In such an atmosphere as that in the Ohio of those days it was natural to be a Republican; it was more than that, it was inevitable that one should be a Republican; it was not a matter of intellectual choice, it was a process of biological selection. The Republican party was not a faction, not a group, not a wing, it was an institution like those Emerson speaks of in his essay on Politics, rooted like oak-trees in the center around which men group themselves as best they can. It was a fundamental and self-evident thing, like life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or like the flag, or the federal judiciary. It was elemental, like gravity, the sun, the stars, the ocean. It was merely a synonym for patriotism, another name for the nation. One became, in Urbana and in Ohio for many years, a Republican just as the Eskimo dons fur clothes. It was inconceivable that any self-respecting person should be a Democrat. There were, perhaps, Democrats in Lighttown; but then there were rebels in Alabama, and in the Ku-klux Klan, about which we read in the evening, in the Cincinnati Gazette.
One of the perplexing and confounding anomalies of existence was the fact that our neighbor, Mr. L——, was a Democrat. That fact perhaps explained to me why he walked so modestly, so unobtrusively, in the shade, so close to the picket fences of Reynolds Street, with his head bowed. I supposed that, being a Democrat, it was only natural for him to slink along. He was a lawyer and a gentleman; my grandfather spoke with him, but from my mind I could never banish the fact that he was a Democrat, and to explain his bent, thoughtful attitude I imagined another reason than the fact that he was a meditative, studious man.
Lawyers, of course, were Republicans, else how could they deliver patriotic addresses on Decoration Day and at the reunions of the 66th regiment? It was natural for a young man to be a lawyer, then to be elected prosecuting attorney, then to go to the legislature, then to congress, then—governor, senator, president. They could not, of course, go any more to war and fight for liberty; that distinction was no longer, unhappily, possible, but they could be Republicans. The Republican party had saved the Union, won liberty for all men, and there was nothing left for the patriotic to do but to extol that party, and to see to it that its members held office under the government.
In those days the party had many leaders in Ohio who had served the nation in military or civil capacity during the great crisis; scarcely a county that had not some colonel or general whose personality impressed the popular imagination; they were looked up to, and revered, and in the political campaigns their faces, pale or red in the flare of the torches of those vast and tumultuous processions that still staged the political contest in the terms of war, looked down from the festooned platforms in every public square. And yet they were already remote, statuesque, oracular, and there was the reverent sense that somehow placed them in the ideal past, whose problems had all been happily solved, rather than in the real present.
V
But up in the northwestern part of the state, still referred to, even in days so late as those, with something of the humorous contempt that attached to the term, as the Black Swamp, there had risen a young, fiery, and romantic figure who ignored the past and flung himself with fierce ardor into a new campaign for liberty. His words fell strangely on ears that were accustomed to the reassurance that liberty was at last conquered, and his doctrines perplexed and irritated minds that had sunk into the shallow optimism of a belief that there were no more liberations needed in the world. It was not a new cry, indeed, that he raised, but an old one thought to have been stilled, and the standard he lifted in the Black Swamp was looked upon by many Ohioans as much askance as though it were another secession flag of stars and bars. Indeed, it had long been associated with the cause of the conquered South, because that section, by reason of its economic conditions, had long espoused the principle of Free Trade.
This young man was Frank Hunt Hurd, then the congressman from the Toledo district, and in that city, where my father was the pastor of a church, he had won many followers and adherents, though not enough to keep him continually in his seat in the House of Representatives.
He served for several alternate terms, the interims being filled by some orthodox nonentity, who was so speedily forgotten that there must have been an impression that for years our district was represented by this one man.
I had heard of him with that dim sense of his position which a boy has of any public character, but I had a real vivid conception of him after that Fourth of July when, during a citizens’ celebration which must have been so far patriotic as to forget, for a time, partizanism, and to remember patriotism sufficiently to include the Democrats, I saw him conducted to the platform by our distinguished citizen, David R. Locke, whom the world knew as “Petroleum V. Nasby.”
He delivered a patriotic oration, and anyone,—even though he were but a wondering boy quite by chance in attendance, standing on the outskirts of the crowd, following some whim which for a while kept him from his sports,—anyone who ever heard Frank Hurd deliver an oration never forgot it afterward.