We had not lived at Mrs. Sandgren’s more than a week when George Boker, knowing my need, spoke to Colonel
John Forney, who was at that time not only Secretary of the Senate of the United States, but the proprietor of the Chronicle newspaper in Washington, of the Press in Philadelphia, “both daily,” as the Colonel once said, which very simple and commonplace expression became a popular by-word. Colonel Forney wanted a managing editor for the Press, and, as I found in due time, not so much a man of enterprise and a leader—that he supplied—nor yet one to practically run the journal—that his son John, a young man of eighteen, supplied—so much as a steady, trustworthy, honest pivot on which the compass could turn during his absences—and that I supplied. I must, to explain the situation, add gently that John, who could not help it considering his experiences, was, to put it mildly, a little irregular, rendering a steady manager absolutely necessary. It was a great pity, for John the junior was extremely clever as a practical managing editor, remembering everything, and knowing—what I never did or could—all the little tricks, games, and wiles of all the reporters and others employed.
Colonel Forney was such a remarkable character, and had such a great influence for many years in American politics, that as I had a great deal to do with him—very much more than was generally known—at a time when he struck his greatest political coup, in which, as he said, I greatly aided him, I will here dwell on him a space. Before I knew him I called him Warwick the King-maker, for it was generally admitted that it was to his intense hatred of Buchanan, added to his speech-making, editing, and tremendously vigorous and not always over-scrupulous intriguing, that “Ten-cent Jimmy” owed his defeat. At this time, in all presidential elections, Pennsylvania turned the scale, and John Forney could and did turn Pennsylvania like a Titan; and he frankly admitted that he owed the success of his last turn to me, as I shall in time relate.
Forney’s antipathies were always remarkably well placed. He hated Buchanan; also, for certain personal reasons, he
hated Simon Cameron; and finally it came to pass that he hated Andrew Johnson with a hatred of twenty-four carats—an aquafortis detestation—and for a most singular cause.
One night when this “President by the pistol, and smallest potato in the American garden of liberty,” was making one of his ribald speeches, after having laid out Horace Greeley, some one in the crowd cried—
“Now give us John Forney!”
With an air of infinite contempt the President exclaimed—
“I don’t waste my powder on dead ducks.”
He had better have left that word unsaid, for it ruined him. It woke Colonel John Forney up to the very highest pitch of his fighting “Injun,” or, as they say in Pennsylvania, his “Dutch.” He had always been to that hour a genial man, like most politicians, a little too much given to the social glass. But from that date of the dead duck he became “total abstinence,” and concentrated all his faculties and found all his excitement in vengeance hot and strong, without a grain of sugar. In which I gladly sympathised and aided, for I detested Johnson as a renegade Copperhead, or rather venomous toad to the South, who wished with all his soul to undo Lincoln’s work and bring in the Confederacy. And I believe, on my life and soul, that if John Forney had not defeated him, we should have had such disasters as are now inconceivable, the least of them being a renewal of the war. Johnson had renegaded from the Confederacy because, being only a tailor, he had ranked as a “low white,” or something despised even by “quality” negroes. The Southern aristocracy humbugged him by promising that if he would betray the Union he should be regarded as one of themselves, by which very shallow cheat he was—as a snob would be—easily caught, and in due time cast off.