This adventure befell my grandfather in 1858, when he had been a Republican for two years, having been a delegate to the first convention of the party in 1856, the one that met in Pittsburgh, before the nominating convention which named Frémont had met in Philadelphia. He had attended that convention with Cassius M. Clay of Kentucky, and shared quarters with him at the hotel.
In 1908, in the Coliseum at Chicago, when the Republican National Convention was in session, there were conducted to the stage one morning, and introduced to the delegates, two old gentlemen who had been delegates to that first convention of the party, and after they had been presented and duly celebrated by the chairman and cheered by the delegates they were assiduously given seats in large chairs, and there, throughout the session, side by side they sat, their hands clasped over the crooks of their heavy canes, their white old heads unsteady, peering out in a certain purblind, bewildered, aged way over that mighty assembly of the power and the wealth, the respectability and the authority, of the nation—far other than that revolutionary gathering they had attended half a century before!
All through the session, now and then, I would look at them; there was a certain indefinable pathos in them, they sat so still, they were so old, there was in their attitude the acquiescence of age—and I would recall my grandfather’s stories of the days when they were the force in the Republic, and the runaway “niggers,” and the rifles, and the great blazing up of liberty in the land, and it seemed to me that Time, or what Thomas Hardy calls the Ironic Spirit, or perhaps it was only the politicians who were managing the convention, had played some grotesque, stupendous joke on those patriarchs. Did their old eyes, gazing so strangely on that scene, behold its implications? Did they descry the guide-post that told them how far away they really were from that first convention and its ideals?
But whatever the reflections of those two aboriginal Republicans, or whatever emotions or speculations they may have inspired in those who saw them,—the torch of liberty being ever brandished somewhere in this world and tossed from hand to hand,—they had done their part in their day, and might presumably be allowed to look on at the antics of men wherever they chose, in peace. They had known Lincoln, no inconsiderable distinction in itself!
Out of that first convention my grandfather, like them, had gone, and he had done his part to help elect Lincoln after Lincoln had defeated Chase in the Chicago convention of 1860, and had been nominated for the presidency. And then, with his man elected, my grandfather had gone into the war that broke upon the land.
He went in with the 66th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, a regiment which he was commissioned by Governor Dennison to recruit at Urbana, and when it was marshaled in camp near Urbana its command was offered him, an honor and a responsibility he declined because, he said, he knew nothing of the art of war, if it is an art, or of its science, if it is a science, and so was content with the shoulder-straps of a captain. One of his sons, a lieutenant in the regular army, was already at the front with his regiment, and another son was a captain in the 66th, and later on, when my grandfather had been transferred to the Department of Subsistence, he took his youngest son with him in the capacity of a clerk, so that the men of his family were away to the war for those four years, and the women remained behind, making housewives and scraping lint, and watching, and waiting, and praying, and enduring all those hardships and making all those sacrifices which are so lauded by the poetic and the sentimental and yet are not enough to entitle them to a voice in that government in whose cause they are made.
The situation was made all the more poignant because the great issue had separated the family, and there were brothers and cousins on the other side, though one of these, in the person of Aunt Lucretia, chose that inauspicious time to come over from the other side all the way from Virginia, to pay a visit, and celebrated the report of a Confederate victory by parading up town with a butternut badge on her bosom. She sailed several times about the Square, with her head held high and her crinolines rustling and standing out, and her butternut badge in evidence, and was rescued by my grandmother, who, hearing of her temerity, went up town in desperation and in fear that she might arrive too late. It was a story I was fond of hearing, and as I pictured the lively scene I always had the statue of the cavalryman as a figure in the picture—though of course the statue could not have been in existence during the war, since it was erected as a memorial to the 66th and a monument to its fallen heroes and their deeds. The cavalryman, an officer wearing a romantic cloak and the old plumed hat of the military fashion of that date, and leaning on his saber in a gloomy way, I always thought was a figure of my uncle, that Captain Brand who went out with the 66th, just as I thought for a long time that the Civil War was practically fought out on the northern side by the 66th, which was not so strange perhaps, since nearly every family in Urbana had been represented in the regiment, and they all talked of little else than the war for many years. They called the 66th the “Bloody Sixty-sixth,” a name I have since heard applied to other regiments, but the honorable epithet was not undeserved by that legion, for it had a long and most gallant record, beginning with the Army of the Potomac and fighting in all that army’s battles until after Gettysburg, and then with the 11th and 12th corps it was transferred, under Hooker, to the Army of the Tennessee, at Chattanooga, in time for Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, after which it went with Sherman to the sea, and thus completed the circuit of the Confederacy.
III
My grandfather, however, did not go with his regiment to the West. He had been transferred to the Commissary Department, and he remained with the Army of the Potomac until the close of the war, and it was on some detail connected with his duties in that department that, in 1865, he went into Washington and had the interview with President Lincoln I so much liked to hear him tell about. It was not in the course of his military duty that he went to see the Commander-in-Chief; whatever those duties were they were quickly discharged at the War Department, so that, in the hours of freedom remaining to him before he went back to the front, he did what everyone likes to do in Washington,—he went to see the President. But he went in no military capacity; he went rather in that political capacity he so much preferred to the military, and he went as to the chief he had so long known and loved and followed.
It would be his old friend Chase who presented him to the President, but their conversation was soon interrupted by the entrance of an aide who announced the arrival in the White House grounds of an Indiana regiment passing through Washington, which, as seems to have been the case with most regiments passing through the Capital, demanded a speech from the President. And Lincoln complied, and as he arose to go out he asked my grandfather to accompany him, and they continued their talk on the way. But when they stood in the White House portico, and the regiment beheld the President and saluted him with its lifted cheer, the aide stepped to my grandfather’s side, and much to his chagrin—for he had been held by the President while he finished a story—told him that it would be necessary for him to drop a few paces to the rear. It was a little contretemps that embarrassed my grandfather, but Lincoln, with his fine and delicate perceptions, divined the whole situation, and met it with that kindness which was so great a part of the humor and humanness in him, by saying: