“I know of none,” I answered.
“Do you think that the committee have found you out?”
“No, I scarcely think so.”
“Then I will see that they do,” and he proceeded in his peculiarly subtle way to undo all that we had done, prolonging the session twenty-four hours.
He was an able man and a lovable man. The missing ingredient was serious belief. Just after the nomination of the Breckinridge and Lane Presidential ticket in 1860, I heard him make an ultra-Southern speech from Mr. Breckinridge’s doorway. “What do you think of that?” I asked Andrew Johnson, who stood by me, and Johnson answered sharply, with an oath: “I never like a man to be for me more than I am for myself.” I have been told that even at home General Butler could never acquire the public confidence. In spite of his conceded mentality and manliness he gave the impression of being something of an intellectual sharper.
He was charitable, generous and amiable. The famous New Orleans order which had made him odious to the women of the South he had issued to warn bad women and protect good women. Assuredly he did not foresee the interpretation that would be put upon it. He was personally popular in Congress. When he came to Washington he dispensed a lavish hospitality. Such radical Democrats as Beck and Knott did not disdain his company, became, indeed, his familiars. Yet, curious to relate, a Kentucky Congressman of the period lost his seat because it was charged and proven that he had ridden in a carriage to the White House with the Yankee Boanerges on a public occasion.
III
Mere party issues never counted with me. I have read too much and seen too much. At my present time of life they count not at all. I used to think that there was a principle involved between the dogmas of Free Trade and Protection as they were preached by their respective attorneys. Yet what was either except the ancient, everlasting scheme—
—“The good old rôle—the simple plan,
That they should take who have the power
And they should keep who can.”
How little wisdom one man may get from another man’s counsels, one nation may get from another nation’s history, can be partly computed when we reflect how often our personal experience has failed in warning admonition.