“Are you there, Mr. Gay? I have been looking for you. They tell me that you ordered my leader out of this morning’s paper. Is it your paper or mine? I should like to know if I cannot print what I choose in my own newspaper!” This in great rage.
“The paper is yours, Mr. Greeley. The article is in type upstairs, and you can use it when you choose. Only this, Mr. Greeley: I know New York, and I hope and believe, before God, that there is so much virtue in New York that, if I had let that article go into this morning’s paper, there would not be one brick upon another in the ‘Tribune’ office now. Certainly I should be sorry if there were.”
Mr. Greeley was cowed. He said not a word, nor ever alluded to the subject again. I suppose the type is locked up in the cupboard of the “Tribune” office at this hour.
It was by this sort of service that Mr. Gay earned Mr. Wilson’s praise that “he kept Mr. Greeley up to the war.”
Mr. Lowell’s correspondence with Mr. Gay makes one wish that we had Mr. Gay’s side as well. The letters which are printed in Lowell’s correspondence are well worthy the study of young journalists.
It will be readily seen that here was a college professor well in touch with the responsibilities of the time. Writing occasionally for such a paper as the “Standard,” responsible for the tone and politics of the “Atlantic,” and afterwards of the “North American,” he could tell the world what he thought in those times of storm and earthquake; and he did not fail to use his opportunity. Meanwhile the war was drawing nearer and nearer. Strictly speaking, the war began when Franklin Pierce, on the part of the government of the United States, acting by the United States marshal, took possession of the Hotel of the Emigrant Aid Company, in Lawrence, Kansas, in May, 1856, and destroyed it.
The class of youngsters who entered Harvard College in 1856, when Lowell began his work there, graduated in 1860, and were eager to go into the army. Of that class sixty-four enlisted, of whom thirteen were killed. Thirty-six of the next class enlisted in the army or navy; thirty of the next class; and thirty-two of the class of 1863. Lowell was in personal relations with most of these young men. He had five young relatives who died in the service,—General Charles Russell Lowell and his brother James Jackson Lowell, William Lowell Putnam, Warren Dutton Russell, and Francis Lowell Dutton Russell, who was only twenty when he died. William Putnam was the son of the sister whose account of the childhood of Lowell has been already referred to.
Mr. Leslie Stephen has referred pathetically to Lowell’s white-heat patriotism as the war went on,—he watching it with such associations. “The language of the most widely known English newspapers at the time could hardly have been more skillfully framed for the purpose of irritating Lowell, if it had been consciously designed to that end.... He showed me the photograph of a young man in the uniform of the United States army, and asked me whether I thought that that lad looked like ‘a blackguard.’ On my giving the obvious reply, he told me that the portrait represented one of the nephews he had lost in the war. Not long afterward I read his verses in the second series of the ‘Biglow Papers,’ the most pathetic, I think, that he ever wrote, in which he speaks of the ‘three likely lads,’
‘Whose comin’ step there’s ears thet won’t,
No, not lifelong, leave off awaitin’.’”