Marse Henry Part 31

Meanwhile the process of oblivion had gone on. The graven effigy of Jefferson Davis at length appeared upon the silver service of an American battleship. This told the Mississippi's guests, wherever and whenever they might meet round her hospitable board, of national unification and peace, giving the lie to sectional malignancy. In the most famous and conspicuous of the national cemeteries now stands the monument of a Confederate general not only placed there by consent of the Government, but dedicated with fitting ceremonies supervised by the Department of War, which sent as its official representative the son of Grant, himself an army officer of rank and distinction.

The world has looked on, incredulous and amazed, whilst our country has risen to each successive act in the drama of reconciliation with increasing enthusiasm.

I have been all my life a Const.i.tutional Nationalist; first the nation and then the state. The episode of the Confederacy seems already far away. It was an interlude, even as matters stood in the Sixties and Seventies, and now he who would thwart the unification of the country on the lines of oblivion, of mutual and reciprocal forgiveness, throws himself across the highway of his country's future, and is a traitor equally to the essential principles of free government and the spirit of the age.

If sectionalism be not dead it should have no place in popular consideration. The country seems happily at last one with itself. The South, like the East and the West, has come to be the merest geographic expression. Each of its states is in the Union, precisely like the states of the East and the West, all in one and one in all. Interchanges of every sort exist.

These exchanges underlie and interlace our social, domestic and business fabric. That the arrangement and relation after half a century of strife thus established should continue through all time is the hope and prayer of every thoughtful, patriotic American. There is no greater dissonance to that sentiment in the South than in the North. To what end, therefore, except ignominious recrimination and ruinous dissension, could a revival of old sectional and partisan pa.s.sions--if it were possible--be expected to reach?

V

Humor has played no small part in our politics. It was Col. Mulberry Sellers, Mark Twain's hero, who gave currency to the conceit and enunciated the principle of "the old flag and an appropriation." He did not claim the formula as his own, however. He got it, he said, of Senator Dillworthy, his patriotic file leader and ideal of Christian statesmanship.

The original of Senator Dillworthy was recognized the country over as Senator Pomeroy, of Kansas, "Old Pom," as he had come to be called, whose oleaginous piety and noisy patriotism, adjusting themselves with equal facility to the purloining of subsidies and the roasting of rebels, to prayer and land grants, had impressed themselves upon the Satirist of the Gilded Age as upon his immediate colleagues in Congress.

He was a ruffle-shirted Pharisee, who affected the airs of a bishop, and resembled Cruikshank's pictures of Pecksniff.

There have not been many "Old Poms" in our public life; or, for that matter Aaron Burrs either, and but one Benedict Arnold. That the chosen people of G.o.d did not dwell amid the twilight of the ages and in far-away Judea, but were reserved to a later time, and a region then undiscovered of men, and that the American republic was ordained of G.o.d to ill.u.s.trate upon the theater of the New World the possibilities of free government in contrast with the failures and tyrannies and corruptions of the Old, I do truly believe. That is the first article in my confession of faith. And the second is like unto it, that Washington was raised up by G.o.d to create it, and that Lincoln was raised up by G.o.d to save it; else why the militia colonel of Virginia and the rail splitter of Illinois, for no reason that was obvious at the time, before all other men? G.o.d moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform. The star of the sublime destiny that hung over the manager of our blessed Savior hung over the cradle of our blessed Union.

Thus far it has weathered each historic danger which has gone before to mark the decline and fall of nations; the struggle for existence; the foreign invasion; the internecine strife; the disputed succession; religious bigotry and racial conflict. One other peril confronts it--the demoralization of wealth and luxury; too great prosperity; the concentration and the abuse of power. Shall we survive the lures with which the spirit of evil, playing upon our self-love, seeks to trip our wayward footsteps, purse-pride and party spirit, mistaken zeal and perverted religion, fanaticism seeking to abridge liberty and liberty running to license, greed masquerading as a patriot and ambition making a commodity of glory--or under the process of a divine evolution shall we be able to mount and ride the waves which swallowed the tribes of Israel, which engulfed the phalanxes of Greece and the legions of Rome, and which still beat the sides and sweep the decks of Europe?

The one-party power we have escaped; the one-man power we have escaped.

The stars in their courses fight for us; the virtue and intelligence of the people are still watchful and alert. Truth is mightier than ever, and justice, mounting guard even in the Hall of Statues, walks everywhere the battlements of freedom!

Chapter the Twentieth

The Real Grover Cleveland--Two Clevelands Before and After Marriage--A Correspondence and a Break of Personal Relations

I

There were, as I have said, two Grover Clevelands--before and after marriage--and, it might be added, between his defeat in 1888 and his election in 1892. He was so sure of his election in 1888 that he could not be induced to see the danger of the situation in his own State of New York, where David Bennett Hill, who had succeeded him in the governorship, was a candidate for reelection, and whom he personally detested, had become the ruling party force. He lost the State, and with it the election, while Hill won, and thereby arose an ugly faction fight.

I did not believe as the quadrennial period approached in 1892 that Mr. Cleveland could be elected. I still think he owed his election, and Harrison his defeat, to the Homestead riots of the midsummer, which transferred the labor vote bodily from the Republicans to the Democrats.

Mainly on account of this belief I opposed his nomination that year.

In the Kentucky State Convention I made my opposition resonant, if not effective. "I understand," I said in an address to the a.s.sembled delegates, "that you are all for Grover Cleveland?"

There came an affirmative roar.

"Well," I continued, "I am not, and if you send me to the National Convention I will not vote for his nomination, if his be the only name presented, because I firmly believe that his nomination will mean the marching through a slaughter-house to an open grave, and I refuse to be party to such a folly."

The answer of the convention was my appointment by acclamation, but it was many a day before I heard the last of my unlucky figure of speech.

Notwithstanding this splendid indors.e.m.e.nt, I went to the National Convention feeling very like the traditional "poor boy at a frolic." All seemed to me lost save honor and conviction. I had become the embodiment of my own epigram, "a tariff for revenue only." Mr. Cleveland, in the beginning very much taken by it, had grown first lukewarm and then frightened. His "Free Trade" message of 1887 had been regarded by the party as an answering voice. But I knew better.

In the national platform, over the protest of Whitney, his organizer, and Vilas, his spokesman, I had forced him to stand on that gospel.

He flew into a rage and threatened to modify, if not to repudiate, the plank in his letter of acceptance. We were still on friendly terms and, upon reaching home, I wrote him the following letter. It reads like ancient history, but, as the quarrel which followed cut a certain figure in the political chronicle of the time, the correspondence may not be historically out of date, or biographically uninteresting:

II

MR. WATTERSON TO MR. CLEVELAND

Courier-Journal Office, Louisville, July 9, 1892.--My Dear Mr. President: I inclose you two editorial articles from the Courier-Journal, and, that their spirit and purpose may not be misunderstood by you, I wish to add a word or two of a kind directly and entirely personal.

To a man of your robust understanding and strong will, opposition and criticism are apt to be taken as more or less unfriendly; and, as you are at present advised, I can hardly expect that any words of mine will be received by you with sentiments either of confidence or favor.

I was admonished by a certain distrust, if not disdain, visited upon the honest challenge I ventured to offer your Civil Service policy, when you were actually in office, that you did not differ from some other great men I have known in an unwillingness, or at least an inability, to accept, without resentment, the question of your infallibility.

Nevertheless, I was then, as I am now, your friend, and not your enemy, animated by the single purpose to serve the country, through you, as, wanting your great opportunities, I could not serve it through myself.

During the four years when you were President, I asked you but for one thing that lay near my heart. You granted that handsomely; and, if you had given me all you had to give beside, you could not have laid me under greater obligation. It is a gratification to me to know, and it ought to be some warrant both of my intelligence and fidelity for you to remember that that matter resulted in credit to the Administration and benefit to the public service.

But to the point; I had at St. Louis in 1888 and at Chicago, the present year, to oppose what was represented as your judgment and desire in the adoption of a tariff plank in our national platform; successfully in both cases. The inclosed articles set forth the reasons forcing upon me a different conclusion from yours, in terms that may appear to you bluntly specific, but I hope not personally offensive; certainly not by intention, for, whilst I would not suppress the truth to please you or any man, I have a decent regard for the sensibilities and the rights of all men, particularly of men so eminent as to be beyond the reach of anything except insolence and injustice. a.s.suredly in your case, I am incapable of even so much as the covert thought of either, entertaining for you absolute respect and regard. But, my dear Mr. President, I do not think that you appreciate the overwhelming force of the revenue reform issue, which has made you its idol.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A Corner of "Mansfield"--Home of Henry Watterson]

If you will allow me to say so, in perfect frankness and without intending to be rude or unkind, the gentlemen immediately about you, gentlemen upon whom you rely for material aid and energetic party management, are not, as to the Tariff, Democrats at all; and have little conception of the place in the popular mind and heart held by the Revenue Reform idea, or, indeed of any idea, except that of organization and money.

Of the need of these latter, no man has a more realizing sense, or larger information and experience, than I have. But they are merely the brakes and wheels of the engine, to which principles and inspirations are, and must always be, the elements of life and motion. It is to entreat you therefore, in your coming letter and address, not to underestimate the tremendous driving power of this Tariff issue, and to beg you, not even to seem to qualify it, or to abridge its terms in a mistaken attempt to seem to be conservative.

You cannot escape your great message of 1887 if you would. I know it by heart, and I think that I perfectly apprehend its scope and tenor. Take it as your guiding star. Stand upon it. Reiterate it. Emphasize it, amplify it, but do not subtract a thought, do not erase a word. For every vote which a bold front may lose you in the East you will gain two votes in the West. In the East, particularly in New York, enemies lurk in your very cupboard, and strike at you from behind your chair at table. There is more than a fighting chance for Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota, and next to a certainty in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana, if you put yourself personally at the head of the column which is moving in your name, supposing it to be another name for reduced taxes and freer exchanges.

Discouraged as I was by the condition of things in New York and Indiana prior to the Chicago Convention, depressed and almost hopeless by your nomination, I can see daylight, if you will relax your grip somewhat upon the East and throw yourself confidently upon the West.

I write warmly because I feel warmly. If you again occupy the White House, and it is my most constant and earnest prayer that you may, be sure that you will not be troubled by me. I cannot hope that my motives in opposing your nomination, consistent as you know them to have been, or that my conduct during the post-convention discussion and canva.s.s, free as I know it to have been of ill-feeling, or distemper, has escaped misrepresentation and misconception. I could not, without the loss of my self-respect, approach you on any private matter whatever; though it may not be amiss for me to say to you, that three weeks before the meeting of the National Convention, I wrote to Mr. Gorman and Mr. Brice urging the withdrawal of any opposition, and declaring that I would be a party to no movement to work the two-thirds rule to defeat the will of the majority.

This is all I have to say, Mr. President, and you can believe it or not, as you please; though you ought to know that I would write you nothing except in sincere conviction, nor speak to you, or of you, except in a candid and kindly spirit. Trusting that this will find you hale, hearty, and happy, I am, dear sir, your fellow democrat and most faithful friend,

HENRY WATTERSON.

The Honorable Grover Cleveland.

III

MR. CLEVELAND TO MR. WATTERSON