III
A LIVELIER and more variegated omnium-gatherum was never assembled. They had already begun to pour in when I arrived. There were long-haired and spectacled doctrinaires from New England, and short-haired and blatant emissaries from New York, mostly, as it turned out, friends of Horace Greeley. There were brisk Westerners from Chicago and St. Louis. If Whitelaw Reid, who had come as Greeley’s personal representative, had his retinue, so had Horace White and Carl Schurz. There were a few rather overdressed persons from New Orleans brought up by Governor Warmouth, and a motley array of Southerners of every sort, who were ready to clutch at any straw that promised relief to intolerable conditions. The full contingent of Washington correspondents was there, of course, with sharpened eyes and pencils, to make the most of what they had already begun to christen a conclave of cranks.
From a photograph taken in 1872
HENRY WATTERSON
Bowles and Halstead met me at the station, and we drove to the St. Nicholas Hotel, where White and Schurz were awaiting us. Then and there was organized a fellowship of the first three and myself which in the succeeding campaign went by the name of the Quadrilateral. We resolved to limit the Presidential nomination of the convention to Charles Francis Adams, Bowles’s candidate, and Lyman Trumbull, White’s candidate, omitting altogether, because of specific reasons urged by White, the candidacy of B. Gratz Brown, who, because of his Kentucky connections, had better served my purpose. The very next day the secret was abroad, and Whitelaw Reid came to me to ask why, in a newspaper combine of this sort, the “New York Tribune” had been left out.
From a photograph taken in 1872
HORACE WHITE
To my mind it seemed preposterous that it had been, or should be, and I stated as much to my new colleagues. They offered objection which to me appeared perverse, if not childish. To begin with, they did not like Reid. He was not a principal, like the rest of us, but a subordinate. Greeley was this, that, and the other; he could never be relied upon in any coherent, practical plan of campaign; to talk about him as a candidate was ridiculous. I listened rather impatiently, and finally I said: “Now, gentlemen, in this movement we shall need the ‘New York Tribune.’ If we admit Reid, we clinch it. You will all agree that Greeley has no chance of a nomination, and so, by taking him in, we both eat our cake and have it.” On this view of the case Reid was invited to join us, and that very night he sat with us at the St. Nicholas, where from night to night until the end we convened and went over the performances and developments of the day and concerted plans for the morrow.
As I recall these symposiums, amusing and plaintive memories rise before me.
The first serious business that engaged us was the killing of the boom for Judge David Davis of the Supreme Court, which was assuming definite and formidable proportions. The preceding winter it had been organizing at Washington under the ministration of some of the most astute politicians of the time, mainly, however, Democratic members of Congress. A party of these had brought the boom to Cincinnati, opening headquarters well provided with the requisite commissaries. Every delegate who came in that could be reached was laid hold of and conducted here.
From a photograph by Sarony, taken in 1872
SAMUEL BOWLES
We considered this flat burglary. It was a gross infringement upon our preserve. What business had the professional politicians with a great reform movement? The influence and dignity of journalism were involved and imperiled. We, its custodians, could brook no such defiance from intermeddling office-seekers, especially from brokendown Democratic office-seekers.
The inner sanctuary of our proceedings was a common drawing-room between two bedchambers shared by Schurz and me. Here we repaired after supper to smoke the pipe of fraternity and reform and to save the country. What could be done to kill off “D. Davis,” as we irreverently called the eminent and learned jurist, the friend of Lincoln, and the only aspirant having a “bar’l”? That was the question. We addressed ourselves to the task with earnest purpose, but characteristically. The power of the press must be invoked. It was our chief, if not our only, weapon. Each of us indited a leading editorial for his paper, to be wired to its destination and printed next morning, striking “D. Davis” at a prearranged and varying angle. Copies of these were made for Halstead, who, having with the rest of us read and compared the different screeds, indited one of his own in general comment and review for Cincinnati consumption. In next day’s “Commercial,” blazing under vivid head-lines, these leading editorials, dated “Chicago,” “New York,” “Springfield, Mass.,” and “Louisville, Ky.,” appeared with the explaining line, “‘The Tribune’ of to-morrow morning [or the ‘Courier-Journal’ or ‘Republican’] will say,” etc.
Wondrous consensus of public opinion! The Davis boom went down before it. The Davis boomers were paralyzed. The earth seemed to have arisen and hit them amidships. The incoming delegates were stopped and forewarned. Six months of adroit scheming was set at naught, and little more was heard of “D. Davis.”
From a photograph by Gutekunst
ALEXANDER K. McCLURE
Like the Mousquetaires, we were equally in for fighting and foot-racing; the point with us being to “get there,” no matter how; the end—the defeat of the rascally machine politicians and the reform of the public service—being relied upon to justify the means. I am writing this forty years after the event, and must be forgiven the fling of my wisdom at my own expense and that of my associates in harmless crime. Reid and White and I are the sole survivors. We were wholly serious, maybe a trifle visionary, but as upright and patriotic in our intentions and as loyal to our engagements as it was possible for older, and maybe worse, men to be. For my part, I must say that if I have never anything on my conscience heavier than the massacre of that not very edifying, yet promising Davis “combine,” I shall be troubled by no remorse, but to the end shall sleep soundly and well.
In that immediate connection an amusing incident throwing some light upon the period thrusts itself upon my memory. The Quadrilateral, with Reid added, had finished its consolidation of public opinion just related, when the cards of Judge Craddock, Chairman of the Kentucky Democratic Committee, and of Colonel J. Stoddart Johnston, editor of the “Frankfort Yeoman,” the organ of the Kentucky Democracy, were brought from below. They had come to look after me, that was evident. By no chance could they have found me in more equivocal company. In addition to ourselves, bad enough from the Kentucky point of view, they found in the room Theodore Tilton and David A. Wells. When they crossed the threshold and were presented seriatim, the face of each was a study. Even an immediate application of whisky and water did not suffice to restore their lost equilibrium and bring them to their usual state of convivial self-possession. Colonel Johnston told me years after that when they went away they walked in silence a block or two, when the old judge, a model of the learned and sedate school of Kentucky politicians and jurists, turned to him and said: “It is no use, Stoddart. We cannot keep up with that young man or with these times. Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace!”
From a photograph taken in 1861, owned by Mr. Frederick H. Meserve
CARL SCHURZ
The Jupiter Tonans of reform in attendance upon the convention was Colonel Alexander K. McClure of the Philadelphia “Times.” He was one of the handsomest and most imposing of men; Halstead himself was scarcely more so. McClure was personally unknown to the Quadrilateral, but this did not stand in the way of our asking him to dine with us as soon as his claims to fellowship in the good cause of reform began to make themselves apparent through the need of bringing the Pennsylvania delegation to “a realizing sense.”
As he entered the room, he looked like a god, nay, he acted like one. Schurz first took him in hand. With a lofty courtesy that I have never seen equaled, he tossed his inquisitor into the air. Halstead came next, trying him upon another tack, but fared no better than Schurz. Then I hurried to the rescue of my friends. McClure, now looking a bit bored and resentful, landed me somewhere near the ceiling.
It would have been laughable if it had not been ignominious. I took my discomfiture with the bad grace of silence throughout the brief, stiff, and formal meal which followed. But when it was over, and the party had risen from the table and was about to disperse, I collected my energies and resources for a final forlorn hope. I was not willing to remain so crushed or to confess myself so beaten, though I could not disguise from myself a feeling that all of us had been overmatched.
“McClure,” said I, with the cool and quiet resolution of despair, drawing him aside, “what in the —— do you want, anyhow?”
He looked at me with swift intelligence and a sudden show of sympathy, and then over at the others with a withering glance.
“What? With those cranks? Nothing.”
Jupiter descended to earth. I am afraid we actually took a glass of wine together. Anyhow, from that moment to the hour of his death we were the best of friends.
Without the inner circle of the Quadrilateral, which had taken matters into its own hands, were a number of persons, some of them disinterested and others simple curiosity- and excitement-seekers, who might be described as merely “lookers-on in Vienna.” The Sunday afternoon before the convention was to meet, we, the self-elect, fell in with a party of these in a garden “over the Rhine,” as the German quarter of Cincinnati is called. There was first general and rather aimless talk, then came a great deal of speech-making. Schurz started it with a few pungent observations intended to suggest and inspire some common ground of public opinion and sentiment. Nobody was inclined to dispute his leadership, but everybody was prone to assert his own. It turned out that each regarded himself, and wished to be regarded, as a man with a mission, having a clear idea how things were not to be done. There were civil-service reform protectionists and civil-service reform free traders. There were a few politicians, who were discovered to be spoilsmen, the unforgivable sin, and as such were quickly dismissed. The missing ingredient was coherence of belief and united action. Not a man of them was willing to commit or bind himself to anything. Edward Atkinson pulled one way, and William Dorsheimer exactly the opposite way. David A. Wells sought to get the two together; it was not possible. Sam Bowles shook his head in diplomatic warning. Horace White threw in a chink or so of a rather agitating newspaper independence, while Halstead, to the more serious-minded, was in an inflamed state of jocosity.
From a photograph by Sarony
MURAT HALSTEAD
All this was grist to the mill of the Washington correspondents, chiefly “story” writers and satirists, who were there to make the most out of an occasion in which the bizarre was much in excess of the conventional, with George Alfred Townsend and Donn Piatt to set the pace. Hyde of the “Republican” had come from St. Louis to keep special tab on Grosvenor of the “Democrat.” Though rival editors facing our way, they had not been admitted to the Quadrilateral. McCullagh and Nixon were among the earliest arrivals from Chicago. The lesser lights of the gild were innumerable. One might have mistaken it for an annual meeting of the Associated Press.