brought into the house,— even if there were one at that time,—which I doubt. As to physical recreation, there was plenty during the summer in the fields and woods, and during the winter in coasting, building huts in the deep snow, and in storming or defending the snow forts on the village green. One of these childish sports had a historical connection with a period which now seems very far away. If any old settler happened to pass during our snow-balling or our shooting with bows and arrows, he was sure to look on with interest, and, at some good shot, to cry out,— ``SHOOT BURGOYNE!''—thus recalling his remembrances of the sharpshooters who brought about the great surrender at Saratoga.
In my seventh year my father was called to take charge of the new bank established at Syracuse, thirty miles distant, and there the family soon joined him. I remember that coming through the Indian Reservation, on the road between the two villages, I was greatly impressed by the bowers and other decorations which had been used shortly before at the installation of a new Indian chief. It was the headquarters of the Onondagas,—formerly the great central tribe of the Iroquois,—the warlike confederacy of the Six Nations; and as, in a general way, the story was told me on that beautiful day in September a new world of romance was opened to me, so that Indian stories, and especially Cooper's novels, when I was allowed to read them, took on a new reality.
Syracuse, which is now a city of one hundred and twenty thousand inhabitants, was then a straggling village of about five thousand. After much time lost in sundry poor ``select schools'' I was sent to one of the public schools which was very good, and thence, when about twelve years old, to the preparatory department of the Syracuse Academy.
There, by good luck, was Joseph A. Allen, the best teacher of English branches I have ever known. He had no rules and no system; or, rather, his rule was to have no rules, and his system was to have no system. To genius. He seemed to divine the character and enter into the purpose of every boy. Work under him was a pleasure. His methods were very simple. Great attention was given to reading aloud from a book made up of selections from the best authors, and to recitals from these. Thus I stored up not only some of the best things in the older English writers, but inspiring poems of Bryant, Whittier, Longfellow, and other moderns. My only regret is that more of this was not given us. I recall, among treasures thus gained, which have been precious to me ever since, in many a weary or sleepless hour on land and sea, extracts from Shakspere, parts of Milton's ``Samson Agonistes,'' and of his sonnets; Gray's ``Elegy,'' Byron's ``Ode to the Ocean,'' Campbell's ``What's Hallowed Ground?'' Goldsmith's ``Deserted Village,'' Longfellow's ``Psalm of Life,'' Irving's ``Voyage to Europe,'' and parts of Webster's ``Reply to Hayne.''
At this school the wretched bugbear of English spelling was dealt with by a method which, so long as our present monstrous orthography continues, seems to me the best possible. During the last half-hour of every day, each scholar was required to have before him a copy- book, of which each page was divided into two columns. At the head of the first column was the word ``Spelling''; at the head of the second column was the word ``Corrected.'' The teacher then gave out to the school about twenty of the more important words in the reading- lesson of the day, and, as he thus dictated each word, each scholar wrote it in the column headed ``Spelling.'' When all the words were thus written, the first scholar was asked to spell from his book the first word; if misspelled, it was passed to the next, and so on until it was spelled correctly; whereupon all who had made a mistake in writing it made the proper correction on the opposite column. The result of this was that the greater part of us learned orthography PRACTICALLY. For the practical use of spelling comes in writing.
The only mistake in Mr. Allen's teaching was too much attention to English grammar. The order ought to be, literature first, and grammar afterward. Perhaps there is no more tiresome trifling in the world for boys and girls than rote recitations and parsing from one of the usual grammatical text-books.
As to mathematics, arithmetic was, perhaps, pushed too far into puzzles; but geometry was made fascinating by showing its real applications and the beauty of its reasoning. It is the only mathematical study I ever loved. In natural science, though most of the apparatus of schools nowadays was wanting, Mr. Allen's instruction was far beyond his time. Never shall I forget my excited interest when, occasionally, the village surgeon came in, and the whole school was assembled to see him dissect the eye or ear or heart of an ox. Physics, as then understood, was studied in a text-book, but there was illustration by simple apparatus, which fastened firmly in my mind the main facts and principles.
The best impulse by this means came from the principal of the academy, Mr. Oren Root,—one of the pioneers of American science, whose modesty alone stood in the way of his fame. I was too young to take direct instruction from him, but the experiments which I saw him perform led me, with one or two of my mates, to construct an excellent electrical machine and subsidiary apparatus; and with these, a small galvanic battery and an extemporized orrery, I diluted Professor Root's lectures with the teachings of my little books on natural philosophy and astronomy to meet the capacities of the younger boys in our neighborhood.
Salient among my recollections of this period are the cries and wailing of a newly-born babe in the rooms at the academy occupied by the principal, and adjacent to our big school-room. Several decades of years later I had the honor of speaking on the platform of Cooper Institute in company with this babe, who, as I write, is, I believe, the very energetic Secretary of War in the Cabinet of President McKinley.
Unfortunately for me, Mr. Root was soon afterward called away to a professorship at Hamilton College, and so, though living in the best of all regions for geological study, I was never properly grounded in that science, and as to botany, I am to this hour utterly ignorant of its simplest facts and principles. I count this as one of the mistakes in my education,—resulting in the loss of much valuable knowledge and high pleasure.
As to physical development, every reasonable encouragement was given to play. Mr. Allen himself came frequently to the play-grounds. He was an excellent musician and a most helpful influence was exerted by singing, which was a daily exercise of the school. I then began taking lessons regularly in music and became proficient enough to play the organ occasionally in church; the best result of this training being that it gave my life one of its deepest, purest, and most lasting pleasures.
On the moral side, Mr. Allen influenced many of us by liberalizing and broadening our horizon. He was a disciple of Channing and an abolitionist, and, though he never made the slightest attempt to proselyte any of his scholars, the very atmosphere of the school made sectarian bigotry impossible.
As to my general education outside the school I browsed about as best I could. My passion in those days was for machinery, and, above all, for steam machinery. The stationary and locomotive engines upon the newly- established railways toward Albany on the east and Buffalo on the west especially aroused my attention, and I came to know every locomotive, its history, character, and capabilities, as well as every stationary engine in the whole region. My holiday excursions, when not employed in boating or skating on the Onondaga Creek, or upon the lake, were usually devoted to visiting workshops, where the engine drivers and stokers seemed glad to talk with a youngster who took an interest in their business. Especially interested was I in a rotary engine on ``Barker's centrifugal principle,'' with which the inventor had prom- ised to propel locomotives at the rate of a hundred miles an hour, but which had been degraded to grinding bark in a tannery. I felt its disgrace keenly, as a piece of gross injustice; but having obtained a small brass model, fitted to it a tin boiler and placed it on a little stern-wheel boat, I speedily discovered the secret of the indignity which had overtaken the machine, for no boat could carry a boiler large enough to supply steam for it.
So, too, I knew every water-wheel in that part of the county, whether overshot, undershot, breast, or turbine. Everything in the nature of a motor had an especial fascination for me, and for the men in control of such power I entertained a respect which approached awe.
Among all these, my especial reverence was given to the locomotive engineers; in my youthful mind they took on a heroic character. Often during the night watches I thought of them as braving storm and peril, responsible for priceless freights of human lives. Their firm, keen faces come back to me vividly through the mists of sixty years, and to this day I look up to their successors at the throttle with respectful admiration.
After Professor Root's departure the Syracuse Academy greatly declined, Mr. Allen being the only strong man left among its teachers, and, as I was to go to college, I was removed to a ``classical school.'' This school was not at first very successful. Its teacher was a good scholar but careless. Under him I repeated the grammatical forms and rules in Latin and Greek, glibly, term after term, without really understanding their value. His great mistake, which seems to me a not infrequent one, was taking it for granted that repeating rules and forms means understanding them and their application. But a catastrophe came. I had been promoted beyond my deserts from a lower into an upper Latin class, and at a public examination the Rev. Samuel Joseph May, who was present, asked me a question, to which I made an answer revealing utter ignorance of one of the simplest principles of Latin grammar. He was discon- certed at the result, I still more so, and our preceptor most of all. That evening my father very solemnly asked me about it. I was mortified beyond expression, did not sleep at all that night, and of my own accord, began reviewing my Andrews and Stoddard thoroughly and vigorously. But this did not save the preceptor. A successor was called, a man who afterward became an eminent Presbyterian divine and professor in a Southern university, James W. Hoyt, one of the best and truest of men, and his manly, moral influence over his scholars was remarkable. Many of them have reached positions of usefulness, and I think they will agree that his influence upon their lives was most happy. The only drawback was that he was still very young, not yet through his senior year in Union College, and his methods in classical teaching were imperfect. He loved his classics and taught his better students to love them, but he was neither thorough in grammar, nor sure in translation, and this I afterward found to my sorrow. My friend and schoolmate of that time, W. O. S., published a few years since, in the ``St. Nicholas Magazine,'' an account of this school. It was somewhat idealized, but we doubtless agree in thinking that the lack of grammatical drill was more than made up by the love of manliness, and the dislike of meanness, which was in those days our very atmosphere. Probably the best thing for my mental training was that Mr. Hoyt interested me in my Virgil, Horace, and Xenophon, and required me to write out my translations in the best English at my command.
But to all his pupils he did not prove so helpful. One of them, though he has since become an energetic man of business on the Pacific Coast, was certainly not helped into his present position by his Latin; for of all the translations I have ever heard or read of, one of his was the worst. Being called to construe the first line of the Aeneid, he proceeded as follows:
``Arma,—arms; virumque,—and a man; cano,—and a dog.'' There was a roar, and Mr. Hoyt, though evidently saddened, kept his temper. He did not, like the great and good Arnold of Rugby, under similar provocation, knock the offender down with the text-book.
Still another agency in my development was the debating club, so inevitable in an American village. Its discussions were sometimes pretentious and always crude, but something was gained thereby. I remember that one of the subjects was stated as follows: ``Which has done most harm, intemperance or fanaticism.'' The debate was without any striking feature until my schoolmate, W. O. S., brought up heavy artillery on the side of the anti-fanatics: namely, a statement of the ruin wrought by Mohammedanism in the East, and, above all, the destruction of the great Alexandrian library by Caliph Omar; and with such eloquence that all the argumentation which any of us had learned in the temperance meetings was paralyzed.
On another occasion we debated the question: ``Was the British Government justified in its treatment of Napoleon Bonaparte?'' Much historical lore had been brought to bear on the question, when an impassioned young orator wound up a bitter diatribe against the great emperor as follows: ``The British Government WAS justified, and if for no other reason, by the Emperor Napoleon's murder of the `Duck de Engine' '' (Duc d'Enghien).
As to education outside of the school very important to me had been the discovery, when I was about ten years old, of `` `The Monastery,' by the author of `Waverley.' '' Who the ``author of `Waverley' '' was I neither knew nor cared, but read the book three times, end over end, in a sort of fascination. Unfortunately, novels and romances were kept under lock and key, as unfit reading for children, and it was some years before I reveled in Scott's other novels. That they would have been thoroughly good and wholesome reading for me I know, and about my sixteenth year they opened a new world to me and gave healthful play to my imagination. I also read and re-read Bunyan's ``Pilgrim's Progress,'' and, with plea- sure even more intense, the earlier works of Dickens, which were then appearing.
My only regret, as regards that time, is that, between the rather trashy ``boys' books'' on one side and the rather severe books in the family library on the other, I read far less of really good literature than I ought to have done. My reading was absolutely without a guide, hence fitful and scrappy; parts of Rollin's ``Ancient History'' and Lander's ``Travels in Africa'' being mixed up with ``Robinson Crusoe'' and ``The Scottish Chiefs.'' Reflection on my experience has convinced me that some kindly guidance in the reading of a fairly scholarly boy is of the utmost importance, and never more so than now, when books are so many and attractive. I should lay much stress, also, on the hearing of good literature well read, and the interspersing of such reading with some remarks by the reader, pointing out the main beauties of the pieces thus presented.
About my tenth year occurred an event, apparently trivial, but really very important in my mental development during many years afterward. My father brought home one day, as a gift to my mother, a handsome quarto called ``The Gallery of British Artists.'' It contained engravings from pictures by Turner, Stanfield, Cattermole, and others, mainly representing scenes from Shakspere, Scott, Burns, picturesque architecture, and beautiful views in various parts of Europe. Of this book I never tired. It aroused in me an intense desire to know more of the subjects represented, and this desire has led me since to visit and to study every cathedral, church, and town hall of any historical or architectural significance in Europe, outside the Spanish peninsula. But, far more important, it gave an especial zest to nearly all Scott's novels, and especially to the one which I have always thought the most fascinating, ``Quentin Durward.'' This novel led me later, not merely to visit Liege, and Orl
In my sixteenth and seventeenth years another element entered into my education. Syracuse, as the central city of the State, was the scene of many conventions and public meetings. That was a time of very deep earnestness in political matters. The last great efforts were making, by the more radical, peaceably to prevent the extension of slavery, and, by the more conservative, peaceably to preserve the Union. The former of these efforts interested me most. There were at Syracuse frequent public debates between the various groups of the anti-slavery party represented by such men as Gerrit Smith, Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, John Parker Hale, Samuel Joseph May, and Frederick Douglass. They took strong hold upon me and gave me a higher idea of a man's best work in life. That was the bloom period of the old popular lecture. It was the time when lectures were expected to build character and increase knowledge; the sensation and buffoon business which destroyed the system had not yet come in. I feel to this hour the good influence of lectures then heard, in the old City Hall at Syracuse, from such men as President Mark Hopkins, Bishop Alonzo Potter, Senator Hale of New Hampshire, Emerson, Ware, Whipple, and many others.
As to recreative reading at this period, the author who exercised the strongest influence over me was Charles Kingsley. His novels ``Alton Locke'' and ``Yeast'' interested me greatly in efforts for doing away with old abuses in Europe, and his ``Two Years After'' increased my hatred for negro slavery in America. His ``Westward Ho!'' extended my knowledge of the Elizabethan period and increased my manliness. Of this period, too, was my reading of Lowell's Poems, many of which I greatly enjoyed. His ``Biglow Papers'' were a perpetual delight; the dialect was familiar to me since, in the little New England town transplanted into the heart of central New York, in which I was born, the less educated people used it, and the dry and droll Yankee expressions of our ``help'' and ``hired man'' were a source of constant amusement in the family.
In my seventeenth year came a trial. My father had taken a leading part in establishing a parish school for St. Paul's church in Syracuse, in accordance with the High Church views of our rector, Dr. Gregory, and there was finally called to the mastership a young candidate for orders, a brilliant scholar and charming man, who has since become an eminent bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church. To him was intrusted my final preparation for college. I had always intended to enter one of the larger New England universities, but my teacher was naturally in favor of his Alma Mater, and the influence of our bishop, Dr. de Lancey, being also thrown powerfully into the scale, my father insisted on placing me at a small Protestant Episcopal college in western New York. I went most reluctantly. There were in the faculty several excellent men, one of whom afterward became a colleague of my own in Cornell University, and proved of the greatest value to it. Unfortunately, we of the lower college classes could have very little instruction from him; still there was good instruction from others; the tutor in Greek, James Morrison Clarke, was one of the best scholars I have ever known.
It was in the autumn of 1849 that I went into residence at the little college and was assigned a very unprepossessing room in a very ugly barrack. Entering my new quarters I soon discovered about me various cabalistic signs, some of them evidently made by heating large iron keys, and pressing them against the woodwork. On inquiring I found that the room had been occupied some years before by no less a personage than Philip Spencer, a member of the famous Spencer family of Albany, who, having passed some years at this little college, and never having been able to get out of the freshman class, had gone to another institution of about the same grade, had there founded a Greek letter fraternity which is now widely spread among American universities, and then, through the influence of his father, who was Secretary of War, had been placed as a midshipman under Commodore McKenzie on the brig-of-war Somers. On the coast of Africa a mutiny was discovered, and as, on examination, young Spencer was found at the head of it, and papers discovered in his cabin revealed the plan of seizing the ship and using it in a career of piracy, the young man, in spite of his connection with a member of the Cabinet, was hanged at the yard-arm with two of his associates.
The most curious relic of him at the college was preserved in the library of the Hermean Society. It was a copy of ``The Pirates' Own Book'': a glorification of the exploits of ``Blackbeard'' and other great freebooters, profusely adorned with illustrations of their joys and triumphs. This volume bore on the fly-leaf the words, ``Presented to the Hermean Society by Philip Spencer,'' and was in those days shown as a great curiosity.
The college was at its lowest ebb; of discipline there was none; there were about forty students, the majority of them, sons of wealthy churchmen, showing no inclination to work and much tendency to dissipation. The authorities of the college could not afford to expel or even offend a student. for its endowment was so small that it must have all the instruction fees possible, and must keep on good terms with the wealthy fathers of its scapegrace students. The scapegraces soon found this out, and the result was a little pandemonium. Only about a dozen of our number studied at all; the rest, by translations, promptings, and evasions escaped without labor. I have had to do since, as student, professor, or lecturer, with some half-dozen large universities at home and abroad, and in all of these together have not seen so much carousing and wild dissipation as I then saw in this little ``Church college'' of which the especial boast was that, owing to the small number of its students, it was ``able to exercise a direct Christian influence upon every young man committed to its care.''
The evidences of this Christian influence were not clear. The president of the college, Dr. Benjamin Hale, was a clergyman of the highest character; a good scholar, an excellent preacher, and a wise administrator; but his stature was very small, his girth very large, and his hair very yellow. When, then, on the thirteenth day of the month, there was read at chapel from the Psalter the words, ``And there was little Benjamin, their ruler,'' very irreverent demonstrations were often made by the students, presumably engaged in worship; demonstrations so mortifying, indeed, that at last the president frequently substituted for the regular Psalms of the day one of the beautiful ``Selections'' of Psalms which the American Episcopal Church has so wisely incorporated into its prayer-book.
But this was by no means the worst indignity which these youth ``under direct Christian influence'' perpetrated upon their reverend instructors. It was my privilege to behold a professor, an excellent clergyman, seeking to quell hideous riot in a student's room, buried under a heap of carpets, mattresses, counterpanes, and blankets; to see another clerical professor forced to retire through the panel of a door under a shower of lexicons, boots, and brushes, and to see even the president himself, on one occasion, obliged to leave his lecture-room by a ladder from a window, and, on another, kept at bay by a shower of beer-bottles.
One favorite occupation was rolling cannon-balls along the corridors at midnight, with frightful din and much damage: a tutor, having one night been successful in catching and confiscating two of these, pounced from his door the next night upon a third; but this having been heated nearly to redness and launched from a shovel, the result was that he wore bandages upon his hands for many days.
Most ingenious were the methods for ``training freshmen,''— one of the mildest being the administration of soot and water by a hose-pipe thrust through the broken panel of a door. Among general freaks I remember seeing a horse turned into the chapel, and a stuffed wolf, dressed in a surplice, placed upon the roof of that sacred edifice.
But the most elaborate thing of the kind I ever saw was the breaking up of a ``Second Adventist'' meeting by a score of student roysterers. An itinerant fanatic had taken an old wooden meeting-house in the lower part of the town, had set up on either side of the pulpit large canvas representations of the man of brass with feet of clay, and other portentous characters of the prophecies, and then challenged the clergy to meet him in public debate. At the appointed time a body of college youth appeared, most sober in habit and demure in manner, having at their head ``Bill'' Howell of Black Rock and ``Tom'' Clark of Manlius, the two wildest miscreants in the sophomore class, each over six feet tall, the latter dressed as a respectable farmer, and the former as a country clergyman, wearing a dress-coat, a white cravat, a tall black hat wrapped in crape, leaning on a heavy, ivory-knobbed cane, and carrying ostentatiously a Greek Testament. These disguised malefactors, having taken their seats in the gallery directly facing the pulpit, the lecturer expressed his ``satisfaction at seeing clergymen present,'' and began his demonstrations. For about five minutes all went well; then ``Bill'' Howell solemnly arose and, in a snuffling voice, asked permission to submit a few texts from scripture. Permission being granted, he put on a huge pair of goggles, solemnly opened his Greek Testament, read emphatically the first passage which attracted his attention and impressively asked the lecturer what he had to say to it. At this, the lecturer, greatly puzzled, asked what the reverend gentleman was reading. Upon this Howell read in New Testament Greek another utterly irrelevant passage. In reply the lecturer said, rather roughly, ``If you will speak English I will answer you.'' At this Howell said with the most humble suavity, ``Do I understand that the distinguished gentleman does not recognize what I have been reading?'' The preacher answered, ``I don't understand any such gibberish; speak English.'' Thereupon Howell threw back his long black hair and launched forth into eloquent denunciation as follows: ``Sir, is it possible that you come here to interpret to us the Holy Bible and do not recognize the language in which that blessed book was written? Sir, do you dare to call the very words of the Almighty `gibberish?' '' At this all was let loose; some students put asafetida on the stove; others threw pigeon-shot against the ceiling and windows, making a most appalling din, and one wretch put in deadly work with a syringe thrust through the canvas representation of the man of brass with feet of clay. But, alas, Constable John Dey had recognized Howell and Clark, even amid their disguises. He had dealt with them too often before. The next tableau showed them, with their tall hats crushed over their heads, belaboring John Dey and his myrmidons, and presently, with half a dozen other ingenuous youth, they were haled to the office of justice. The young judge who officiated on this occasion was none other than a personage who will be mentioned with great respect more than once in these reminiscences,—Charles James Folger,— afterward my colleague in the State Senate, Chief Justice of the State and Secretary of the Treasury of the United States. He had met Howell often, for they were members of the same Greek letter fraternity,—the thrice illustrious Sigma Phi,—and, only a few days before, Howell had presented me to him; but there was no fraternal bond visible now; justice was sternly implacable, and good round fines were imposed upon all the culprits caught.
The philosophy of all this waywardness and dissipation was very simple. There was no other outlet for the animal spirits of these youth. Athletics were unknown; there was no gymnasium, no ball-playing, and, though the college was situated on the shore of one of the most beautiful lakes in the world, no boating. As regards my own personal relation to this condition of things I have pictured, it was more that of a good-natured spectator than of an active accomplice. My nearest friends were in the thick of it, but my tastes kept me out of most of it. I was fond of books, and, in the little student's library in my college building I reveled. Moreover, I then began to accumulate for myself the library which has since grown to such large proportions. Still the whole life of the place became more and more unsatisfactory to me, and I determined, at any cost, to escape from it and find some seat of learning where there was less frolic and more study.
CHAPTER II
YALE AND EUROPE—1850-1857
At the close of my year at the little Western New York College I felt that it was enough time wasted, and, anxious to try for something better, urged upon my father my desire to go to one of the larger New England universities. But to this he would not listen. He was assured by the authorities of the little college that I had been doing well, and his churchmanship, as well as his respect for the bishop, led him to do what was very unusual with him—to refuse my request. Up to this period he had allowed me to take my own course; but now he was determined that I should take his. He was one of the kindest of men, but he had stern ideas as to proper subordination, and these he felt it his duty to maintain. I was obliged to make a coup d'
The stay of three months with my friend—the future bishop—in the little country town, was also good for me physically. In our hours of recreation we roamed through the neighboring woods, shooting squirrels and pigeons with excellent effect on my health. Meantime I kept up my correspondence with all the members of the family save my father;—from him there was no sign. But at last came a piece of good news. He was very fond of music, and on the arrival of Jenny Lind in the United States he went to New York to attend her concerts. During one of these my mother turned suddenly toward him and said: ``What a pity that the boy cannot hear this; how he would enjoy it!'' My father answered, ``Tell him to come home and see us.'' My mother, of course, was not slow in writing me, and a few days later my father cordially greeted my home-coming, and all difficulties seemed over. Shortly after Christmas he started with me for Yale; but there soon appeared a lion in the path. Our route lay through Hartford, the seat of Trinity College, and to my consternation I found at the last moment that he had letters from our rector and others to the president and professors of that institution. Still more alarming, we had hardly entered the train when my father discovered a Trinity student on board. Of course, the youth spoke in the highest terms of his college and of his faculty, and more and more my father was pleased with the idea of staying a day or two at Hartford, taking a look at Trinity, and presenting our letters of introduction. During a considerably extended career in the diplomatic service I have had various occasions to exercise tact, care, and discretion, but I do not think that my efforts on all these together equaled those which I then put forth to avoid stopping at Hartford. At last my father asked me, rather severely, why I cared so much about going to New Haven, and I framed an answer offhand to meet the case, saying that Yale had an infinitely finer library than Trinity. Thereupon he said, ``My boy, if you will go to Trinity College I will give you the best private library in the United States.'' I said, ``No, I am going to New Haven; I started for New Haven, and I will go there.'' I had never braved him before. He said not a word. We passed quietly through Hartford, and a day or two later I was entered at Yale.
It was a happy change. I respected the institution, for its discipline, though at times harsh, was, on the whole, just, and thereby came a great gain to my own self-respect. But as to the education given, never was a man more disappointed at first. The president and professors were men of high character and attainments; but to the lower classes the instruction was given almost entirely by tutors, who took up teaching for bread-winning while going through the divinity school. Naturally most of the work done under these was perfunctory. There was too much reciting by rote and too little real intercourse between teacher and taught. The instructor sat in a box, heard students' translations without indicating anything better, and their answers to questions with very few suggestions or remarks. The first text-book in Greek was Xenophon's ``Memorabilia,'' and one of the first men called up was my classmate Delano Goddard. He made an excellent translation,—clean, clear, in thoroughly good English; but he elicited no attention from the instructor, and was then put through sundry grammatical puzzles, among which he floundered until stopped by the word, ``Sufficient.'' Soon afterward another was called up who rattled off glibly a translation without one particle of literary merit, and was then plied with the usual grammatical questions. Being asked to ``synopsize'' the Greek verb, he went through the various moods and tenses, in all sorts of ways and in all possible combinations, his tongue rattling like the clapper of a mill. When he sat down my next neighbor said to me, ``that man will be our valedictorian.'' This disgusted me. If that was the style of classical scholarship at Yale, I knew that there was nothing in it for me. It turned out as my friend said. That glib reciter did become the valedictorian of the class, but stepped from the commencement stage into nothingness, and was never heard of more. Goddard became the editor of one of the most important metropolitan news- papers of the United States, and, before his early death, distinguished himself as a writer on political and historical topics.
Nor was it any better in Latin. We were reading, during that term the ``De Senectute'' of Cicero,—a beautiful book; but to our tutor it was neither more nor less than a series of pegs on which to hang Zumpt's rules for the subjunctive mood. The translation was hurried through, as of little account. Then came questions regarding the subjunctives;—questions to which very few members of the class gave any real attention. The best Latin scholar in the class, G. W. S——, since so distinguished as the London correspondent of the ``New York Tribune,'' and, at present, as the New York correspondent of the London ``Times,'' having one day announced to some of us,—with a very round expletive,—that he would answer no more such foolish questions, the tutor soon discovered his recalcitrancy, and thenceforward plied him with such questions and nothing else. S—— always answered that he was not prepared on them; with the result that at the Junior Exhibition he received no place on the programme.
In the junior year matters improved somewhat; but, though the professors were most of them really distinguished men, and one at least, James Hadley, a scholar who, at Berlin or Leipsic, would have drawn throngs of students from all Christendom, they were fettered by a system which made everything of gerund-grinding and nothing of literature.
The worst feature of the junior year was the fact that through two terms, during five hours each week, ``recitations'' were heard by a tutor in ``Olmsted's Natural Philosophy.'' The text-book was simply repeated by rote. Not one student in fifty took the least interest in it; and the man who could give the words of the text most glibly secured the best marks. One exceedingly unfortunate result of this kind of instruction was that it so disgusted the class with the whole subject, that the really excellent lectures of Professor Olmsted, illustrated by probably the best apparatus then possessed by any American university, were voted a bore. Almost as bad was the historical instruction given by Professor James Hadley. It consisted simply in hearing the student repeat from memory the dates from ``P
The same thing must be said of Professor Thatcher's instruction in Tacitus. It was always the same mechanical sort of thing, with, occasionally, a few remarks which really aroused interest.
In the senior year the influence of President Woolsey and Professor Porter was strong for good. Though the ``Yale system'' fettered them somewhat, their personality often broke through it. Yet it amazes me to remember that during a considerable portion of our senior year no less a man than Woolsey gave instruction in history by hearing men recite the words of a text-book;—and that text-book the Rev. John Lord's little, popular treatise on the ``Modern History of Europe!'' Far better was Woolsey's instruction in Guizot. That was stimulating. It not only gave some knowledge of history, but suggested thought upon it. In this he was at his best. He had not at that time begun his new career as a professor of International Law, and that subject was treated by a kindly old governor of the State, in a brief course of instruction, which was, on the whole, rather inadequate. Professor Porter's instruction in philosophy opened our eyes and led us to do some thinking for ourselves. In political economy, during the senior year, President Woolsey heard the senior class ``recite'' from Wayland's small treatise, which was simply an abridged presentation of the Manchester view, the most valuable part of this instruction being the remarks by Woolsey himself, who discussed controverted questions briefly but well. He also delivered, during one term, a course of lectures upon the historical relations between the German States, which had some interest, but, not being connected with our previous instruction, took little hold upon us. As to natural science, we had in chemistry and geology, doubtless, the best courses then offered in the United States. The first was given by Benjamin Silliman, the elder, an American pioneer in science, and a really great character; the second, by James Dwight Dana, and in his lecture-room one felt himself in the hands of a master. I cannot forgive myself for having yielded to the general indifference of the class toward all this instruction. It was listlessly heard, and grievously neglected. The fault was mainly our own; —but it was partly due to ``The System,'' which led students to neglect all studies which did not tell upon ``marks'' and ``standing.''
Strange to say, there was not, during my whole course at Yale, a lecture upon any period, subject, or person in literature, ancient or modern:—our only resource, in this field, being the popular lecture courses in the town each winter, which generally contained one or two presentations of literary subjects. Of these, that which made the greatest impression upon me was by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Sundry lectures in my junior year, by Whipple, and at a later period by George William Curtis, also influenced me. It was one of the golden periods of English literature, the climax of the Victorian epoch;—the period of Wordsworth, Tennyson, and the Brownings, of Thackeray and Dickens, of Macaulay and Carlyle on one side of the Atlantic, and of Emerson, Irving, Hawthorne, Ban- croft, Prescott, Motley, Lowell, Longfellow, Horace Bushnell, and their compeers on the other. Hence came strong influences; but in dealing with them we were left to ourselves.
Very important in shaping my intellectual development at this time were my fellow-students. The class of 1853 was a very large one for that day, and embraced far more than the usual proportion of active-minded men. Walks and talks with these were of great value to me; thence came some of my best impulses and suggestions to reading and thought.
Especially fortunate was I in my ``chum,'' the friend that stood closest to me. He was the most conservative young man I ever knew, and at the very opposite pole from me on every conceivable subject. But his deeply religious character, his thorough scholarship, and his real devotion to my welfare, were very precious to me. Our very differences were useful, since they obliged me to revise with especial care all my main convictions and trains of thought. He is now, at this present writing, the Bishop of Michigan, and a most noble and affectionate pastor of his flock.
The main subjects of interest to us all had a political bearing. Literature was considered as mainly subsidiary to political discussion. The great themes, in the minds of those who tried to do any thinking, were connected with the tremendous political struggle then drawing toward its climax in civil war. Valuable to me was my membership of sundry student fraternities. They were vealy, but there was some nourishment in them; by far the best of all being a senior club which, though it had adopted a hideous emblem, was devoted to offhand discussions of social and political questions;—on the whole, the best club I have ever known.
The studies which interested me most were political and historical; from classical studies the gerund-grinding and reciting by rote had completely weaned me. One of our Latin tutors, having said to me: ``If you would try you could become a first-rate classical scholar,'' I answered: ``Mr. B——, I have no ambition to become a classical scholar, as scholarship is understood here.''
I devoted myself all the more assiduously to study on my own lines, especially in connection with the subjects taught by President Woolsey in the senior year, and the one thing which encouraged me was that, at the public reading of essays, mine seemed to interest the class. Yet my first trial of strength with my classmates in this respect did not apparently turn out very well. It was at a prize debate, in one of the large open societies, but while I had prepared my speech with care, I had given no thought to its presentation, and, as a result, the judges passed me by. Next day a tutor told me that Professor Porter wished to see me. He had been one of the judges, but it never occurred to me that he could have summoned me for anything save some transgression of college rules. But, on my arrival at his room, he began discussing my speech, said some very kind things of its matter, alluded to some defects in its manner, and all with a kindness which won my heart. Thus began a warm personal friendship which lasted through his professorship and presidency to the end of his life. His kindly criticism was worth everything to me; it did far more for me than any prize could have done. Few professors realize how much a little friendly recognition may do for a student. To this hour I bless Dr. Porter's memory.
Nor did my second effort, a competition in essay-writing, turn out much better. My essay was too labored, too long, too crabbedly written, and it brought me only half a third prize.
This was in the sophomore year. But in the junior year came a far more important competition; that for the Yale Literary Gold Medal, and without any notice of my intention to any person, I determined to try for it. Being open to the entire university, the universal expectation was that it would be awarded to a senior, as had hitherto been the case, and speculations were rife as to what mem- ber of the graduating class would take it. When the committee made their award to the essay on ``The Greater Distinctions in Statesmanship,'' opened the sealed envelopes and assigned the prize to me, a junior, there was great surprise. The encouragement came to me just at the right time, and did me great good. Later, there were awarded to me the first Clarke Prize for the discussion of a political subject, and the De Forest Gold Medal, then the most important premium awarded in the university, my subject being, ``The Diplomatic History of Modern Times.'' Some details regarding this latter success may serve to show certain ways in which influence can be exerted powerfully upon a young man. The subject had been suggested to me by hearing Edwin Forrest in Bulwer's drama of ``Richelieu.'' The character of the great cardinal, the greatest statesman that France has produced, made a deep impression upon me, and suggested the subjects in both the Yale Literary and the De Forest competitions, giving me not only the initial impulse, but maintaining that interest to which my success was largely due. Another spur to success was even more effective. Having one day received a telegram from my father, asking me to meet him in New York, I did so, and passed an hour with him, all the time at a loss to know why he had sent for me. But, finally, just as I was leaving the hotel to return to New Haven, he said, ``By the way, there is still another prize to be competed for, the largest of all.'' ``Yes,'' I answered, ``the De Forest; but I have little chance for that; for though I shall probably be one of the six Townsend prize men admitted to the competition, there are other speakers so much better, that I have little hope of taking it.'' He gave me rather a contemptuous look, and said, somewhat scornfully: ``If I were one of the first SIX competitors, in a class of over a hundred men, I would try hard to be the first ONE.'' That was all. He said nothing more, except good-bye. On my way to New Haven I thought much of this, and on arriving, went to a student, who had some reputation as an elocutionist, and engaged him for a course in vocal gymnastics. When he wished me to recite my oration before him, I declined, saying that it must be spoken in my own way, not in his; that his way might be better, but that mine was my own, and I would have no other. He confined himself, therefore, to a course of vocal gymnastics, and the result was a surprise to myself and all my friends. My voice, from being weak and hollow, became round, strong, and flexible. I then went to a student in the class above my own, a natural and forcible speaker, and made an arrangement with him to hear me pronounce my oration, from time to time, and to criticize it in a common-sense way. This he did. At passages where he thought my manner wrong, he raised his finger, gave me an imitation of my manner, then gave the passage in the way he thought best, and allowed me to choose between his and mine. The result was that, at the public competition, I was successful. This experience taught me what I conceive to be the true theory of elocutionary training in our universities—vocal gymnastics, on one side; common-sense criticism, on the other.
As to my physical education: with a constitution far from robust, there was need of special care. Fortunately, I took to boating. In an eight-oared boat, spinning down the harbor or up the river, with G. W. S—— at the stroke —as earnest and determined in the Undine then as in the New York office of the London ``Times'' now, every condition was satisfied for bodily exercise and mental recreation. I cannot refrain from mentioning that our club sent the first challenge to row that ever passed between Yale and Harvard, even though I am obliged to confess that we were soundly beaten; but neither that defeat at Lake Quinsigamond, nor the many absurdities which have grown out of such competitions since, have prevented my remaining an apostle of college boating from that day to this. If guarded by common-sense rules enforced with firmness by college faculties, it gives the maximum of healthful exercise, with a minimum of danger. The most detestable product of college life is the sickly cynic; and a thor- ough course in boating, under a good stroke oar, does as much as anything to make him impossible.
At the close of my undergraduate life at Yale I went abroad for nearly three years, and fortunately had, for a time, one of the best of companions, my college mate, Gilman, later president of Johns Hopkins University, and now of the Carnegie Institution, who was then, as he has been ever since, a source of good inspirations to me,— especially in the formation of my ideas regarding education. During the few weeks I then passed in England I saw much which broadened my views in various ways. History was made alive to me by rapid studies of persons and places while traveling, and especially was this the case during a short visit to Oxford, where I received some strong impressions, which will be referred to in another chapter. Dining at Christ Church with Osborne Gordon, an eminent tutor of that period, I was especially interested in his accounts of John Ruskin, who had been his pupil. Then, and afterward, while enjoying the hospitalities of various colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, I saw the excellencies of their tutorial system, but also had my eyes opened to some of their deficiencies.
Going thence to Paris I settled down in the family of a very intelligent French professor, where I remained nearly a year. Not a word of English was spoken in the family; and, with the daily lesson in a French method, and lectures at the Sorbonne and Coll
My favorite subject of study was the French Revolution, and, in the intervals of reading and lectures, I sought out not only the spots noted in its history, but the men who had taken part in it. At the H
There still remained at Paris, in those days, one main connecting link between the second empire and the first, and this was the most contemptible of all the Bonapartes,— the younger brother of the great Napoleon,— J
It was well known that the ex-king, as well as his son, Prince J
During the summer of 1854 I employed my vacation in long walks and drives with a college classmate through northern, western, and central France, including Picardy, Normandy, Brittany, and Touraine, visiting the spots of most historical and architectural interest. There were, at that time, few railways in those regions, so we put on blouses and took to the road, sending our light baggage ahead of us, and carrying only knapsacks. In every way it proved a most valuable experience. Pleasantly come back to me my walks and talks with the peasantry, and vividly dwell in my memory the cathedrals of Beauvais, Amiens, Rouen, Bayeux, Coutances, Le Mans, Tours, Chartres, and Orl
``Roi, je ne puis,
Prince ne daigne,
Rohan je suis.''
At this he seemed greatly pleased, grasped my hand, and launched at once into extended conversation. His great anxiety was to know who was to be the future king of our Republic, and he asked especially whether Washington had left any direct descendants. On my answering in the negative, he insisted that we would have to find some descendant in the collateral line, ``for,'' said he, ``you can't escape it; no nation can get along for any considerable time without a monarch.''
Returning to Paris I resumed my studies, and, at the request of Mr. Randall, the biographer of Jefferson, made some search in the French archives for correspondence between Jefferson and Robespierre,—search made rather to put an end to calumny than for any other purpose.
At the close of this stay in France, by the kindness of the American minister to Russia, Governor Seymour, of Connecticut, I was invited to St. Petersburg, as an attach
Returning from St. Petersburg, I was matriculated at the University of Berlin, and entered the family of a very scholarly gymnasial professor, where nothing but German was spoken. During this stay at the Prussian capital, in the years 1855 and 1856, I heard the lectures of Lepsius, on Egyptology; August Boeckh, on the History of Greece; Friedrich von Raumer, on the History of Italy; Hirsch, on Modern History in general; and Carl Ritter, on Physical Geography. The lectures of Ranke, the most eminent of German historians, I could not follow. He had a habit of becoming so absorbed in his subject, as to slide down in his chair, hold his finger up toward the ceiling, and then, with his eye fastened on the tip of it, to go mumbling through a kind of rhapsody, which most of my German fellow-students confessed they could not understand. It was a comical sight: half a dozen students crowding around his desk, listening as priests might listen to the sibyl on her tripod, the other students being scattered through the room, in various stages of discouragement. My studies at this period were mainly in the direction of history, though with considerable reading on art and literature. Valuable and interesting to me at this time were the representations of the best dramas of Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, and Gutzkow, at the Berlin theaters. Then, too, really began my education in Shakspere, and the representations of his plays (in Schlegel and Tieck's version) were, on the whole, the most satisfactory I have ever known. I thus heard plays of Shakspere which, in English-speaking countries, are never presented, and, even into those better known, wonderful light was at times thrown from this new point of view.
As to music, the Berlin Opera was then at the height of its reputation, the leading singer being the famous Joanna Wagner. But my greatest satisfaction was derived from the ``Liebig Classical Concerts.'' These were, undoubtedly, the best instrumental music then given in Europe, and a small party of us were very assiduous in our attendance. Three afternoons a week we were, as a rule, gathered about our table in the garden where the concerts were given, and, in the midst of us, Alexander Thayer, the biographer of Beethoven, who discussed the music with us during its intervals. Beethoven was, for him, the one personage in human history, and Beethoven's music the only worthy object of human concern. He knew every composition, every note, every variant, and had wrestled for years with their profound meanings. Many of his explanations were fantastic, but some were suggestive and all were interesting. Even more inspiring was another new-found friend, Henry Simmons Frieze; a thorough musician, and a most lovely character. He broached no theories, uttered no comments, but sat rapt by the melody and harmony—transfigured—``his face as it had been the face of an angel.'' In these Liebig concerts we then heard, for the first time, the music of a new composer,—one Wagner,—and agreed that while it was all very strange, there was really something in the overture to ``Tannh
At the close of this stay in Berlin, I went with a party of fellow-students through Austria to Italy. The whole journey was a delight, and the passage by steamer from Trieste to Venice was made noteworthy by a new acquaintance,—James Russell Lowell. As he had already written the ``Vision of Sir Launfal,'' the ``Fable for Critics,'' and the ``Biglow Papers,'' I stood in great awe of him; but this feeling rapidly disappeared in his genial presence. He was a student like the rest of us,—for he had been passing the winter at Dresden, working in German literature, as a preparation for succeeding Longfellow in the professorship at Harvard. He came to our rooms, and there linger delightfully in my memory his humorous accounts of Italian life as he had known it.
During the whole of the journey, it was my exceeding good fortune to be thrown into very close relations with two of our party, both of whom became eminent Latin professors, and one of whom,—already referred to,— Frieze, from his lecture-room in the University of Michigan, afterward did more than any other man within my knowledge to make classical scholarship a means of culture throughout our Western States. My excursions in Rome, under that guidance, I have always looked upon as among the fortunate things of life. The day was given to exploration, the evening to discussion, not merely of archaeological theories, but of the weightier matters pertaining to the history of Roman civilization and its influence. Dear Frieze and Fishburne! How vividly come back the days in the tower of the Croce di Malta, at Genoa, in our sky-parlor of the Piazza di Spagna at Rome, and in the old ``Capuchin Hotel'' at Amalfi, when we held high debate on the analogies between the Roman Empire and the British, and upon various kindred subjects.
An episode, of much importance to me at this time, was my meeting our American minister at Naples, Robert Dale Owen. His talks on the political state of Italy, and his pictures of the monstrous despotism of ``King Bomba'' took strong hold upon me. Not even the pages of Colletta or of Settembrini have done so much to arouse in me a sense of the moral value of political history.
Then, too, I made the first of my many excursions through the historic towns of Italy. My reading of Sismondi's ``Italian Republics'' had deeply interested me in their history, and had peopled them again with their old turbulent population. I seemed to see going on before my eyes the old struggle between Guelphs and Ghibellines, and between the demagogues and the city tyrants. In the midst of such scenes my passion for historical reading was strengthened, and the whole subject took on new and deeper meanings.
On my way northward, excursions among the cities of southern France, especially Nismes, Arles, and Orange, gave me a far better conception of Roman imperial power than could be obtained in Italy alone, and Avignon, Bourges, and Toulouse deepened my conceptions of mediaeval history.
Having returned to America in the summer of 1856 and met my class, assembled to take the master's degree in course at Yale, I was urged by my old Yale friends, especially by Porter and Gilman, to remain in New Haven. They virtually pledged me a position in the school of art about to be established; but my belief was in the value of historical studies, and I accepted an election to a professorship of history at the University of Michigan. The work there was a joy to me from first to last, and my relations with my students of that period, before I had become distracted from them by the cares of an executive position, were among the most delightful of my life. Then, perhaps, began the most real part of my education. The historical works of Buckle, Lecky, and Draper, which were then appearing, gave me a new and fruitful impulse; but most stimulating of all was the atmosphere coming from the great thought of Darwin and Herbert Spencer,— an atmosphere in which history became less and less a matter of annals, and more and more a record of the unfolding of humanity. Then, too, was borne in upon me the meaning of the proverb docendo disces. I found energetic Western men in my classes ready to discuss historical questions, and discovered that in order to keep up my part of the discussions, as well as to fit myself for my class-room duties, I must work as I had never worked before. The education I then received from my classes at the University of Michigan was perhaps the most effective of all.
PART II
POLITICAL LIFE
CHAPTER III
FROM JACKSON TO FILLMORE—1832-1851
My arrival in this world took place at one of the stormy periods of American political history. It was on the third of the three election days which carried Andrew Jackson a second time into the Presidency. Since that period, the election, with its paralysis of business, ghastly campaign lying, and monstrous vilification of candidates, has been concentrated into one day; but at that time all the evil passions of a presidential election were allowed to ferment and gather vitriolic strength during three days.
I was born into a politically divided family. My grandfather, on my mother's side, whose name I was destined to bear, was an ardent Democrat; had, as such, represented his district in the State legislature, and other public bodies; took his political creed from Thomas Jefferson, and adored Andrew Jackson. My father, on the other hand, was in all his antecedents and his personal convictions, a devoted Whig, taking his creed from Alexander Hamilton, and worshiping Henry Clay.
This opposition between my father and grandfather did not degenerate into personal bitterness; but it was very earnest, and, in later years, my mother told me that when Hayne, of South Carolina, made his famous speech, charging the North with ill-treatment of the South, my grandfather sent a copy of it to my father, as unanswerable; but that, shortly afterward, my father sent to my grandfather the speech of Daniel Webster, in reply, and that, when this was read, the family allowed that the latter had the better of the argument. I cannot help thinking that my grandfather must have agreed with them, tacitly, if not openly. He loved the Hampshire Hills of Massachusetts, from which he came. Year after year he took long journeys to visit them, and Webster's magnificent reference to the ``Old Bay State'' must have aroused his sympathy and pride.
Fortunately, at that election, as at so many others since, the good sense of the nation promptly accepted the result, and after its short carnival of political passion, dismissed the whole subject; the minority simply leaving the responsibility of public affairs to the majority, and all betaking themselves again to their accustomed vocations.
I do not remember, during the first seven years of my life, ever hearing any mention of political questions. The only thing I heard during that period which brings back a chapter in American politics, was when, at the age of five years, I attended an infant school and took part in a sort of catechism, all the children rising and replying to the teacher's questions. Among these were the following:
Q. Who is President of the United States?
A. Martin Van Buren.
Q. Who is governor of the State of New York?
A. William L. Marcy.
This is to me somewhat puzzling, for I was four years old when Martin Van Buren was elected, and my father was his very earnest opponent, yet, though I recall easily various things which occurred at that age and even earlier, I have no remembrance of any general election before 1840, and my only recollection of the first New York statesman elected to the Presidency is this mention of his name, in a child's catechism.
My recollections of American polities begin, then, with the famous campaign of 1840, and of that they are vivid. Our family had, in 1839, removed to Syracuse, which, although now a city of about one hundred and twenty thousand inhabitants, was then a village of fewer than six thousand; but, as the central town of the State, it was already a noted gathering-place for political conventions and meetings. The great Whig mass-meeting held there, in 1840, was long famous as the culmination of the campaign between General Harrison and Martin Van Buren.
As a President, Mr. Van Buren had fallen on evil times. It was a period of political finance; of demagogical methods in public business; and the result was ``hard times,'' with an intense desire throughout the nation for a change. This desire was represented especially by the Whig party. General Harrison had been taken up as its candidate, not merely because he had proved his worth as governor of the Northwestern Territory, and as a senator in Congress, but especially as the hero of sundry fights with the Indians, and, above all, of the plucky little battle at Tippecanoe. The most popular campaign song, which I soon learned to sing lustily, was ``Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too,'' and sundry lines of it expressed, not only my own deepest political convictions and aspirations, but also those cherished by myriads of children of far larger growth. They ran as follows:
``Oh, have you heard the great commotion-motion-motion
Rolling the country through?
It is the ball a-rolling on
For Tippecanoe and Tyler, too,
For Tippecanoe and Tyler, too;
And with them we 'll beat little Van;
Van, Van is a used up man;
And with them we 'll beat little Van.''
The campaign was an apotheosis of tom-foolery. General Harrison had lived the life, mainly, of a Western farmer, and for a time, doubtless, exercised amid his rude surroundings the primitive hospitality natural to sturdy Western pioneers. On these facts the changes were rung. In every town and village a log cabin was erected where the Whigs held their meetings; and the bringing of logs, with singing and shouting, to build it, was a great event; its front door must have a wooden latch on the inside; but the latch-string must run through the door; for the claim which the friends of General Harrison especially insisted upon was that he not only lived in a log cabin, but that his latch-string was always out, in token that all his fellow-citizens were welcome at his fireside.
Another element in the campaign was hard cider. Every log cabin must have its barrel of this acrid fluid, as the antithesis of the alleged beverage of President Van Buren at the White House. He, it was asserted, drank champagne, and on this point I remember that a verse was sung at log-cabin meetings which, after describing, in a prophetic way the arrival of the ``Farmer of North Bend'' at the White House, ran as follows:
``They were all very merry, and drinking champagne
When the Farmer, impatient, knocked louder again;
Oh, Oh, said Prince John, I very much fear
We must quit this place the very next year.''
``Prince John'' was President Van Buren's brilliant son; famous for his wit and eloquence, who, in after years, rose to be attorney-general of the State of New York, and who might have risen to far higher positions had his principles equaled his talents.
Another feature at the log cabin, and in all political processions, was at least one raccoon; and if not a live raccoon in a cage, at least a raccoon skin nailed upon the outside of the cabin. This gave local color, but hence came sundry jibes from the Democrats, for they were wont to refer to the Whigs as ``coons,'' and to their log cabins as ``coon pens.'' Against all these elements of success, added to promises of better times, the Democratic party could make little headway. Martin Van Buren, though an admirable public servant in many ways, was discredited. M. de Bacourt, the French Minister at Washington, during his administration, was, it is true, very fond of him, and this cynical scion of French nobility wrote in a private letter, which has been published in these latter days, ``M. Van Buren is the most perfect imitation of a gentleman I ever saw.'' But this commendation had not then come to light, and the main reliance of the Democrats in capturing the popular good-will was their candidate for the Vice-Presidency, Colonel Richard M. Johnson, of Kentucky. He, too, had fought in the Indian wars, and bravely. Therefore it was that one of the Whig songs which especially rejoiced me, ran:
``They shout and sing, Oh humpsy dumpsy,
Colonel Johnson killed Tecumseh.''
Among the features of that period which excited my imagination were the enormous mass meetings, with processions, coming in from all points of the compass, miles in length, and bearing every patriotic device and political emblem. Here the Whigs had infinitely the advantage. Their campaign was positive and aggressive. On platform- wagons were men working at every trade which expected to be benefited by Whig success; log cabins of all sorts and sizes, hard-cider barrels, coon pens, great canvas balls, which were kept ``a-rolling on,'' canoes, such as General Harrison had used in crossing Western rivers, eagles that screamed in defiance, and cocks that crowed for victory. The turning ball had reference to sundry lines in the foremost campaign song. For the October election in Maine having gone Whig by a large majority, clearly indicating what the general result was to be in November, the opening lines ran as follows:
``Oh, have you heard the news from Maine—Maine—Maine?
Rolling the country through?
It is the ball a-rolling on
For Tippecanoe and Tyler, too.''
&c., &c., &c.
Against all this the Democrats, with their negative and defensive platform, found themselves more and more at a disadvantage; they fought with desperation, but in vain, and one of their most unlucky ventures to recover their position was an effort to undermine General Harrison's military reputation. For this purpose they looked about, and finally found one of their younger congressional representatives, considered to be a rising man, who, having gained some little experience in the Western militia, had received the honorary title of ``General,'' Isaac M. Crary, of Michigan; him they selected to make a speech in Congress exhibiting and exploding General Harrison's military record. He was very reluctant to undertake it, but at last yielded, and, after elaborate preparation, made an argument loud and long, to show that General Harrison was a military ignoramus. The result was both comic and pathetic. There was then in Congress the most famous stump-speaker of his time, and perhaps of all times, a man of great physical, intellectual, and moral vigor; powerful in argument, sympathetic in manner, of infinite wit and humor, and, unfortunately for General Crary, a Whig,—Thomas Corwin, of Ohio. Mr. Crary's heavy, tedious, perfunctory arraignment of General Harrison being ended, Corwin rose and began an offhand speech on ``The Military Services of General Isaac M. Crary.'' In a few minutes he had as his audience, not only the House of Representatives, but as many members of the Senate, of the Supreme Court, and visitors to the city, as could be crowded into the congressional chamber, and, of all humorous speeches ever delivered in Congress, this of Corwin has come down to us as the most successful. Long afterward, parts of it lingered in our ``speakers' manuals'' and were declaimed in the public schools as examples of witty oratory. Many years later, when the House of Representatives left the old chamber and went into that which it now occupies, Thurlow Weed wrote an interesting article on scenes he had witnessed in the old hall, and most vivid of all was his picture of this speech by Corwin. His delineations of Crary's brilliant exploits, his portrayal of the valiant charges made by Crary's troops on muster days upon the watermelon patches of Michigan, not only convulsed his audience, but were echoed throughout the nation, Whigs and Democrats laughing alike; and when John Quincy Adams, in a speech shortly afterward, referred to the man who brought on this tempest of fun as ``the late General Crary,'' there was a feeling that the adjective indicated a fact. It really was so; Crary, although a man of merit, never returned to Congress, but was thenceforth dropped from political life. More than twenty years afterward, as I was passing through Western Michigan, a friend pointed out to me his tombstone, in a little village cemetery, with comments, half comic, half pathetic; and I also recall a mournful feeling when one day, in going over the roll of my students at the University of Michigan, I came upon one who bore the baptismal name of Isaac Crary. Evidently, the blighted young statesman had a daughter who, in all this storm of ridicule and contempt, stood by him, loved him, and proudly named her son after him.
Another feature in the campaign also impressed me. A blackguard orator, on the Whig side, one of those whom great audiences applaud for the moment and ever afterward despise,—a man named Ogle,—made a speech which depicted the luxury prevailing at the White House, and among other evidences of it, dwelt upon the ``gold spoons'' used at the President's table, denouncing their use with such unction that, for the time, unthinking people regarded Martin Van Buren as a sort of American Vitellius. As a matter of fact, the scanty silver-gilt table utensils at the White House have been shown, in these latter days, in some very pleasing articles written by General Harrison's grandson, after this grandson had himself retired from the Presidency, to have been, for the most part, bought long before;—and by order of General Washington.
The only matter of political importance which, as a boy eight years old, I seized upon, and which dwells in my memory, was the creation of the ``Sub-Treasury.'' That this was a wise measure seems now proven by the fact that through all the vicissitudes of politics, from that day to this, it has remained and rendered admirable service. But at that time it was used as a weapon against the Democratic party, and came to be considered by feather- brained partizans, young and old, as the culmination of human wickedness. As to what the ``Sub-Treasury'' really was I had not the remotest idea; but this I knew;— that it was the most wicked outrage ever committed by a remorseless tyrant upon a long-suffering people.
In November of 1840 General Harrison was elected. In the following spring he was inaugurated, and the Whigs being now for the first time in power, the rush for office was fearful. It was undoubtedly this crushing pressure upon the kindly old man that caused his death. What British soldiers, and Indian warriors, and fire, flood, and swamp fevers could not accomplish in over sixty years, was achieved by the office-seeking hordes in just one month. He was inaugurated on the fourth of March and died early in April.
I remember, as if it were yesterday, my dear mother coming to my bedside, early in the morning, and saying to me, ``President Harrison is dead.'' I wondered what was to become of us. He was the first President who had died during his term of service, and a great feeling of relief came over me when I learned that his high office had devolved upon the Vice-President.
But now came a new trouble, and my youthful mind was soon sadly agitated. The Whig papers, especially the ``New York Express'' and ``Albany Evening Journal,'' began to bring depressing accounts of the new President, —tidings of extensive changes in the offices throughout the country, and especially in the post-offices. At first the Whig papers published these under the heading ``Appointments by the President.'' But soon the heading changed; it became ``Appointments by Judas Iscariot,'' or ``Appointments by Benedict Arnold,'' and war was declared against President Tyler by the party that elected him. Certain it is that no party ever found itself in a worse position than did the Whigs, when their Vice-President came into the Chief Magistracy; and equally certain is it that this position was the richly earned punishment of their own folly.
I have several times since had occasion to note the carelessness of National and State conventions in nominating a candidate for the second place upon the ticket—whether Vice-President or Lieutenant-Governor. It would seem that the question of questions—the nomination to the first office—having been settled, there comes a sort of collapse in these great popular assemblies, and that then, for the second office, it is very often anybody's race and mainly a matter of chance. In this way alone can be explained several nominations which have been made to second offices, and above all, that of John Tyler. As a matter of fact, he was not commended to the Whig party on any solid grounds. His whole political life had shown him an opponent of their main ideas; he was, in fact, a Southern doctrinaire, and frequently suffered from acute attacks of that very troublesome political disease, Virginia metaphysics. As President he attempted to enforce his doctrines, and when Whig leaders, and above all Henry Clay attempted, not only to resist, but to crush him, he asserted his dignity at the cost of his party, and finally tried that which other accidental Presidents have since tried with no better success, namely, to build up a party of his own by a new distribution of offices. Never was a greater failure. Mr. Tyler was dropped by both parties and disappeared from American political life forever. I can now see that he was a man obedient to his convictions of duty, such as they were, and in revolt against attempts of Whig leaders to humiliate him; but then, to my youthful mind, he appeared the very incarnation of evil.
My next recollections are of the campaign of 1844. Again the Whig party took courage, and having, as a boy of twelve years, acquired more earnest ideas regarding the questions at issue, I helped, with other Whig boys, to raise ash-poles, and to hurrah lustily for Clay at public meetings. On the other hand, the Democratic boys hurrahed as lustily around their hickory poles and, as was finally proved, to much better purpose. They sang doggerel which, to me, was blasphemous, and especially a song with the following refrain:
``Alas poor Cooney Clay,
Alas poor Cooney Clay,
You never can be President,
For so the people say.''
The ash-poles had reference to Ashland, Clay's Kentucky estate; and the hickory poles recalled General Jackson's sobriquet, ``Old Hickory.'' For the Democratic candidate in 1844, James Knox Polk, was considered heir to Jackson's political ideas. The campaign of 1844 was not made so interesting by spectacular outbursts of tom-foolery as the campaign of 1840 had been. The sober second thought of the country had rather sickened people of that sort of thing; still, there was quite enough of it, especially as shown in caricatures and songs. The poorest of the latter was perhaps one on the Democratic side, for as the Democratic candidates were Polk of Tennessee and Dallas of Pennsylvania, one line of the song embraced probably the worst pun ever made, namely—
``PORK in the barrel, and DOLLARS in the pocket.''
It was at this period that the feeling against the extension of slavery, especially as indicated in the proposed annexation of Texas, began to appear largely in politics, and though Clay at heart detested slavery and always refused to do the bidding of its supporters beyond what he thought absolutely necessary in preserving the Union, an unfortunate letter of his led great numbers of anti- slavery men to support a separate anti-slavery ticket, the candidate being James G. Birney. The result was that the election of Clay became impossible. Mr. Polk was elected, and under him came the admission of Texas, which caused the Mexican War, and gave slavery a new lease of life. The main result, in my own environment, was that my father and his friends, thenceforward for a considerable time, though detesting slavery, held all abolitionists and anti-slavery men in contempt,—as unpatriotic because they had defeated Henry Clay, and as idiotic because they had brought on the annexation of Texas and thereby the supremacy of the slave States.
But the flame of liberty could not be smothered by friends or blown out by enemies; it was kept alive by vigorous counterblasts in the press, and especially fed by the lecture system, which was then at the height of its efficiency. Among the most powerful of lecturers was John Parker Hale, senator of the United States from New Hampshire, his subject being, ``The Last Gladiatorial Combat at Rome.'' Taking from Gibbon the story of the monk Telemachus, who ended the combats in the arena by throwing himself into them and sacrificing his life, Hale suggested to his large audiences an argument that if men wished to get rid of slavery in our country they must be ready to sacrifice themselves if need be. His words sank deep into my mind, and I have sometimes thought that they may have had something to do in leading John Brown to make his desperate attempt on slavery at Harper's Ferry.
How blind we all were! Henry Clay, a Kentucky slave- holder, would have saved us. Infinitely better than the violent solutions proposed to us was his large statesman- like plan of purchasing the slave children as they were born and setting them free. Without bloodshed, and at cost of the merest nothing as compared to the cost of the Civil War, he would thus have solved the problem; but it was not so to be. The guilt of the nation was not to be so cheaply atoned for. Fanatics, North and South, opposed him and, as a youth, I yielded to their arguments.
Four years later, in 1848, came a very different sort of election. General Zachary Taylor, who had shown ster- ling qualities in the Mexican War, was now the candidate of the Whigs, and against him was nominated Mr. Cass, a general of the War of 1812, afterward governor of the Northwestern Territory, and senator from Michigan. As a youth of sixteen, who by that time had become earnestly interested in politics, I was especially struck by one event in this campaign. The Democrats of course realized that General Taylor, with the prestige gained in the Mexican War, was a very formidable opponent. Still, if they could keep their party together, they had hopes of beating him. But a very large element in their party had opposed the annexation of Texas and strongly disliked the extension of slavery;—this wing of the party in New York being known as the ``Barn Burners,'' because it was asserted that they ``believed in burning the barn to drive the rats out.'' The question was what these radical gentlemen would do. That question was answered when a convention, controlled largely by the anti-slavery Democrats of New York and other States, met at Buffalo and nominated Martin Van Buren to the Presidency. For a time it was doubtful whether he would accept the nomination. On one side it was argued that he could not afford to do so, since he had no chance of an election, and would thereby forever lose his hold upon the Democratic party; but, on the other hand, it was said that he was already an old man; that he realized perfectly the impossibility of his re
On the very day which brought the news of this acceptance, General Cass arrived in Syracuse, on his way to his home at Detroit. I saw him welcomed by a great procession of Democrats, and marched under a broiling sun, through dusty streets, to the City Hall, where he was forced to listen and reply to fulsome speeches prophesying his election, which he and all present knew to be impos- sible. For Mr. Van Buren's acceptance of the ``free soil'' nomination was sure to divide the Democratic vote of the State of New York, thus giving the State to the Whigs; and in those days the proverb held good, ``As New York goes, so goes the Union.''
For years afterward there dwelt vividly in my mind the picture of this old, sad man marching through the streets, listening gloomily to the speeches, forced to appear confident of victory, yet evidently disheartened and disgusted.
Very vivid are my recollections of State conventions at this period. Syracuse, as the ``Central City,'' was a favorite place for them, and, as they came during the summer vacations, boys of my age and tastes were able to admire the great men of the hour,—now, alas, utterly forgotten. We saw and heard the leaders of all parties. Many impressed me; but one dwells in my memory, on account of a story which was told of him. This was a very solemn, elderly gentleman who always looked very wise but said nothing,—William Bouck of Schoharie County. He had white hair and whiskers, and having been appointed canal commissioner of the State, had discharged his duties by driving his old white family nag and buggy along the towing-path the whole length of the canals, keeping careful watch of the contractors, and so, in his simple, honest way, had saved the State much money. The result was the nickname of the ``Old White Hoss of Schoharie,'' and a reputation for simplicity and honesty which made him for a short time governor of the State.
A story then told of him reveals something of his character. Being informed that Bishop Hughes of New York was coming to Albany, and that it would be well to treat him with especial courtesy, the governor prepared himself to be more than gracious, and, on the arrival of the bishop, greeted him most cordially with the words, ``How do you do, Bishop; I hope you are well. How did you leave Mrs. Hughes and your family?'' To this the bishop answered, ``Governor, I am very well, but there is no Mrs. Hughes; bishops in our church don't marry.'' ``Good gracious,'' answered the governor, ``you don't say so; how long has that been?'' The bishop must have thoroughly enjoyed this. His Irish wit made him quick both at comprehension and repartee. During a debate on the school question a leading Presbyterian merchant of New York, Mr. Hiram Ketchum, made a very earnest speech against separate schools for Roman Catholics, and presently, turning to Bishop Hughes, said, ``Sir, we respect you, sir, but, sir, we can't go your purgatory, sir.'' To this the bishop quietly replied, ``You might go further and fare worse.''
Another leading figure, but on the Whig side, was a State senator, commonly known as ``Bray'' Dickinson, to distinguish him from D. S. Dickinson who had been a senator of the United States, and a candidate for the Presidency. ``Bray'' Dickinson was a most earnest supporter of Mr. Seward; staunch, prompt, vigorous, and really devoted to the public good. One story regarding him shows his rough-and-readiness.
During a political debate in the old Whig days, one of his Democratic brother senators made a long harangue in favor of Martin Van Buren as a candidate for the Presidency, and in the course of his speech referred to Mr. Van Buren as ``the Curtius of the Republic.'' Upon this Dickinson jumped up, went to some member better educated in the classics than himself, and said, ``Who in thunder is this Curtis that this man is talking about?'' ``It isn't Curtis, it 's Curtius, ``was the reply. ``Well, now, `` said Dickinson, ``what did Curtius do?'' ``Oh,'' said his informant, ``he threw himself into an abyss to save the Roman Republic.'' Upon this Dickinson returned to his seat, and as soon as the Democratic speaker had finished, arose and said: ``Mr. President, I deny the justice of the gentleman's reference to Curtius and Martin Van Buren. What did Curtius do? He threw himself, sir, into an abyss to save his country. What, sir, did Martin Van Buren do? He threw his country into an abyss to save himself.''
Rarely, if ever, has any scholar used a bit of classical knowledge to better purpose.
Another leading figure, at a later period, was a Democrat, Fernando Wood, mayor of New York, a brilliant desperado; and on one occasion I saw the henchmen whom he had brought with him take possession of a State convention and deliberately knock its president, one of the most respected men in the State, off the platform. It was an unfortunate performance for Mayor Wood, since the disgust and reaction thereby aroused led all factions of the Democratic party to unite against him.
Other leading men were such as Charles O'Conor and John Van Buren; the former learned and generous, but impracticable; the latter brilliant beyond belief, but not considered as representing any permanent ideas or principles.
During the campaign of 1848, as a youth of sixteen, I took the liberty of breaking from the paternal party; my father voting for General Taylor, I hurrahing for Martin Van Buren. I remember well how one day my father earnestly remonstrated against this. He said, ``My dear boy, you cheer Martin Van Buren's name because you believe that if he is elected he will do something against slavery: in the first place, he cannot be elected; and in the second place, if you knew him as we older people do, you would not believe in his attachment to any good cause whatever.''
The result of the campaign was that General Taylor was elected, and I recall the feeling of awe and hope with which I gazed upon his war-worn face, for the first and last time, as he stopped to receive the congratulations of the citizens of Syracuse;—hope, alas, soon brought to naught, for he, too, soon succumbed to the pressure of official care, and Millard Fillmore of New York, the Vice- President, reigned in his stead.
I remember Mr. Fillmore well. He was a tall, large, fine-looking man, with a face intelligent and kindly, and he was noted both as an excellent public servant and an effective public speaker. He had been comptroller of the State of New York,—then the most important of State offices, had been defeated as Whig candidate for governor, and had been a representative in Congress. He was the second of the accidental Presidents, and soon felt it his duty to array himself on the side of those who, by compromise with the South on the slavery question, sought to maintain and strengthen the Federal Union. Under him came the compromise measures on which our great statesmen of the middle period of the nineteenth century, Clay, Webster, Calhoun, and Benton, made their last speeches. Mr. Fillmore was undoubtedly led mainly by patriotic motives, in promoting the series of measures which were expected to end all trouble between the North and South, but which, unfortunately, embraced the Fugitive Slave Law; yet this, as I then thought, rendered him accursed. I remember feeling an abhorrence for his very name, and this feeling was increased when there took place, in the city of Syracuse, the famous ``Jerry Rescue.''
CHAPTER IV EARLY MANHOOD—1851-1857
On the first day of October, 1851, there was shuffling about the streets of Syracuse, in the quiet pursuit of his simple avocations, a colored person, as nearly ``of no account'' as any ever seen. So far as was known he had no surname, and, indeed, no Christian name, save the fragment and travesty,—``Jerry.''
Yet before that day was done he was famous; his name, such as it was, resounded through the land; and he had become, in all seriousness, a weighty personage in American history.
Under the law recently passed, he was arrested, openly and in broad daylight, as a fugitive slave, and was carried before the United States commissioner, Mr. Joseph Sabine, a most kindly public officer, who in this matter was sadly embarrassed by the antagonism between his sworn duty and his personal convictions.
Thereby, as was supposed, were fulfilled the Law and the Prophets—the Law being the fugitive slave law recently enacted, and the Prophets being no less than Henry Clay and Daniel Webster.
For, as if to prepare the little city to sacrifice its cherished beliefs, Mr. Clay had some time before made a speech from the piazza of the Syracuse House, urging upon his fellow-citizens the compromises of the Constitution; and some months later Mr. Webster appeared, spoke from a balcony near the City Hall, and to the same purpose; but more so. The latter statesman was prophetic, not only in the hortatory, but in the predictive sense; for he declared not only that the Fugitive Slave Law must be enforced, but that it WOULD be enforced, and he added, in substance: ``it will be enforced throughout the North in spite of all opposition—even in this city— even in the midst of your abolition conventions.'' This piece of prophecy was accompanied by a gesture which seemed to mean much; for the great man's hand was waved toward the City Hall just across the square—the classic seat and center of abolition conventions.
How true is the warning, ``Don't prophesy unless you know!'' The arrest of Jerry took place within six months after Mr. Webster's speech, and indeed while an abolition convention was in session at that same City Hall; but when the news came the convention immediately dissolved, the fire-bells began to ring, a crowd moved upon the commissioner's office, surged into it, and swept Jerry out of the hands of the officers. The authorities having rallied, re-arrested the fugitive, and put him in confinement and in irons. But in the evening the assailants returned to the assault, carried the jail by storm, rescued Jerry for good, and spirited him off safe and sound to Canada, thus bringing to nought the fugitive slave law, as well as the exhortations of Mr. Clay and the predictions of Mr. Webster.
This rescue produced great excitement throughout the nation. Various persons were arrested for taking part in it, and their trials were adjourned from place to place, to the great hardship of all concerned. During a college vacation I was present at one of these trials at Canandaigua, the United States Judge, before whom it was held, being the Hon. N. K. Hall, who had been Mr. Fillmore's law partner in Buffalo. The evening before the trial an anti-slavery meeting was held, which I attended. It was opened with prayer by a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Loguen, and of all prayers I have ever heard, this dwells in my mind as perhaps the most impressive. The colored minister's petitions for his race, bond and free, for Jerry and for those who had sought to rescue him, for the souls of the kidnappers, and for the country which was to his people a land of bondage, were most pathetic. Then arose Gerrit Smith. Of all Tribunes of the People I have ever known he dwells in my memory as possessing the greatest variety of gifts. He had the prestige given by great wealth, by lavish generosity, by transparent honesty, by earnestness of purpose, by advocacy of every good cause, by a superb presence, and by natural eloquence of a very high order. He was very tall and large, with a noble head, an earnest, yet kindly face, and of all human voices I have ever heard his was the most remarkable for its richness, depth, and strength. I remember seeing and hearing him once at a Republican State Convention in the City Hall at Syracuse, when, having come in for a few moments as a spectator, he was recognized by the crowd and greeted with overwhelming calls for a speech. He was standing at the entrance door, towering above all about him, and there was a general cry for him to come forward to the platform. He declined to come forward; but finally observed to those near him, in his quiet, natural way, with the utmost simplicity, ``Oh, I shall be heard.'' At this a shout went up from the entire audience; for every human being in that great hall had heard these words perfectly, though uttered in his usual conversational voice.
I also remember once entering the old Delavan House at Albany, with a college friend of mine, afterward Bishop of Maine, and seeing, at the other end of a long hall, Gerrit Smith in quiet conversation. In a moment we heard his voice, and my friend was greatly impressed by it, declaring he had never imagined such an utterance possible. It was indeed amazing; it was like the deep, clear, rich tone from the pedal bass of a cathedral organ. During his career in Congress, it was noted that he was the only speaker within remembrance who without effort made himself heard in every part of the old chamber of the House of Representatives, which was acoustically one of the worst halls ever devised. And it was not a case of voice and nothing else; his strength of argument, his gift of fit expression, and his wealth of illustration were no less extraordinary.
On this occasion at Canandaigua he rose to speak, and every word went to the hearts of his audience. ``Why,'' he began, ``do they conduct these harassing proceedings against these men? If any one is guilty, I am guilty. With Samuel J. May I proposed the Jerry Rescue. We are responsible for it; why do they not prosecute us?'' And these words were followed by a train of cogent reasoning and stirring appeal.
The Jerry Rescue trials only made matters worse. Their injustice disgusted the North, and their futility angered the South. They revealed one fact which especially vexed the Southern wing of the Democratic party, and this was, that their Northern allies could not be depended upon to execute the new compromise. In this Syracuse rescue one of the most determined leaders was a rough burly butcher, who had been all his life one of the loudest of pro-slavery Democrats, and who, until he saw Jerry dragged in manacles through the streets, had been most violent in his support of the fugitive slave law. The trials also stimulated the anti-slavery leaders and orators to new vigor. Garrison, Phillips, Gerrit Smith, Sumner, and Seward aroused the anti-slavery forces as never before, and the ``Biglow Papers'' of James Russell Lowell, which made Northern pro-slavery men ridiculous, were read with more zest than ever.
But the abolition forces had the defects of their qualities, and their main difficulty really arose from the stimulus given to a thin fanaticism. There followed, in the train of the nobler thinkers and orators, the ``Fool Reformers,''—sundry long-haired men and short-haired women, who thought it their duty to stir good Christian people with blasphemy, to deluge the founders of the Republic with blackguardism, and to invent ever more and more ingenious ways for driving every sober-minded man and woman out of the anti-slavery fold. More than once in those days I hung my head in disgust as I listened to these people, and wondered, for the moment, whether, after all, even the supremacy of slaveholders might not be more tolerable than the new heavens and the new earth, in which should dwell such bedraggled, screaming, denunciatory creatures.
At the next national election the Whigs nominated General Scott, a man of extraordinary merit and of grandiose appearance; but of both these qualities he was himself unfortunately too well aware; as a result the Democrats gave him the name of ``Old Fuss and Feathers,'' and a few unfortunate speeches, in one of which he expressed his joy at hearing that ``sweet Irish brogue,'' brought the laugh of the campaign upon him.
On the other hand the Democrats nominated Franklin Pierce; a man greatly inferior to General Scott in military matters, but who had served well in the State politics of New Hampshire and in Congress, was widely beloved, of especially attractive manners, and of high personal character.
He also had been in the Mexican War, but though he had risen to be brigadier-general, his military record amounted to very little. There was in him, no doubt, some alloy of personal with public motives, but it would be unjust to say that selfishness was the only source of his political ideas. He was greatly impressed by the necessity of yielding to the South in order to save the Union, and had shown this by his utterances and votes in Congress: the South, therefore, accepted him against General Scott, who was supposed to have moderate anti- slavery views.
General Pierce was elected; the policy of his administration became more and more deeply pro-slavery; and now appeared upon the scene Stephen Arnold Douglas— senator from Illinois, a man of remarkable ability,—a brilliant thinker and most effective speaker, with an extraordinary power of swaying men. I heard him at vari- ous times; and even after he had committed what seemed to me the unpardonable sin, it was hard to resist his eloquence. He it was who, doubtless from a mixture of motives, personal and public, had proposed the abolition of the Missouri Compromise, which since the year 1820 had been the bulwark of the new territories against the encroachments of slavery. The whole anti-slavery sentiment of the North was thereby intensified, and as the establishment of north polarity at one end of the magnet excites south polarity at the other, so Southern feeling in favor of slavery was thereby increased. Up to a recent period Southern leaders had, as a rule, deprecated slavery, and hoped for its abolition; now they as generally advocated it as good in itself;—the main foundation of civil liberty; the normal condition of the working classes of every nation; and some of them urged the revival of the African slave-trade. The struggle became more and more bitter. I was during that time at Yale, and the general sentiment of that university in those days favored almost any concession to save the Union. The venerable Silliman, and a great majority of the older professors spoke at public meetings in favor of the pro-slavery compromise measures which they fondly hoped would settle the difficulty between North and South and re
The great body of the students, also, from North and South, took the same side. It is a suggestive fact that whereas European students are generally inclined to radicalism, American students have been, since the war of the Revolution, eminently conservative.
To this pro-slavery tendency at Yale, in hope of saving the Union, there were two remarkable exceptions, one being the beloved and respected president of the university, Dr. Theodore Dwight Woolsey, and the other his classmate and friend, the Rev. Dr. Leonard Bacon, pastor of the great Center Church of New Haven, and frequently spoken of as the ``Congregational Pope of New England.'' They were indeed a remarkable pair; Woolsey, quiet and scholarly, at times irascible, but always kind and just; Bacon a rugged, leonine sort of man who, when he shook his mane in the pulpit and addressed the New England conscience, was heard throughout the nation. These two, especially, braved public sentiment, as well as the opinion of their colleagues, and were supposed, at the time, to endanger the interests of Yale by standing against the fugitive slave law and other concessions to slavery and its extension. As a result Yale fell into disrepute in the South, which had, up to that time, sent large bodies of students to it, and I remember that a classmate of mine, a tall, harum-scarum, big-hearted, sandy-haired Georgian known as ``Jim'' Hamilton, left Yale in disgust, returned to his native heath, and was there welcomed with great jubilation. A poem was sent me, written by some ardent admirer of his, beginning with the words:
``God bless thee, noble Hamilton,'' &c.
On the other hand I was one of the small minority of students who remained uncompromisingly anti-slavery, and whenever I returned from Syracuse, my classmates and friends used to greet me in a jolly way by asking me ``How are you, Gerrit; how did you leave the Rev. Antoinette Brown and brother Fred Douglas?'' In consequence I came very near being, in a small way, a martyr to my principles. Having had some success in winning essay prizes during my sophomore and junior years, my name was naturally mentioned in connection with the election of editors for the ``Yale Literary Magazine.'' At this a very considerable body of Southern students and their Northern adherents declared against me. I neither said nor did anything in the premises, but two of my most conservative friends wrought valiantly in my behalf. One was my dear old chum, Davies, the present Bishop of Michigan, at the very antipodes from myself on every possible question; and the other my life-long friend, Randall Lee Gibson of Kentucky, himself a large slaveholder, afterward a general in the Confederate service, and finally, at his lamented death a few years since, United States senator from Louisiana. Both these friends championed my cause, with the result that they saved me by a small majority.
As editor of the ``Yale Literary Magazine,'' through my senior year, I could publish nothing in behalf of my cherished anti-slavery ideas, since a decided majority of my fellow-editors would have certainly refused admission to any obnoxious article, and I therefore confined myself, in my editorial capacity, to literary and abstract matters; but with my college exercises it was different. Professor Larned, who was charged with the criticism of our essays and speeches, though a very quiet man, was at heart deeply anti-slavery, and therefore it was that in sundry class-room essays, as well as in speeches at the junior exhibition and at commencement, I was able to pour forth my ideas against what was stigmatized as the ``sum of human villainies.''
I was not free from temptation to an opposite course. My experience at the college election had more than once suggested to my mind the idea that possibly I might be wrong, after all; that perhaps the voice of the people was really the voice of God; that if one wishes to accomplish anything he must work in harmony with the popular will; and that perhaps the best way would be to conform to the general opinion. To do so seemed, certainly, the only road to preferment of any kind. Such were the temptations which, in those days, beset every young man who dreamed of accomplishing something in life, and they beset me in my turn; but there came a day when I dealt with them decisively. I had come up across New Haven Green thinking them over, and perhaps paltering rather contemptibly with my conscience; but arriving at the door of North College, I stopped a moment, ran through the whole subject in an instant, and then and there, on the stairway leading to my room, silently vowed that, come what might, I would never be an apologist for slavery or for its extension, and that what little I could do against both should be done.
I may add that my conscience was somewhat aided by a piece of casuistry from the most brilliant scholar in the Yale faculty of that time, Professor James Hadley. I had been brought up with a strong conviction of the necessity of obedience to law as the first requirement in any State, and especially in a Republic; but here was the fugitive slave law. What was our duty regarding it? This question having come up in one of our division- room debates, Professor Hadley, presiding, gave a decision to the following effect: ``On the statute books of all countries are many laws, obsolete and obsolescent; to disobey an obsolete law is frequently a necessity and never a crime. As to disobedience to an obsolescent law, the question in every man's mind must be as to the degree of its obsolescence. Laws are made obsolescent by change of circumstances, by the growth of convictions which render their execution impossible, and the like. Every man, therefore, must solemnly decide for himself at what period a law is virtually obsolete.''
I must confess that the doctrine seems to me now rather dangerous, but at that time I welcomed it as a very serviceable piece of casuistry, and felt that there was indeed, as Mr. Seward had declared, a ``higher law'' than the iniquitous enactment which allowed the taking of a peaceful citizen back into slavery, without any of the safeguards which had been developed under Anglo-Saxon liberty.
Though my political feelings throughout the senior year grew more and more intense, there was no chance for their expression either in competition for the Clarke Essay Prize or for the De Forest Oration Gold Medal, the subjects of both being assigned by the faculty; and though I afterward had the satisfaction of taking both these, my exultation was greatly alloyed by the thought that the ideas I most cherished could find little, if any, expression in them.
But on Commencement Day my chance came. Then I chose my own theme, and on the subject of ``Modern Oracles'' poured forth my views to a church full of people; many evidently disgusted, but a few as evidently pleased. I dwelt especially upon sundry utterances of John Quincy Adams, who had died not long before, and who had been, during all his later years, a most earnest opponent of slavery, and I argued that these, with the declarations of other statesmen of like tendencies, were the oracles to which the nation should listen.
Curiously enough this commencement speech secured for me the friendship of a man who was opposed to my ideas, but seemed to like my presenting them then and there—the governor of the State, Colonel Thomas Seymour. He had served with distinction in the Mexican War, had been elected and re
Of the diplomatic phase of my life into which he initiated me, I shall speak in another chapter; but, as regards my political life, he influenced me decidedly, for his conversation and the reading he suggested led me to study closely the writings of Jefferson. The impulse thus given my mind was not spent until the Civil War, which, betraying the ultimate results of sundry Jeffersonian ideas, led me to revise my opinions somewhat and to moderate my admiration for the founder of American ``Democracy,'' though I have ever since retained a strong interest in his teaching.
But deeply as both the governor and myself felt on the slavery question, we both avoided it in our conversation. Each knew how earnestly the other felt regarding it, and each, as if by instinct, kept clear of a discussion which could not change our opinions, and might wreck our friendship. The result was, that, so far as I remember, we never even alluded to it during the whole year we were together. Every other subject we discussed freely but this we never touched. The nearest approach to a discussion was when one day in the Legation Chancery at St. Petersburg, Mr. Erving, also a devoted Union pro- slavery Democrat, pointing to a map of the United States hanging on the wall, went into a rhapsody over the extension of the power and wealth of our country. I answered, ``If our country could get rid of slavery in all that beautiful region of the South, such a riddance would be cheap at the cost of fifty thousand lives and a hundred millions of dollars.'' At this Erving burst forth into a torrent of brotherly anger. ``There was no conceivable cause,'' he said, ``worth the sacrifice of fifty thousand lives, and the loss of a hundred millions of dollars would mean the blotting out of the whole prosperity of the nation.'' His deep earnestness showed me the impossibility of converting a man of his opinions, and the danger of wrecking our friendship by attempting it. Little did either of us dream that within ten years from that day slavery was to be abolished in the United States, at the sacrifice not of fifty thousand, but of nearly a million lives, and at the cost not merely of a hundred millions, but, when all is told, of at least ten thousand millions of dollars!
I may mention here that it was in this companionship, at St. Petersburg, that I began to learn why newspaper criticism has, in our country, so little permanent effect on the reputation of eminent men. During four years before coming abroad I had read, in leading Republican journals of New York and New Haven, denunciations of Governor Thomas Hart Seymour as an ignoramus, a pretender, a blatant demagogue, a sot and companion of sots, an associate, and fit associate, for the most worthless of the populace. I had now found him a man of real convictions, thoroughly a gentleman, quiet, conscientious, kindly, studious, thoughtful, modest, abstemious, hardly ever touching a glass of wine, a man esteemed and beloved by all who really knew him. Thus was first revealed to me what, in my opinion, is the worst evil in American public life,—that facility for unlimited slander, of which the first result is to degrade our public men, and the second result is to rob the press of that confidence among thinking people, and that power for good and against evil which it really ought to exercise. Since that time I have seen many other examples strengthening the same conviction.
Leaving St. Petersburg, I followed historical and, to some extent, political studies at the University of Berlin, having previously given attention to them in France; and finally, traveling in Italy, became acquainted with a man who made a strong impression upon me. This was Mr. Robert Dale Owen, then the American minister at Naples, whose pictures of Neapolitan despotism, as it then existed, made me even a stronger Republican than I had been before.
Returning to America I found myself on the eve of the new presidential election. The Republicans had nominated John C. Fr
I took but slight part in the campaign; in fact, a natural diffidence kept me aloof from active politics. Having given up all hope or desire for political preferment, and chosen a university career, I merely published a few newspaper and magazine articles, in the general interest of anti- slavery ideas, but made no speeches, feeling myself, in fact, unfit to make them.
But I shared more and more the feelings of those who supported Fr
Mr. Buchanan, though personal acquaintance had taught me to like him as a man, and the reading of his despatches in the archives of our legation at St. Petersburg had forced me to respect him as a statesman, represented to me the encroachments and domination of American slavery, while Fr
On election day, 1856, I went to the polls at the City Hall of Syracuse to cast my first vote. There I chanced to meet an old schoolmate who had become a brilliant young lawyer, Victor Gardner, with whom, in the old days, I had often discussed political questions, he being a Democrat and I a Republican. But he had now come upon new ground, and, wishing me to do the same, he tendered me what was known as ``The American Ticket,'' bearing at its head the name of Millard Fillmore. He claimed that it represented resistance to the encroachments and dangers which he saw in the enormous foreign immigration of the period, and above all in the increasing despotism of the Roman Catholic hierarchy controlling the Irish vote. Most eloquently did my old friend discourse on the dangers from this source. He insisted that Roman Catholic bishops and priests had wrecked every country in which they had ever gained control; that they had aided in turning the mediaeval republics into despotisms; that they had ruined Spain and the South American republics; that they had rendered Poland and Ireland unable to resist oppression; that they had hopelessly enfeebled Austria and Italy; that by St. Bartholomew massacres and clearing out of Huguenots they had made, first, terrorism, and, finally, despotism necessary in France; that they had rendered every people they had controlled careless of truth and inclined to despotism,—either of monarchs or ``bosses'';—that our prisons were filled with the youth whom they had trained in religion and morals; that they were ready to ravage the world with fire and sword to gain the slightest point for the Papacy; that they were the sworn foes of our public- school system, without which no such thing as republican government could exist among us; that, in fact, their bishops and priests were the enemies of everything we Americans should hold dear, and that their church was not so much a religious organization as a political conspiracy against the best that mankind had achieved.
``Look at the Italians, Spanish, French to-day, ``he said. ``The Church has had them under its complete control fifteen hundred years, and you see the result. Look at the Irish all about us;—always screaming for liberty, yet the most abject slaves of their passions and of their priesthood.''
He spoke with the deepest earnestness and even eloquence; others gathered round, and some took his tickets. I refused them, saying, ``No. The question of all questions to me is whether slavery or freedom is to rule this Republic,'' and, having taken a Republican ticket, I went up-stairs to the polls. On my arrival at the ballot-box came a most exasperating thing. A drunken Irish Democrat standing there challenged my vote. He had, perhaps, not been in the country six months; I had lived in that very ward since my childhood, knew and was known by every other person present; and such was my disgust that it is not at all unlikely that if one of Gardner's tickets had been in my pocket, it would have gone into the ballot-box. But persons standing by,—Democrats as well as Republicans,—having quieted this perfervid patriot, and saved me from the ignominy of swearing in my vote, I carried out my original intention, and cast my first vote for the Republican candidate.
Certainly Providence was kind to the United States in that contest. For Fr
We of the Republican party were fearfully mistaken, and among many evidences in history that there is ``a Power in the universe, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness,'' I think that the non-election of Fr
On March 1, 1857, I visited Washington for the first time. It was indeed the first time I had ever trodden the soil of a slave State, and, going through Baltimore, a sense of this gave me a feeling of horror. The whole atmosphere of that city seemed gloomy, and the city of Washington no better. Our little company established itself at the National Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, then a famous hostelry. Henry Clay had died there not long before, and various eminent statesmen had made it, and were then making it, their headquarters.
On the evening of my arrival a curious occurrence showed me the difference between Northern and Southern civilization. As I sat in the reading-room, there rattled upon my ear utterances betokening a vigorous dispute in the adjoining bar-room, and, as they were loud and long, I rose and walked toward the disputants, as men are wont to do on such occasions in the North; when, to my surprise I found that, though the voices were growing steadily louder, people were very generally leaving the room; presently, the reason dawned upon me: it was a case in which revolvers might be drawn at any moment, and the bystanders evidently thought life and limb more valuable than any information they were likely to obtain by remaining.
On the evening of the third of March I went with the crowd to the White House. We were marshalled through the halls, President Pierce standing in the small chamber adjoining the East Room to receive the guests, around him being members of the Cabinet, with others distinguished in the civil, military, and naval service, and, among them, especially prominent, Senator Douglas, then at the height of his career. Persons in the procession were formally presented, receiving a kindly handshake, and then allowed to pass on. My abhorrence of the Presi- dent and of Douglas was so bitter that I did a thing for which the only excuse was my youth:—I held my right hand by my side, walked by and refused to be presented.
Next morning I was in the crowd at the east front of the Capitol, and, at the time appointed, Mr. Buchanan came forth and took the oath administered to him by the Chief Justice, Roger Brooke Taney of Maryland. Though Taney was very decrepit and feeble, I looked at him much as a Spanish Protestant in the sixteenth century would have looked at Torquemada; for, as Chief Justice, he was understood to be in the forefront of those who would fasten African slavery on the whole country; and this view of him seemed justified when, two days after the inauguration, he gave forth the Dred Scott decision, which interpreted the Constitution in accordance with the ultra pro-slavery theory of Calhoun.
Having taken the oath, Mr. Buchanan delivered the inaugural address, and it made a deep impression upon me. I began to suspect then, and I fully believe now, that he was sincere, as, indeed, were most of those whom men of my way of thinking in those days attacked as pro-slavery tools and ridiculed as ``doughfaces.'' We who had lived remote from the scene of action, and apart from pressing responsibility, had not realized the danger of civil war and disunion. Mr. Buchanan, and men like him, in Congress, constantly associating with Southern men, realized both these dangers. They honestly and patriotically shrank from this horrible prospect; and so, had we realized what was to come, would most of us have done. I did not see this then, but looking back across the abyss of years I distinctly see it now. The leaders on both sides were honest and patriotic, and, as I firmly believe, instruments of that ``Power in the universe, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness.''
There was in Mr. Buchanan's inaugural address a tone of deep earnestness. He declared that all his efforts should be given to restore the Union, and to re
During my stay in Washington I several times visited the Senate and the House, in the old quarters which they shortly afterward vacated in order to enter the more commodious rooms of the Capitol, then nearly finished. The Senate was in the room at present occupied by the Supreme Court, and from the gallery I looked down upon it with mingled feelings of awe, distrust, and aversion. There, as its president, sat Mason of Virginia, author of the fugitive slave law; there, at the desk in front of him, sat Cass of Michigan, who, for years, had been especially subservient to the slave power; Douglas of Illinois, who had brought about the destruction of the Missouri Compromise; Butler of South Carolina, who represented in perfection the slave-owning aristocracy; Slidell and Benjamin of Louisiana, destined soon to play leading parts in the disruption of the Union.
But there were others. There was Seward, of my own State, whom I had been brought up to revere, and who seemed to me, in the struggle then going on, the incarnation of righteousness; there was Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, just recovering from the murderous blows given him by Preston Brooks of South Carolina, —a martyr, as I held, to his devotion to freedom; there was John Parker Hale of New Hampshire, who had been virtually threatened with murder, as a penalty for his opposition to slavery; and there was bluff Ben Wade of Ohio, whose courage strengthened the whole North.
The House of Representatives interested me less. In it there sat various men now mainly passed out of human memory; and, unfortunately, the hall, though one of the finest, architecturally, in the world, was one of the least suited to its purpose. To hear anything either in the galleries or on the floor was almost an impossibility.
The Supreme Court, though sitting in a wretched room in the basement, made a far deeper impression upon me. The judges, seated in a row, and wearing their simple, silken gowns, seemed to me, in their quiet dignity, what the highest court of a great republic ought to be; though I looked at Chief Justice Taney and his pro-slavery associates much as a Hindoo regards his destructive gods.
The general impression made upon me at Washington was discouraging. It drove out from my mind the last lingering desire to take any part in politics. The whole life there was repulsive to me, and when I reflected that a stay of a few years in that forlorn, decaying, reeking city was the goal of political ambition, the whole thing seemed to me utterly worthless. The whole life there bore the impress of the slipshod habits engendered by slavery, and it seemed a civilization rotting before ripeness. The city was certainly, at that time, the most wretched capital in Christendom. Pennsylvania Avenue was a sort of Slough of Despond,—with ruts and mud- holes from the unfinished Capitol, at one end, to the unfinished Treasury building, at the other, and bounded on both sides with cheap brick tenements. The extensive new residence quarter and better hotels of these days had not been dreamed of. The ``National,'' where we were living, was esteemed the best hotel, and it was abominable. Just before we arrived, what was known as the ``National Hotel Disease'' had broken out in it;— by some imputed to an attempt to poison the incoming President, in order to bring the Vice-President into his place. But that was the mere wild surmise of a political pessimist. The fact clearly was that the wretched sewage of Washington, in those days, which was betrayed in all parts of the hotel by every kind of noisome odor, had at last begun to do its work. Curiously enough there was an interregnum in the reign of sickness and death, probably owing to some temporary sanitary efforts, and that interregnum, fortunately for us, was coincident with our stay there. But the disease set in again shortly afterward, and a college friend of mine, who arrived on the day of our departure, was detained in the hotel for many weeks with the fever then contracted. The number of deaths was considerable, but, in the interest of the hotel, the matter was hushed up, as far as possible.
The following autumn I returned to New Haven as a resident graduate, and, the popular lecture system being then at its height, was invited to become one of the lecturers in the course of that winter. I prepared my discourse with great care, basing it upon studies and observations during my recent stay in the land of the Czar, and gave it the title of ``Civilization in Russia.''
I remember feeling greatly honored by the fact that my predecessor in the course was Theodore Parker, and my successor Ralph Waldo Emerson. Both talked with me much about my subject, and Parker surprised me. He was the nearest approach to omniscience I had ever seen. He was able to read, not only Russian, but the Old Slavonic. He discussed the most intimate details of things in Russia, until, at last, I said to him, ``Mr. Parker, I would much rather sit at your feet and listen to your information regarding Russia, than endeavor to give you any of my own.'' He was especially interested in the ethnology of the empire, and had an immense knowledge of the different peoples inhabiting it, and of their characteristics. Finally, he asked me what chance I thought there was for the growth of anything like free institutions in Russia. To this I answered that the best thing they had was their system of local peasant meetings for the repartition of their lands, and for the discussion of subjects connected with them, and that this seemed to me something like a germ of what might, in future generations, become a sort of town-meeting system, like that of New England. This let me out of the discussion very satisfactorily, for Parker told me that he had arrived at the same conclusion, after talking with Count Gurowski, who was, in those days, an especial authority.
In due time came the evening for my lecture. As it was the first occasion since leaving college that I had appeared on any stage, a considerable number of my old college associates and friends, including Professor (afterward President) Porter, Dr. Bacon, and Mr. (afterward Bishop) Littlejohn, were there among the foremost, and after I had finished they said some kindly things, which encouraged me.
In this lecture I made no mention of American slavery, but into an account of the events of my stay at St. Petersburg and Moscow during the Crimean War, and of the death and funeral of the Emperor Nicholas, with the accession and first public address of Alexander II, I sketched, in broad strokes, the effects of the serf system,—effects not merely upon the serfs, but upon the serf owners, and upon the whole condition of the empire. I made it black indeed, as it deserved, and though not a word was said regarding things in America, every thoughtful man present must have felt that it was the strongest indictment against our own system of slavery which my powers enabled me to make.
Next day came a curious episode. A classmate of mine, never distinguished for logical acuteness, came out in a leading daily paper with a violent attack upon me and my lecture. He lamented the fact that one who, as he said, had, while in college, shown much devotion to the anti- slavery cause, had now faced about, had no longer the courage of his opinions, and had not dared say a word against slavery in the United States. The article was laughable. It would have been easy to attack slavery and thus at once shut the minds and hearts of a large majority of the audience. But I felt then, as I have generally felt since, that the first and best thing to do is to SET PEOPLE AT THINKING, and to let them discover, or think that they discover, the truth for themselves. I made no reply, but an eminent clergyman of New Haven took up the cudgels in my favor, covered my opponent with ridicule, and did me the honor to declare that my lecture was one of the most effective anti-slavery arguments ever made in that city. With this, I retired from the field well satisfied.
The lecture was asked for in various parts of the country, was delivered at various colleges and universities, and in many cities of western New York, Michigan, and Ohio; and finally, after the emancipation of the serfs, was re- cast and republished in the ``Atlantic Monthly'' under the title of ``The Rise and Decline of the Serf System in Russia.''
And now occurred a great change in my career which, as I fully believed, was to cut me off from all political life thoroughly and permanently. This was my election to the professorship of history and English literature in the University of Michigan.
CHAPTER V
THE CIVIL WAR PERIOD—1857-1864
Arriving at the University of Michigan in October, 1857, I threw myself into my new work most heartily. Though I felt deeply the importance of the questions then before the country, it seemed to me that the only way in which I could contribute anything to their solution was in aiding to train up a new race of young men who should understand our own time and its problems in the light of history.
It was not difficult to point out many things in the past that had an important bearing upon the present, and my main work in this line was done in my lecture-room. I made no attempts to proselyte any of my hearers to either political party, my main aim being then, as it has been through my life, when dealing with students and the public at large, to set my audience or my readers at thinking, and to give them fruitful historical subjects to think upon. Among these subjects especially brought out in dealing with the middle ages, was the origin, growth, and decline of feudalism, and especially of the serf system, and of municipal liberties as connected with it. This, of course, had a general bearing upon the important problem we had to solve in the United States during the second half of that century.
In my lectures on modern history, and especially on the Reformation period, and the events which led to the French Revolution, there were various things throwing light upon our own problems, which served my purpose of arousing thought. My audiences were large and attentive, and I have never, in the whole course of my life, enjoyed any work so much as this, which brought me into hearty and close relations with a large body of active- minded students from all parts of our country, and especially from the Northwest. More and more I realized the justice of President Wayland's remark, which had so impressed me at the Yale Alumni meeting just after my return from Europe: that the nation was approaching a ``switching-off place''; that whether we were to turn toward evil or good in our politics would be decided by the great Northwest, and that it would be well for young Americans to cast in their lot with that part of the country.
In the intervals of my university work many invitations came to me from associations in various parts of Michigan and neighboring States to lecture before them, and these I was glad to accept. Such lectures were of a much more general character than those given in the university, but by them I sought to bring the people at large into trains of thought which would fit them to grapple with the great question which was rising more and more portentously before us.
Having accepted, in one of my vacations, an invitation to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa Commencement Address at Yale, I laid down as my thesis, and argued it from history, that in all republics, ancient or modern, the worst foe of freedom had been a man-owning aristocracy—an aristocracy based upon slavery. The address was circulated in printed form, was considerably discussed, and, I trust, helped to set some few people thinking.
For the same purpose I also threw some of my lectures into the form of magazine articles for the ``Atlantic Monthly,'' and especially one entitled ``The Statesmanship of Richelieu,'' my effort in this being to show that the one great error of that greatest of all French statesmen was in stopping short of rooting out the serf system in France when he had completely subjugated the serf owners and had them at his mercy.
As the year 1860 approached, the political struggle became more and more bitter. President Buchanan in redeeming his promise to maintain the Union had gone to lengths which startled and disappointed many of his most devoted supporters. Civil war had broken out in Kansas and Nebraska, with murder and massacre: desperate attempts were made to fasten the hold of the pro-slavery party permanently upon the State, and as desperately were these efforts repelled. A certain John Brown, who requited assassination of free-state men by the assassination of slave-state men,—a very ominous appearance,—began to be heard of; men like Professor Silliman, who, during my stay at Yale had spoken at Union meetings in favor of the new compromise measures, even including the fugitive slave law, now spoke publicly in favor of sending rifles to the free-state men in Kansas; and, most striking symptom of all, Stephen A. Douglas himself, who had led the Democratic party in breaking the Missouri Compromise, now recoiled from the ultra pro-slavery propaganda of President Buchanan. Then, too, came a new incitement to bitterness between North and South. John Brown, the man of Scotch-Covenanter type, who had imbibed his theories of political methods from the Old-Testament annals of Jewish dealings with the heathen, and who had in Kansas solemnly slaughtered in cold blood, as a sort of sacrifice before the Lord, sundry Missouri marauders who had assassinated free-state men, suddenly appeared in Virginia, and there, at Harper's Ferry, with a handful of fanatics subject to his powerful will, raised the standard of revolution against the slave-power. Of course he was easily beaten down, his forces scattered, those dearest to him shot, and he himself hanged. But he was a character of antique mold, and this desperate effort followed by his death, while it exasperated the South, stirred the North to its depths.
Like all such efforts, it was really mistaken and unfortunate. It helped to obscure Henry Clay's proposal to extinguish slavery peaceably, and made the solution of the problem by bloodshed more and more certain. And in the execution of John Brown was lost a man who, had he lived until the Civil War, might have rendered enormous services as a partizan leader. Of course, his action aroused much thought among my students, and their ideas came out in their public discussions. It was part of my duty, once or twice a week, to preside over these discussions, and to decide between the views presented. In these decisions on the political questions now arising I became deeply interested, and while I was careful not to give them a partizan character, they were, of course, opposed to the dominance of slavery.
In the spring of 1860, the Republican National Convention was held at Chicago, and one fine morning I went to the railway station to greet the New York delegation on its way thither. Among the delegates whom I especially recall were William M. Evarts, under whose Secretaryship of State I afterward served as minister at Berlin, and my old college friend, Stewart L. Woodford, with whom I was later in close relations during his term as lieutenant-governor of New York and minister to Spain. The candidate of these New York delegates was of course Mr. Seward, and my most devout hopes were with him, but a few days later came news that the nomination had been awarded to Mr. Lincoln. Him we had come to know and admire during his debates with Douglas while the senatorial contest was going on in the State of Illinois; still the defeat of Mr. Seward was a great disappointment, and hardly less so in Michigan than in New York. In the political campaign which followed I took no direct part, though especially aroused by the speeches of a new man who had just appeared above the horizon,—Carl Schurz. His arguments seemed to me by far the best of that whole campaign—the broadest, the deepest, and the most convincing.
My dear and honored father, during the months of July, August, and the first days of September, was slowly fading away on his death-bed. Yet he was none the less interested in the question at issue, and every day I sat by his bedside and read to him the literature bearing upon the contest; but of all the speeches he best liked those of this new orator—he preferred them, indeed, to those of his idol Seward.
I have related in another place how, years afterward, Bismarck asked me, in Berlin, to what Carl Schurz's great success in America was due, and my answer to this question.
Mr. Lincoln having been elected, I went on with my duties as before, but the struggle was rapidly deepening. Soon came premonitions of real conflict, and, early in the following spring, civil war was upon us. My teaching went on, as of old, but it became more direct. In order to show what the maintenance of a republic was worth, and what patriots had been willing to do for their country in a struggle not unlike ours, I advised my students to read Motley's ``History of the Dutch Republic,'' and I still think it was good advice. Other works, of a similar character, showing how free peoples have conducted long and desperate wars for the maintenance of their national existence and of liberty, I also recommended, and with good effect.
Reverses came. During part of my vacation, in the summer of 1861, I was at Syracuse, and had, as my guest, Mr. George Sumner, younger brother of the eminent senator from Massachusetts, a man who had seen much of the world, had written magazine articles and reviews which had done him credit, and whose popular lectures were widely esteemed. One Sunday afternoon in June my uncle, Mr. Hamilton White, dropped in at my house to make a friendly call. He had just returned from Washington, where he had seen his old friend Seward, Mr. Lincoln's Secretary of State, and felt able to give us a forecast of the future. This uncle of mine was a thoughtful man of affairs; successful in business, excellent in judgment, not at all prone to sanguine or flighty views, and on our asking him how matters looked in Washington he said, ``Depend upon it, it is all right: Seward says that they have decided to end the trouble at once, even if it is necessary to raise an army of fifty thousand men;—that they will send troops immediately to Richmond and finish the whole thing at once, so that the country can go on quietly about its business.''
There was, of course, something reassuring in so favorable a statement made by a sensible man fresh from the most accredited sources, and yet I could not resist grave doubts. Such historical knowledge as I possessed taught me that a struggle like that just beginning between two great principles, both of which had been gathering force for nearly a century, and each of which had drawn to its support millions of devoted men, was not to be ended so easily; but I held my peace.
Next day I took Mr. Sumner on an excursion up the beautiful Onondaga Valley. As we drove through the streets of Syracuse, noticing knots of men gathered here and there in discussion, and especially at the doors of the news offices, we secured an afternoon newspaper and drove on, engaged in earnest conversation. It was a charming day, and as we came to the shade of some large trees about two miles from the city we rested and I took out the paper. It struck me like death. There, displayed in all its horrors, was the first account of the Battle of Bull Run,— which had been fought the previous afternoon,—exactly at the time when my uncle was assuring us that the United States Army was to march at once to Richmond and end the war. The catastrophe seemed fatal. The plans of General McDowell had come utterly to nought; our army had been scattered to the four winds; large numbers of persons, including sundry members of Congress who had airily gone out with the army to ``see the fun,'' among them one from our own neighborhood, Mr. Alfred Ely, of Rochester, had been captured and sent to Richmond, and the rebels were said to be in full march on the National Capital.
Sumner was jubilant. ``This,'' he said, ``will make the American people understand what they have to do; this will stop talk such as your uncle gave us yesterday afternoon.'' But to me it was a fearful moment. Sumner's remarks grated horribly upon my ears; true as his view was, I could not yet accept it.
And now preparations for war, and, indeed, for repelling invasion, began in earnest. My friends all about me were volunteering, and I also volunteered, but was rejected with scorn; the examining physician saying to me, ``You will be a burden upon the government in the first hospital you reach; you have not the constitution to be of use in carrying a musket; your work must be of a different sort.''
My work, then, through the summer was with those who sought to raise troops and to provide equipments for them. There was great need of this, and, in my opinion, the American people have never appeared to better advantage than at that time, when they began to realize their duty, and to set themselves at doing it. In every city, village, and hamlet, men and women took hold of the work, feeling that the war was their own personal business. No other country since the world began has ever seen a more noble outburst of patriotism or more efficient aid by individuals to their government. The National and State authorities of course did everything in their power; but men and women did not wait for them. With the exception of those whose bitter partizanship led them to oppose the war in all its phases, men, women, and children engaged heartily and efficiently in efforts to aid the Union in its struggle.