Marse Henry Part 1

Ma.r.s.e Henry, Complete.

by Henry Watterson.

Chapter the First

I Am Born and Begin to Take Notice--John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson--James K. Polk and Franklin Pierce--Jack Dade and "Beau Hickman"--Old Times in Washington

I

I am asked to jot down a few autobiographic odds and ends from such data of record and memory as I may retain. I have been something of a student of life; an observer of men and women and affairs; an appraiser of their character, their conduct, and, on occasion, of their motives. Thus, a kind of instinct, which bred a tendency and grew to a habit, has led me into many and diverse companies, the lowest not always the meanest.

Circ.u.mstance has rather favored than hindered this bent. I was born in a party camp and grew to manhood on a political battlefield. I have lived through stirring times and in the thick of events. In a vein colloquial and reminiscential, not ambitious, let me recall some impressions which these have left upon the mind of one who long ago reached and turned the corner of the Scriptural limitation; who, approaching fourscore, does not yet feel painfully the frost of age beneath the ravage of time's defacing waves. a.s.suredly they have not obliterated his sense either of vision or vista. Mindful of the adjuration of Burns,

Keep something to yourself, Ye scarcely tell to ony,

I shall yet hold little in reserve, having no state secrets or mysteries of the soul to reveal.

It is not my purpose to be or to seem oracular. I shall not write after the manner of Rousseau, whose Confessions had been better honored in the breach than the observance, and in any event whose sincerity will bear question; nor have I tales to tell after the manner of Paul Barras, whose Memoirs have earned him an immortality of infamy. Neither shall I emulate the grandiose volubility and self-complacent posing of Metternich and Talleyrand, whose pretentious volumes rest for the most part unopened upon dusty shelves. I aspire to none of the honors of the historian. It shall be my aim as far as may be to avoid the garrulity of the raconteur and to restrain the exaggerations of the ego. But neither fear of the charge of self-exploitation nor the specter of a modesty oft too obtrusive to be real shall deter me from a proper freedom of narration, where, though in the main but a humble chronicler, I must needs appear upon the scene and speak of myself; for I at least have not always been a dummy and have sometimes in a way helped to make history.

In my early life--as it were, my salad days--I aspired to becoming what old Simon Cameron called "one of those d.a.m.ned literary fellows" and Thomas Carlyle less profanely described as "a leeterary celeebrity."

But some malign fate always sat upon my ambitions in this regard. It was easy to become The National Gambler in Nast's cartoons, and yet easier The National Drunkard through the medium of the everlasting mint-julep joke; but the phantom of the laurel crown would never linger upon my fair young brow.

Though I wrote verses for the early issues of Harper's Weekly--happily no one can now prove them on me, for even at that jejune period I had the prudence to use an anonym--the Harpers, luckily for me, declined to publish a volume of my poems. I went to London, carrying with me "the great American novel." It was actually accepted by my ever too partial friend, Alexander Macmillan. But, rest his dear old soul, he died and his successors refused to see the transcendent merit of that performance, a view which my own maturing sense of belles-lettres values subsequently came to verify.

When George Harvey arrived at the front I "'ad 'opes." But, Lord, that cast-iron man had never any bookish bowels of compa.s.sion--or political either for the matter of that!--so that finally I gave up fiction and resigned myself to the humble category of the crushed tragi-comedians of literature, who inevitably drift into journalism.

Thus my destiny has been casual. A great man of letters quite thwarted, I became a newspaper reporter--a voluminous s.p.a.ce writer for the press--now and again an editor and managing editor--until, when I was nearly thirty years of age, I hit the Kentucky trail and set up for a journalist. I did this, however, with a big "J," nursing for a while some faint ambitions of statesmanship--even office--but in the end discarding everything that might obstruct my entire freedom, for I came into the world an insurgent, or, as I have sometimes described myself in the Kentucky vernacular, "a free n.i.g.g.e.r and not a slave n.i.g.g.e.r."

II

Though born in a party camp and grown to manhood on a political battlefield my earlier years were most seriously influenced by the religious spirit of the times. We pa.s.sed to and fro between Washington and the two family homesteads in Tennessee, which had cradled respectively my father and mother, Beech Grove in Bedford County, and Spring Hill in Maury County. Both my grandfathers were devout churchmen of the Presbyterian faith. My Grandfather Black, indeed, was the son of a Presbyterian clergyman, who lived, preached and died in Madison County, Kentucky. He was descended, I am a.s.sured, in a straight line from that David Black, of Edinburgh, who, as Burkle tells us, having declared in a sermon that Elizabeth of England was a harlot, and her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, little better, went to prison for it--all honor to his memory.

My Grandfather Watterson was a man of mark in his day. He was decidedly a constructive--the projector and in part the builder of an important railway line--an early friend and comrade of General Jackson, who was all too busy to take office, and, indeed, who throughout his life disdained the ephemeral honors of public life. The Wattersons had migrated directly from Virginia to Tennessee.

The two families were prosperous, even wealthy for those days, and my father had entered public life with plenty of money, and General Jackson for his sponsor. It was not, however, his ambitions or his career that interested me--that is, not until I was well into my teens--but the camp meetings and the revivalist preachers delivering the Word of G.o.d with more or less of ignorant yet often of very eloquent and convincing fervor.

The wave of the great Awakening of 1800 had not yet subsided. Bascom was still alive. I have heard him preach. The people were filled with thoughts of heaven and h.e.l.l, of the immortality of the soul and the life everlasting, of the Redeemer and the Cross of Calvary. The camp ground witnessed an annual muster of the adjacent countryside. The revival was a religious hysteria lasting ten days or two weeks. The sermons were appeals to the emotions. The songs were the outpourings of the soul in ecstacy. There was no fanaticism of the death-dealing, proscriptive sort; nor any conscious cant; simplicity, childlike belief in future rewards and punishments, the orthodox Gospel the universal rule. There was a good deal of doughty controversy between the churches, as between the parties; but love of the Union and the Lord was the bedrock of every confession.

Inevitably an impressionable and imaginative mind opening to such sights and sounds as it emerged from infancy must have been deeply affected.

Until I was twelve years old the enchantment of religion had complete possession of my understanding. With the loudest, I could sing all the hymns. Being early taught in music I began to transpose them into many sorts of rhythmic movement for the edification of my companions. Their words, aimed directly at the heart, sank, never to be forgotten, into my memory. To this day I can repeat the most of them--though not without a break of voice--while too much dwelling upon them would stir me to a pitch of feeling which a life of activity in very different walks and ways and a certain self-control I have been always able to command would scarcely suffice to restrain.

The truth is that I retain the spiritual essentials I learned then and there. I never had the young man's period of disbelief. There has never been a time when if the Angel of Death had appeared upon the scene--no matter how festal--I would not have knelt with adoration and welcome; never a time on the battlefield or at sea when if the elements had opened to swallow me I would not have gone down shouting!

Sectarianism in time yielded to universalism. Theology came to seem to my mind more and more a weapon in the hands of Satan to embroil and divide the churches. I found in the Sermon on the Mount leading enough for my ethical guidance, in the life and death of the Man of Galilee inspiration enough to fulfill my heart's desire; and though I have read a great deal of modern inquiry--from Renan and Huxley through Newman and Dollinger, embracing debates before, during and after the English upheaval of the late fifties and the Ec.u.menical Council of 1870, including the various raids upon the Westminster Confession, especially the revision of the Bible, down to writers like Frederic Harrison and Doctor Campbell--I have found nothing to shake my childlike faith in the simple rescript of Christ and Him crucified.

III

From their admission into the Union, the States of Kentucky and Tennessee have held a relation to the politics of the country somewhat disproportioned to their population and wealth. As between the two parties from the Jacksonian era to the War of Sections, each was closely and hotly contested. If not the birthplace of what was called "stump oratory," in them that picturesque form of party warfare flourished most and lasted longest. The "barbecue" was at once a rustic feast and a forum of political debate. Especially notable was the presidential campaign of 1840, the year of my birth, "Tippecanoe and Tyler," for the Whig slogan--"Old Hickory" and "the battle of New Orleans," the Democratic rallying cry--Jackson and Clay, the adored party chieftains.

I grew up in the one State, and have pa.s.sed the rest of my life in the other, cherishing for both a deep affection, and, maybe, over-estimating their hold upon the public interest. Excepting General Jackson, who was a fighter and not a talker, their public men, with Henry Clay and Felix Grundy in the lead, were "stump orators." He who could not relate and impersonate an anecdote to ill.u.s.trate and clinch his argument, nor "make the welkin ring" with the clarion tones of his voice, was politically good for nothing. James K. Polk and James C. Jones led the van of stump orators in Tennessee, Ben Hardin, John J. Crittenden and John C.

Breckenridge in Kentucky. Tradition still has stories to tell of their exploits and prowess, their wit and eloquence, even their commonplace sayings and doings. They were marked men who never failed to captivate their audiences. The system of stump oratory had many advantages as a public force and was both edifying and educational. There were a few conspicuous writers for the press, such as Ritchie, Greeley and Prentice. But the day of personal journalism and newspaper influence came later.

I was born at Washington--February 16, 1840--"a bad year for Democrats,"

as my father used to say, adding: "I am afraid the boy will grow up to be a Whig."

In those primitive days there were only Whigs and Democrats. Men took their politics, as their liquor, "straight"; and this father of mine was an undoubting Democrat of the schools of Jefferson and Jackson. He had succeeded James K. Polk in Congress when the future President was elected governor of Tennessee; though when nominated he was little beyond the age required to qualify as a member of the House.

To the end of his long life he appeared to me the embodiment of wisdom, integrity and courage. And so he was--a man of tremendous force of character, yet of surpa.s.sing sweetness of disposition; singularly disdainful of office, and indeed of preferment of every sort; a profuse maker and a prodigal spender of money; who, his needs and recognition a.s.sured, cared nothing at all for what he regarded as the costly glories of the little great men who rattled round in places often much too big for them.

Immediately succeeding Mr. Polk, and such a youth in appearance, he attracted instant attention. His father, my grandfather, allowed him a larger income than was good for him--seeing that the per diem then paid Congressmen was altogether insufficient--and during the earlier days of his sojourn in the national capital he cut a wide swath; his princ.i.p.al yokemate in the pleasures and dissipations of those times being Franklin Pierce, at first a representative and then a senator from New Hampshire.

Fortunately for both of them, they were whisked out of Washington by their families in 1843; my father into the diplomatic service and Mr.

Pierce to the seclusion of his New England home. They kept in close touch, however, the one with the other, and ten years later, in 1853, were back again upon the scene of their rather conspicuous frivolity, Pierce as President of the United States, my father, who had preceded him a year or two, as editor of the Washington Union, the organ of the Administration.

When I was a boy the national capital was still rife with stories of their escapades. One that I recall had it that on a certain occasion returning from an excursion late at night my father missed his footing and fell into the ca.n.a.l that then divided the city, and that Pierce, after many fruitless efforts, unable to a.s.sist him to dry land, exclaimed, "Well, Harvey, I can't get you out, but I'll get in with you," suiting the action to the word. And there they were found and rescued by a party of pa.s.sers, very well pleased with themselves.

My father's absence in South America extended over two years. My mother's health, maybe her aversion to a long overseas journey, kept her at home, and very soon he tired of life abroad without her and came back. A committee of citizens went on a steamer down the river to meet him, the wife and child along, of course, and the story was told that, seated on the paternal knee curiously observant of every detail, the brat suddenly exclaimed, "Ah ha, pa! Now you've got on your store clothes. But when ma gets you up at Beech Grove you'll have to lay off your broadcloth and put on your jeans, like I do."

Being an only child and often an invalid, I was a pet in the family and many tales were told of my infantile precocity. On one occasion I had a fight with a little colored boy of my own age and I need not say got the worst of it. My grandfather, who came up betimes and separated us, said, "he has blackened your eye and he shall black your boots," thereafter making me a deed to the lad. We grew up together in the greatest amity and in due time I gave him his freedom, and again to drop into the vernacular--"that was the only n.i.g.g.e.r I ever owned." I should add that in the "War of Sections" he fell in battle bravely fighting for the freedom of his race.

It is truth to say that I cannot recall the time when I was not pa.s.sionately opposed to slavery, a crank on the subject of personal liberty, if I am a crank about anything.

IV

In those days a less attractive place than the city of Washington could hardly be imagined. It was scattered over an ill-paved and half-filled oblong extending east and west from the Capitol to the White House, and north and south from the line of the Maryland hills to the Potomac River. One does not wonder that the early Britishers, led by Tom Moore, made game of it, for it was both unpromising and unsightly.

Private carriages were not numerous. Hackney coaches had to be especially ordered. The only public conveyance was a rickety old omnibus which, making hourly trips, plied its lazy journey between the Navy Yard and Georgetown. There was a livery stable--Kimball's--having "stalls,"

as the sleeping apartments above came to be called, thus literally serving man and beast. These stalls often lodged very distinguished people. Kimball, the proprietor, a New Hampshire Democrat of imposing appearance, was one of the last Washingtonians to wear knee breeches and a ruffled shirt. He was a great admirer of my father and his place was a resort of my childhood.

One day in the early April of 1852 I was humped in a chair upon one side of the open entrance reading a book--Mr. Kimball seated on the other side reading a newspaper--when there came down the street a tall, greasy-looking person, who as he approached said: "Kimball, I have another letter here from Frank."

"Well, what does Frank say?"

Then the letter was produced, read and discussed.

It was all about the coming National Democratic Convention and its prospective nominee for President of the United States, "Frank" seeming to be a princ.i.p.al. To me it sounded very queer. But I took it all in, and as soon as I reached home I put it up to my father:

"How comes it," I asked, "that a big old loafer gets a letter from a candidate for President and talks it over with the keeper of a livery stable? What have such people to do with such things?"