I repeat that he was never a subtle schemer—sitting behind the screen and pulling his wires—which his political and party enemies discovered him to be as soon as he began to get in the way of the machine and obstruct the march of the self-elect. His confidences were not effusive, nor their subjects numerous. His deliberation was unfailing and sometimes it carried the idea of indecision, not to say actual love of procrastination. But in my experience with him I found that he usually ended where he began, and it was nowise difficult for those whom he trusted to divine the bias of his mind where he thought it best to reserve its conclusions.
I do not think in any great affair he ever hesitated longer than the gravity of the case required of a prudent man or that he had a preference for delays or that he clung tenaciously to both horns of the dilemma, as his training and instinct might lead him to do, and did certainly expose him to the accusation of doing.
He was a philosopher and took the world as he found it. He rarely complained and never inveighed. He had a discriminating way of balancing men’s good and bad qualities and of giving each the benefit of a generous accounting, and a just way of expecting no more of a man than it was in him to yield. As he got into deeper water his stature rose to its level, and from his exclusion from the presidency in 1877 to his renunciation of public affairs in 1884 and his death in 1886 his walks and ways might have been a study for all who would learn life’s truest lessons and know the real sources of honor, happiness and fame.
Henry Watterson—Fifty Years Ago
Chapter the Thirteenth
Charles Eames and Charles Sumner-Schurzand Lamar—I Go to Congress—A Heroic Kentuckian—Stephen Foster and His Songs—Music and Theodore Thomas
I
Swift’s definition of “conversation” did not preside over or direct the daily intercourse between Charles Sumner, Charles Eames and Robert J. Walker in the old days in the National Capital. They did not converse. They discoursed. They talked sententiously in portentous essays and learned dissertations. I used to think it great, though I nursed no little dislike of Sumner.