There are always many men who claim to have carried every Presidential election—the late Mr. Guiteau was one of these geniuses—but it is also true that there are many who would by not working have produced very great changes. Forney was a mighty wire-puller, if not exactly before the Lord, at least before the elections, and he opined that I had secured the success. There were certainly other men—e.g., Peacock, who influenced as many votes as the Weekly Press,
and George Francis Train—without whose aid Pennsylvania and Grant’s election would have been lost, but it is something to have been one of the few who did it.
When General Grant came in, he resolved to have nothing to do with “corrupt old politicians,” even though they had done him the greatest service. So he took up with a lot of doubly corrupt young ones, who were only inferior to the veterans in ability. Colonel Forney was snubbed cruelly, in order to rob him. Whatever he had done wrongly, he had done his work rightly, and if Grant intended to throw his politicians overboard, he should have informed them of it before availing himself of their services. His conduct was like that of the old lady who got a man to saw three cords of wood for her, and then refused to pay him because he had been divorced.
I had never in my life asked for an office from anybody. Mr. Charles A. Dana once said that the work I did for the Republican party on Vanity Fair alone was worth a foreign mission, and that was a mere trifle to what I did with the Continental Magazine, my pamphlet, &c. When Grant was President, I petitioned that a little consulate worth $1,000 (£200) might be given to a poor Episcopal clergyman, but a man accustomed to consular work, who spoke French, and who had been secretary to two commodores. It was for a small French town. It was supported by Forney and George H. Boker; but it was refused because I was “in Forney’s set,” and the consulate was given to a Western man who did not know French.
If John Forney, instead of using all his immense influence for Grant, had opposed him tooth and nail, he could not have been treated with more scornful neglect. The pretence for this was that Forney had defaulted $40,000! I know every detail of the story, and it is this:—While Forney was in Europe, an agent to whom he had confided his affairs did take money to that amount. As soon as Forney learned this, he promptly raised $40,000 by mortgage on his property,
and repaid the deficit. Even his enemy Simon Cameron declared he did not believe the story, and the engine of his revenge was always run by “one hundred Injun power.”
I had “met” Grant several times, when one day in London I was introduced to him again. He said that he was very happy to make my acquaintance. I replied, “General Grant, I have had the pleasure of being introduced to you six times already, and I hope for many happy renewals of it.” A week or two after, this appeared in Punch, adapted to a professor and a duchess.
When the Sanitary Fair was held in Philadelphia in 1863, a lady in New York wrote to Garibaldi, begging him for some personal souvenir to be given to the charity. Garibaldi replied by actually sending the dagger which he had carried in every engagement, expressing in a letter a hope that it might pass to General Grant. But a warm partisan of McClellan so arranged it that there should be an election for the dagger between the partisans of Grant and McClellan, every one voting to pay a dollar to the Fair. For a long time the McClellanites were in a majority, but at the last hour Miss Anna M. Lea, now Mrs. Lea Merritt, very cleverly brought down a party of friends, who voted for Grant, secured the dagger for him, and so carried out the wish of Garibaldi. Long after an amusing incident occurred relative to this. In conversation in London with Mrs. Grant, I asked her if the dagger had been received. She replied, “Oh, yes,” and then added naïvely, “but wasn’t it really alt a humbug?”
The death of my father and brother within a year, the sudden change in my fortunes, the Presidential campaign, and, above all, the working hard seven days in the week, had been too much for me. I began to find, little by little, that I could not execute half the work to which I was accustomed. Colonel Forney was very kind indeed, and never said a word. But I began to apprehend that a break-down in my health was impending. I needed change of scene, and so resolved, finding, after due consideration, that I had enough to live on,
to go abroad for a long rest. It proved to be a very wise resolve. So I rented my house, packed my trunks, and departed, to be gone “for a year or two.”