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.
Temperament and circumstance do indeed cut a prodigious figure in life. Traversing the older countries, especially Spain, the most illustrative, the wayfarer is met at all points by what seems not merely the logic of events, but the common law of the inevitable. The Latin of the Sixteenth century was a recrudescence of the Roman of the First. He had not, like the Mongolian, lived long enough to become a stoic. He was mainly a cynic and an adventurer. Thence he flowered into a sybarite. Coming to great wealth with the discoveries of Columbus and the conquests of Pizarro and Cortes, he proceeded to enjoy its fruits according to his fancy and the fashion of the times.
He erected massive shrines to his deities. He reared noble palaces. He built about his cathedrals and his castles what were then thought to be great cities, walled and fortified. He was, for all his self-sufficiency and pride, short-sighted; and yet, until they arrived, how could he foresee the developments of artillery? They were as hidden from him as three centuries later the wonders of electricity were hidden from us.
I was never a Free Trader. I stood for a tariff for revenue as the least oppressive and safest support of Government. The protective system in the United States, responsible for our unequal distribution of wealth, took at least its name from Spain, and the Robber Barons, as I used to call the Protectionists of Pennsylvania, were not of immediate German origin.
Truth to say, both on land and water Spain has made a deal of history, and the front betwixt Gibraltar and the Isle of San Fernando--Tangier on one side and the Straits of Tarifa on the other--Cape Trafalgar, where Nelson fought the famous battle, midway between them--has had its share.