"At this I instantly recalled the facts, and said: 'Since you were on that jury, I wish you would tell me what I have always wanted to know—why they disagreed.'
"'Well, Mr. Dana, I don't mind telling you we stood eleven to one for conviction, and that one obstinate man wouldn't budge. Perhaps you remember it was proved on the trial that the negro was got away from Boston, taken to Concord, New Hampshire, and there was handed over to a man who drove him in a sleigh across the border into Canada.'
"'Oh, yes, I remember that.'
"'Well, Mr. Dana, I was the man who drove him in the sleigh across the border into Canada.'"
I knew something of the preposterous charge against Dana, that in editing Wheaton's International Law he had appropriated the labours of a dull predecessor, Mr. William Beach Lawrence. When President Grant nominated Dana Minister to England in succession to that General Schenck who is still quoted as an authority on poker, the Lawrence charge was pressed before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. It was an ex parte hearing, and Dana had no opportunity to defend himself. Whether that or the unsleeping malignity of General Butler did him the more harm I know not, but President Grant, as his honourable habit was, stood by his nominee; and the Senate rejected Dana by thirty-one votes to seventeen. The matter naturally attracted attention in England, and there were comments, none too just. I wrote a letter to The Times, of which Mr. Delane was then editor. A long letter, something over a column, but Delane published it next morning in his best type, first striking out a number of censorious sentences about Butler and Zach Chandler and other eminent persons who had engineered Dana's defeat. In my wish to do justice to Dana and upon his enemies I had not remembered that I was writing in an English newspaper, and had no business to be rebuking Americans to an English audience. When I read my letter and noted Delane's excisions I saw how wrong I had been, and I wrote to Delane to thank him for suppressing all those ferocities. There came in reply such a note as only Delane would have written.
"It is the first time anybody ever thanked me for using a blue pencil on a correspondent's letter. Thank you."
This was in 1876. Dana's letter to me on my letter about him was characteristic. I think I might print it, but it is with other papers in New York. He was grateful and kindly, but also critical. He was always capable of looking at his own case as if it were a third person's; his mind detached from everything that was personal to himself. He thought the legal points might have been pressed. But the public, especially the English public, will not have too much law. I suppose the Beach-Lawrence suit and the Minister-to-England business troubled Dana more than anything else in his career. He ought, of course, to have been Minister. He would have been such a Minister as Charles Francis Adams was, or as Phelps was, two of the American Ministers whom the English liked best; out of the half-dozen who have held in this country a pre-eminent position among Ministers and Ambassadors, including the present Ambassador and his two immediate predecessors, Hay and Choate. That brilliant list ought to have been enriched with Dana's name; but it was not to be.
Dana came abroad again in 1878, and I saw him once more. He spent his time chiefly in Paris and Rome, and died in Rome, January 7th, 1882. He lies near Keats and Shelley in the Protestant cemetery at Porte Pià; and there is a monument. In Boston he is remembered; whether he is remembered elsewhere I have no means of knowing. But we cannot, in whatever part of America, we cannot afford to forget a man who had all the American virtues in one of the heroic ages of America.