Marse Henry: An Autobiography, Complete

by Henry Watterson

It had taken me but a day and a night to pull myself together after the first shock and surprise and to plunge into the swim to help fetch the waterlogged factions ashore. This was clearly indispensable to forcing the Democratic organization to come to the rescue of what would have been otherwise but a derelict upon a stormy sea. Schurz was deeply disgruntled. Before he could be appeased a bridge, found in what was called the Fifth Avenue Hotel Conference, had to be constructed in order to carry him across the stream which flowed between his disappointed hopes and aims and what appeared to him an illogical and repulsive alternative. He had taken to his tent and sulked like another Achilles. He was harder to deal with than any of the Democratic file leaders, but he finally yielded and did splendid work in the campaign.

His was a stubborn spirit not readily adjustable. He was a nobly gifted man, but from first to last an alien in an alien land. He once said to me, “If I should live a thousand years they would still call me a Dutchman.” No man of his time spoke so well or wrote to better purpose. He was equally skillful in debate, an overmatch for Conkling and Morton, whom—especially in the French arms matter—he completely dominated and outshone. As sincere and unselfish, as patriotic and as courageous as any of his contemporaries, he could never attain the full measure of the popular heart and confidence, albeit reaching its understanding directly and surely; within himself a man of sentiment who was not the cause of sentiment in others. He knew this and felt it.

The Nast cartoons, which as to Greeley and Sumner were unsparing in the last degree, whilst treating Schurz with a kind of considerate qualifying humor, nevertheless greatly offended him. I do not think Greeley minded them much if at all. They were very effective; notably the “Pirate Ship,” which represented Greeley leaning over the taffrail of a vessel carrying the Stars and Stripes and waving his handkerchief at the man-of-war Uncle Sam in the distance, the political leaders of the Confederacy dressed in true corsair costume crouched below ready to spring. Nothing did more to sectionalize Northern opinion and fire the Northern heart, and to lash the fury of the rank and file of those who were urged to vote as they had shot and who had hoisted above them the Bloody Shirt for a banner. The first half of the canvass the bulge was with Greeley; the second half began in eclipse, to end in something very like collapse.

The old man seized his flag and set out upon his own account for a tour of the country. Right well he bore himself. If speech-making ever does any good toward the shaping of results Greeley’s speeches surely should have elected him. They were marvels of impromptu oratory, mostly homely and touching appeals to the better sense and the magnanimity of a people not ripe or ready for generous impressions; convincing in their simplicity and integrity; unanswerable from any standpoint of sagacious statesmanship or true patriotism if the North had been in any mood to listen and to reason.

I met him at Cincinnati and acted as his escort to Louisville and thence to Indianapolis, where others were waiting to take him in charge. He was in a state of querulous excitement. Before the vast and noisy audiences which we faced he stood apparently pleased and composed, delivering his words as he might have dictated them to a stenographer. As soon as we were alone he would break out into a kind of lamentation, punctuated by occasional bursts of objurgation. He especially distrusted the Quadrilateral, making an exception in my case, as well he might, because however his nomination had jarred my judgment I had a real affection for him, dating back to the years immediately preceding the war when I was wont to encounter him in the reporters’ galleries at Washington, which he preferred to using his floor privilege as an ex-member of Congress.

It was mid-October. We had heard from Maine; Indiana and Ohio had voted. He was for the first time realizing the hopeless nature of the contest. The South in irons and under military rule and martial law sure for Grant, there had never been any real chance. Now it was obvious that there was to be no compensating ground swell at the North. That he should pour forth his chagrin to one whom he knew so well and even regarded as one of his boys was inevitable. Much of what he said was founded on a basis of fact, some of it was mere suspicion and surmise, all of it came back to the main point that defeat stared us in the face. I was glad and yet loath to part with him. If ever a man needed a strong friendly hand and heart to lean upon he did during those dark days—the end in darkest night nearer than anyone could divine. He showed stronger mettle than had been allowed him: bore a manlier part than was commonly ascribed to the slovenly slipshod habiliments and the aspects in which benignancy and vacillation seemed to struggle for the ascendancy. Abroad the elements conspired against him. At home his wife lay ill, as it proved, unto death. The good gray head he still carried like a hero, but the worn and tender heart was beginning to break. Overwhelming defeat was followed by overwhelming affliction. He never quitted his dear one’s beside until the last pulsebeat, and then he sank beneath the load of grief.

“The Tribune is gone and I am gone,” he said, and spoke no more.

The death of Greeley fell upon the country with a sudden shock. It roused a universal sense of pity and sorrow and awe. All hearts were hushed. In an instant the bitterness of the campaign was forgotten, though the huzzas of the victors still rent the air. The President, his late antagonist, with his cabinet and the leading members of the two Houses of Congress, attended his funeral. As he lay in his coffin he was no longer the arch rebel, leading a combine of buccaneers and insurgents, which the Republican orators and newspapers had depicted him, but the brave old apostle of freedom who had done more than all others to make the issues upon which a militant and triumphant party had risen to power.

The multitude remembered only the old white hat and the sweet old baby face beneath it, heart of gold, and hand wielding the wizard pen; the incarnation of probity and kindness, of steadfast devotion to his duty as he saw it, and to the needs of the whole human family. A tragedy in truth it was; and yet as his body was lowered into its grave there rose above it, invisible, unnoted, a flower of matchless beauty—the flower of peace and love between the sections of the Union to which his life had been a sacrifice.

The crank convention had builded wiser than it knew. That the Democratic Party could ever have been brought to the support of Horace Greeley for President of the United States reads even now like a page out of a nonsense book. That his warmest support should have come from the South seems incredible and was a priceless fact. His martyrdom shortened the distance across the bloody chasm; his coffin very nearly filled it. The candidacy of Charles Francis Adams or of Lyman Trumbull meant a mathematical formula, with no solution of the problem and as certain defeat at the end of it. His candidacy threw a flood of light and warmth into the arena of deadly strife; it made a more equal and reasonable division of parties possible; it put the Southern half of the country in a position to plead its own case by showing the Northern half that it was not wholly recalcitrant or reactionary; and it made way for real issues of pith and moment relating to the time instead of pigments of bellicose passion and scraps of ante-bellum controversy.