American Men of Action Part 7

[Ill.u.s.tration: LINCOLN]

The emanc.i.p.ation of the slaves, which has loomed so large in history, was in reality, merely an incident, a war measure, taken to weaken the enemy and justifiable, perhaps, only on that ground; the preliminary proclamation, indeed, proposed to liberate the slaves only in such states as were in rebellion on the following first of January. Nor did emanc.i.p.ation create any great popular enthusiasm. The congressional elections which followed it showed a great reaction against anti-slavery. The Democrats carried Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois. For a time the administration was fighting for its life, and won by an alarmingly small margin.

Before the year had elapsed, however, there was a great reversal in public opinion, and at the succeeding election, Lincoln received 212 out of 233 electoral votes. The end of the Confederacy was by this time in sight. A month after his second inauguration, Richmond fell, and five days later, Lee surrendered his army to General Grant. Lincoln at once paid a visit to Richmond and then returned to Washington for the last act of the drama.

The fourteenth of April was Good Friday, and the President arranged to take a small party to Ford's theatre to witness a performance of a farce comedy called "Our American Cousin." The President entered his box about nine o'clock and was given a tumultuous reception. Then the play went forward quietly, until suddenly the audience was startled by a pistol shot, followed by a woman's scream. At the same instant, a man was seen to leap from the President's box to the stage. Pausing only to wave a dagger which he carried in his hand and to shout, "Sic semper tyrannis!"

the man disappeared behind the scenes. Amid the confusion, no efficient pursuit was made. The President had been shot through the head, the bullet pa.s.sing through the brain. Unconsciousness, of course, came instantly, and death followed in a few hours.

Eleven days later, the murderer, an actor by the name of John Wilkes Booth, was surrounded in a barn where he had taken refuge; he refused to come out, and the barn was set on fire. Soon afterwards, the a.s.sa.s.sin was brought forth with a bullet at the base of his brain, whether fired by himself or one of the besieging soldiers was never certainly known.

It is startling to contemplate the fearful responsibility which Booth a.s.sumed when he fired that shot. So far from benefiting the South, he did it incalculable harm, for the North was thoroughly aroused by the deed. Thousands and thousands flocked to see the dead President as he lay in state at the Capitol, and in the larger cities in which his funeral procession paused on its way to his home in Springfield. The whole country was in mourning, as for its father; business was practically suspended, and the people seemed stunned by the great calamity. That so gentle a man should have been murdered wakened, deep down in the heart of the North, a fierce resentment; the feelings of kindliness for a vanquished foe were, for the moment, swept away in anger; and the North turned upon the South with stern face and shining eyes. The wild and foolish a.s.sa.s.sin brought down upon the heads of his own people such a wrath as the great conflict had not awakened. We shall see how bitter was the retribution.

Not then so fully as now was Lincoln's greatness understood. He has come to personify for us the triumphs and glories, the sadness and the pathos, of the great struggle which he guided. His final martyrdom seems almost a fitting crown for his achievements. It has, without doubt, done much to secure him the exalted niche which he occupies in the hearts of the American people, whom, in a way, he died to save. Had he lived through the troubled period of Reconstruction which followed, he might have emerged with a fame less clear and shining; and yet the hand which guided the country through four years of Civil War, was without doubt the one best fitted to save it from the misery and disgrace which lay in store for it. But speculations as to what might have been are vain and idle. What was, we know; and above the clouds of conflict, Lincoln's figure looms, serene and venerable. Two of his own utterances reveal him as the words of no other man can--his address on the battlefield of Gettysburg, and his address at his second inauguration--but two months after he was laid to rest, James Russell Lowell, at the services in commemoration of the three hundredth anniversary of Harvard College, paid him one of the most eloquent tributes ever paid any man, concluding with the words:

"Great captains, with their guns and drums; Disturb our judgment for the hour, But at last silence comes; These all are gone, and, standing like a tower, Our children shall behold his fame, The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man; Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame; New birth of our new soil, the first American."

On the ticket with Lincoln, the Republicans had placed, as a sop to such pro-slavery sentiment as still existed at the North, a southerner and state rights Democrat named Andrew Johnson. By one of those singular chances of history, Johnson's origin and early years had been very much like Lincoln's. He, too, was born of a "poor white" family; first seeing the light in North Carolina about six weeks before Abraham Lincoln opened his eyes in that rude log cabin in Kentucky. His condition was, if anything, even more hopeless and degraded than Lincoln's, and if any one had prophesied that these two ignorant and poverty-stricken children would one day rise, side by side, to the greatest position in the Republic, he would have been regarded, and justly, as a hopeless madman.

But not even to a madman did any such wild idea occur. "Poor whites"

were despised throughout the South, even by the slaves; if there was, in the whole United States, any law of caste, it was against these ignorant and shiftless people; and Andrew Johnson, at the age of fifteen, was little better than a young savage. He had never gone to school, he had never seen a book. But one day, he heard a man reading aloud, and the wonder of it quickened a new purpose within him. He induced a friend to teach him the alphabet, and then, borrowing the book, he laboriously taught himself to read. So there was something more than "poor white" in him, after all.

By the time he was eighteen, he had had enough of his shiftless surroundings, and struck out for himself, journeyed across the mountains to Greenville, Tennessee, met there a girl of sixteen named Eliza McCardle, and, with youth's sublime improvidence, married her! As it happened, he did well, for his wife had a fair education, and night after night taught him patiently, until he could read fairly well and write a little. I like to think of that family group, so different from most, and to admire that girl-wife teaching her husband the rudiments of education.

Already, as a result of his lowly birth and the cla.s.s prejudice he everywhere encountered, young Johnson had conceived that hatred of the ruling cla.s.s at the South which was to influence his after life so deeply. He had a certain rude eloquence which appealed to the lower cla.s.ses of the people, and, in 1835, succeeded in gaining an election to the state legislature. He nursed his political prospects carefully, and eight years later, was sent to Congress. He was afterwards twice governor of Tennessee.

It has been said that secession was, in the beginning, a policy of the ruling cla.s.s in the South and not of the people. It is not surprising, then, that Johnson should have arrayed himself against it, and fought it with all his might. This position made him so prominent, that on March 4, 1862, Lincoln appointed him military-governor of Tennessee--a position which was exactly to Johnson's taste and which he filled well.

In this position, he seemed the embodiment of the Union element of the South, and at their national convention in 1864, the Republicans decided that the President's policy of reconstruction for the South would be greatly aided by the presence of a southern man on the ticket, and Johnson was thereupon chosen for the office of Vice-President. On the same day that Lincoln was inaugurated for the second time, Johnson took the oath of office in the Senate chamber, and delivered a speech which created a sensation. He declared, in effect, that Tennessee had never been out of the Union, that she was electing representatives who would soon mingle with their brothers from the North at Washington, and that she was ent.i.tled to every privilege which the northern states enjoyed.

Three hours after the death of the President, Andrew Johnson took the oath of office as his successor, but he was regarded with suspicion at both North and South--at the North, because he was believed to be at heart pro-slavery; at the South because of his well-known animosity toward the aristocratic and ruling cla.s.s. He was also known to be stubborn, high-tempered and intemperate, and he and Congress were soon at sword's point. Johnson was of the opinion that the question of suffrage for the negroes should be left to the several states; a majority of Congress were determined to exact this for their own protection. This was embodied in the so-called Civil Rights Bill, conferring citizenship upon colored men. It was promptly vetoed by the President, and was pa.s.sed over his veto; soon afterwards the fourteenth amendment was pa.s.sed, conferring the suffrage upon all citizens of the United States without regard to color or previous condition of servitude. It also was vetoed, and pa.s.sed over the veto. Johnson was hailed as a traitor by Republicans, and the campaign against him culminated in his impeachment by Congress early in 1868. The trial which followed was the most bitter in the history of the Senate, but Andrew Johnson was acquitted by the failure of the prosecution to secure the two-thirds vote necessary for conviction by a single vote, thirty-five senators voting for conviction and nineteen for acquittal.

Johnson's friends were jubilant, but his power had vanished. The seceded states one by one came back into the Union in accordance with the Reconstruction act which Johnson had vetoed. He failed of the nomination on the Democratic ticket, and after the inauguration of his successor, at once returned to his old home in Tennessee. There he attempted to secure the nomination for United States senator, but his influence was gone and he was defeated. So ended his public life.

It has been rather the fashion to picture Johnson, as an intemperate and bull-headed ignoramus, but such a characterization is far from fair. But for Lincoln's a.s.sa.s.sination, some such policy of reconstruction as Johnson advocated would probably have been carried out, instead of the policy of fanatics like Thaddeus Stevens, which left the South a prey to the carpet-bagger and the ignorant negro for over a decade. Johnson himself might have accomplished more if he had been of a less violent disposition; but he was ignorant of diplomacy, incapable of compromise, and so was worsted in the fight. However we may disagree with his policy and dislike his character, let us at least not forget that picture of the "poor white" boy teaching himself to read; and that other of the girl-wife patiently instructing him in the rudiments of writing.

A successful war inevitably gives to its commanders a tremendous popular prestige. We have seen how the battle of New Orleans made Andrew Jackson a national hero, how William Henry Harrison loomed large after the battle of Tippecanoe, and how Zachary Taylor was chosen President as a result of his victories in Mexico. The country was now to undergo another period of military domination, longer lived than those others, as the Civil War was greater than them--a period from which it has even yet not fully recovered.

In 1868, the Republican party nominated unanimously for President the general who had pushed the war to a successful finish, and who had received Lee's surrender, Ulysses Simpson Grant, and he was elected by an overwhelming majority. For the first time in the history of the country, a man had been elected President without regard to his qualifications for the office, for even Jackson had had many years'

experience in public affairs. Of such qualifications, Grant had very few. He was egotistical, a poor judge of men, without experience in statesmanship, and unwilling to submit to guidance. As a result, his administration was marked by inefficiency and extravagance, and ended in a swirl of scandal.

Born in Ohio in 1822, and graduated at West Point, he had served through the war with Mexico, resigned from the army, remained in obscurity for six years, during which he made an unsuccessful attempt to support himself in civil life, and entered the army again at the outbreak of the Civil War. From the first he was successful more than any other of the Union generals, not so much because of military genius as from a certain tenacity of purpose with which he fairly wore out the enemy. But a people discouraged by reverses were not disposed to inquire too closely into the reason of his victories, and early in 1864, after a brilliant campaign along the Mississippi, he had been appointed commander-in-chief of the Union army, and began that series of operations against Richmond which cost the North so dear, but which resulted in the fall of the capital of the Confederacy and in Lee's surrender.

A bearded, square-jawed, silent man, he caught the public fancy by two messages, the one of "Unconditional surrender," with which he had answered the demand for terms on the part of the Confederates whom he had entrapped in Fort Donelson; the other, the famous: "I propose to fight it out on this line, if it takes all summer," with which he started his campaign in the Wilderness. Both were characteristic, and if Grant had retired from public life at the close of the Civil War, or had been content to remain commander-in-chief of the army of the United States, his fame would probably have been brighter than it is to-day.

His training, such as it was, had been wholly military and his inaugural address showed his profound ignorance of the work which lay before him--an ignorance all the more profound and unreachable because of his serene unconsciousness of it. He fell at once an easy prey to political demagogues, and before the close of his first administration, demoralization was widespread throughout the government. A large portion of the Republican party, realizing his unfitness for the office, opposed his renomination, and when they saw his nomination was inevitable, broke away and named a ticket of their own, but Grant's victory was a sweeping one.

With this stamp of public approval, the boodlers became bolder and great scandals followed, involving many members of Congress and even some members of the cabinet, but not the President himself, of whose personal honesty there was never any doubt, and in 1873, came the worst panic the country had ever experienced. A political reaction followed, and in 1874 the Democrats carried the country, gaining the House of Representatives by a majority of nearly a hundred.

Following his retirement from office in 1877, Grant made a tour of the world, returning in 1879, to be again a candidate for the presidency, and coming very near to getting the nomination. It was characteristic of the man's egotism that, even yet, he did not realize his unfitness for the office, but thought himself great enough to disregard the precedent which Washington had established. He lived five years longer, the last years of his life rendered miserable by cancer of the throat, which finally killed him.

In the summer of 1876, the Republicans nominated Rutherford B. Hayes, at that time Governor of Ohio, as their candidate for President--a nomination which was a surprise to the country, which had confidently expected that of James G. Blaine. Hayes was by no means a national figure, although he had served in the Union army, had been in Congress, and, as has been said, was governor of Ohio at the time of his nomination. Nor was he a man of more than very ordinary ability, upright, honest, and mediocre. The Democratic candidate was Samuel J.

Tilden, a political star of the first magnitude, and the contest which followed was unprecedented in American history.

Tilden received a popular majority of half a million votes, and 184 electoral votes, out of the 185 necessary to elect, without counting the votes from Florida, South Carolina and Louisiana, all of which he had carried on the face of the returns. The Republicans disputed the vote in these states, however, and by the inexorable use of party machinery and carpet-bag government, declared Hayes elected. For a time, so manifest was the partisan bias of this decision, the country seemed on the verge of another Civil War, but Tilden led in wiser council, and Hayes was permitted to take his seat. It is the only instance in a national election where the will of the people at the polls has been defied and overridden.

Hayes was a sincere and honest man, and he felt keenly the cloud which the manner of his election cast over his administration. He was never popular with his party, and no doubt he felt that the debt he owed it for getting him his seat was a doubtful one. His administration was noteworthy princ.i.p.ally because he destroyed the last vestiges of carpet-bag government in the South, and left the southern states to work out their own destiny unhampered. He was not even considered for a renomination, and spent the remainder of his life quietly in his Ohio home.

Hayes's successor was another so-called "dark horse," that is, a man of minor importance, whose nomination, was due to the fact that the party leaders could not agree upon any of the more prominent candidates. They were Grant, Blaine and John Sherman, and after thirty-five ballots, it was evident that a "dark horse" must be found. The choice fell upon James Abram Garfield, who was not prominent enough to have made any enemies, and who was as astonished as was the country at large when it heard the news.

Garfield was born in Ohio in 1831, in a little log cabin and to a position in the world not greatly different to Lincoln's. While laboring at various rough trades, he succeeded in preparing himself for college, worked his way through, got into politics, served through the Civil War, and later for eighteen years in Congress, where he made a creditable but by no means brilliant record. He was elected President by a small majority, and enraged the many enemies of James G. Blaine by selecting that astute politician as his secretary of state. One of these, a rattle-brained New Yorker named Charles J. Guiteau, approached the President on July 2, 1881, as he was waiting at a railroad station in Washington, about to start on a journey, and shot him through the body.

Death followed, after a painful struggle, two months later.

Obscure, in a sense, as Garfield had been, the man who succeeded him was immeasurably more so. Chester Alan Arthur was a successful New York lawyer, who had dabbled in politics and held some minor appointive offices, his selection as Vice-President being due to the desire of the Republican managers to throw a sop to the Empire State. His administration, however, while marked by no great or stirring event, was for the most part wise and conservative, but James G. Blaine had by this time secured complete control of the party, and Arthur had no chance for the nomination for President. He died of apoplexy within two years of his retirement.

The Republican party had been supreme in the national government for a quarter of a century, and there seemed no reason to doubt that Blaine, its candidate in the campaign of 1884, would at last realize his consuming ambition to be elected President. He had an immense personal prestige, he had outlived the taint of corruption attached to him during the administration of Grant, and he had for years been preparing and strengthening himself for this contest. So he entered it confidently.

But a new issue had arisen--that of the protective tariff, which, originally a war revenue measure, had been formally adopted as a principle of Republicanism, which was hailed by its adherents as a new and brilliant economic device for enriching everybody at n.o.body's expense, and which had really enriched a few at the expense of the many.

The Democrats, with considerable hesitation and ambiguity, p.r.o.nounced against it, arraigned the Republican party for corruption, and named as their nominee Grover Cleveland, of New York.

Cleveland was born in New Jersey in 1837, the son of a clergyman whose early death threw him upon his own resources. He started west in search of employment, stopped at Buffalo, and afterwards made it his home. He studied law while working as a clerk and copyist, was admitted to the bar in 1859, and in the late seventies was elected mayor of Buffalo on a reform ticket. Almost at once, the country's eyes were fastened upon him. Elected as a reform mayor, he continued to be one after his induction into office. He actually seemed to think that the promises and pledges made by him during his campaign were still binding upon him, and astounded the politicians by proceeding to carry those promises out. So scathing were the veto messages he sent in, one after another, to a corrupt council, that they awakened admiration and respect even among his opponents. The messages, written in the plainest of plain English, aroused the people of the city to the way in which they had been robbed by dishonest officials, they rallied behind him, and his reputation was made. In 1882, his party wanted a reform candidate for governor, and they naturally turned to Cleveland, and he was elected by a plurality of two hundred thousand.

He found the same condition of things on a larger scale at Albany as at Buffalo--a corrupt machine paying political debts with public money--and here, again, he showed the same astonishing regard for pre-election pledges, the same belief in his famous declaration that "a public office is a public trust," and bill after bill was vetoed, while the people applauded. And with every veto came a message stating its reasons in language which did not mince words and which all could understand. He showed himself not only to be entirely beyond the control of the political machine of his own party, but also to possess remarkable moral courage, and he became naturally and inevitably the Democratic candidate for President, since the Democratic platform was in the main an arraignment of Republican corruption and moral decay. The campaign which followed was a bitter one; but Blaine had estranged a large portion of his party, he made a number of bad blunders, and Cleveland was elected.

The old party founded by Jefferson, which, beginning with Jefferson's administration, had ruled the country uninterruptedly for forty years, was returned to power, and on an issue which would have delighted Jefferson's heart.

Much to the dismay and disappointment of the politicians, the new President made no clean sweep of Republican officeholders. He took the unheard-of ground that, in the public service, as in any other, good work merited advancement, no matter what the politics of the individual might be. He made some changes, as a matter of course, but he was from the first st.u.r.dily in favor of civil service reform. It is worth remarking that a Democratic President was the first to take a decided stand against the principle of "to the victors belong the spoils," first put into practice by another Democratic President, Andrew Jackson, over fifty years before.

His stand, too, on the pension question was startling in its audacity.

The shadow of the Civil War still hung over the country; the soldiers who had served in that war had formed themselves into a great, semi-political organization, known as the Grand Army of the Republic, and worked unceasingly for increased pensions, which Congress had found itself unable to refuse. More than that, the members of Congress were in the habit of pa.s.sing hundreds of special bills, giving pensions to men whose claims had been rejected by the pension department, as not coming within the law. Cleveland took the stand that, unless the soldier had been disabled by the war, he had no just claim to government support, and he vetoed scores of private pension bills, many of which were shown to be fraudulent.

In other ways, his remarkable strength of personality soon became apparent, and his determination to do what he thought his duty, regardless of consequences. His message of December, 1887, fairly startled the country. It was devoted entirely to a denunciation of the high tariff laws, a subject on which the Democratic leaders had deemed it prudent to maintain a discreet silence since the preceding election, and which many of them hoped would be forgotten by the public. But Cleveland's message brought the question squarely to the front, and made it the one issue of the campaign which followed. Cleveland would have been elected but for the traitorous conduct of the leaders in New York, who had never forgiven him for the way in which, as governor, he had scourged them. New York State was lost to him, and his opponent, Benjamin Harrison, was elected, although his popular vote fell below that of Cleveland by over a hundred thousand.

But Cleveland had his revenge four years later, when, in spite of the protests of the leaders from his own state of New York, he was again nominated on a platform denouncing the tariff, and defeated Harrison by an overwhelming majority. And now came one of those strange instances of party perfidy and party suicide, of which the country has just witnessed a second example. In accordance with the platform pledges, a bill to lower the tariff was at once framed in the House and adopted; but the Senate, although Democratic in complexion, so altered it that it fell far short of carrying out the party pledges. The leader in the Senate was Arthur P. Gorman, of Maryland, and to him chiefly was due this act of treachery. The President refused to sign the bill, and it became a law without his signature. There can be little question that it was the failure of the Democratic party to fulfil its pledges at that critical time which led to its subsequent disruption and defeat.

Twice more did Cleveland startle the country with his extraordinary decision of character. In the summer of 1894, a great railroad strike, centering at Chicago, occasioned an outbreak of violence, which the governor of Illinois did nothing to quell. The President, therefore, declaring that the rioters had no right to interfere with the United States mails, ordered national troops to the scene to maintain order. A year later, when the British Government, involved in a boundary dispute with Venezuela, declared that it did not accept the Monroe Doctrine and would not submit the dispute to arbitration, the President sent a message to Congress, declaring that the Monroe Doctrine must be upheld at whatever cost. The country was thrilled from end to end, the President's course approved, and Great Britain at last consented to arbitration.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CLEVELAND]

And yet, when Cleveland left the presidential chair for the second time, he had entirely lost control of and sympathy with his own party. He had shown little tact in his dealings with the party leaders. He seemed to forget that, after all, these leaders had certain rights and privileges which should be respected; he sometimes blundered through very anxiety to be right. You have heard some men called so upright that they leaned over backward--well, that, occasionally, was Cleveland's fault. He was subjected to such a storm of abuse as no other ex-President ever had to endure. That he felt it keenly there can be no question; but in the years which followed, his st.u.r.dy and una.s.sailable character came to be recognized and appreciated, and his death, in the summer of 1908, was the occasion of deep and widespread sorrow.

We have told how, in 1888, Cleveland was defeated for the presidency by Benjamin Harrison. Harrison was a grandson of the old warrior of Tippecanoe, William Henry Harrison, the successful candidate of the Whig party forty-eight years before. He was an able but not brilliant man, had served through the Civil War, and was afterwards elected senator from Indiana, to which state he had removed from Ohio at an early age.

The platform on which he was elected pledged the party to the protective tariff principle, and a high tariff measure, known as the McKinley Bill, was pa.s.sed, raising duties to a point higher than had ever before been known in the history of the United States.

The Dependent Pension Bill, which Cleveland had vetoed, and which gave a pension to every Union soldier who was from any cause unable to earn a living, was also pa.s.sed. But these policies did not appeal to the public; besides which, Harrison, although a man of integrity and ability, was popular with neither the rank nor file of his party, through a total lack of personal magnetism, and though he received the nomination, Cleveland easily defeated him. The remainder of his life was pa.s.sed quietly at his Indiana home.