[CHAPTER X]
CYRUS H. McCORMICK AS A MAN
CYRUS H. MCCORMICK was a great commercial Thor. He was six feet tall, weighed two hundred pounds, and had the massive shoulders of a wrestler. His body was well proportioned, with small hands and feet. His hair, even in old age, was very dark and waving. His bearing was erect, his manner often imperious, and his general appearance that of a man built on large lines and for large affairs.
Men of lesser caliber regarded him with fear, not for any definite reason, but because, as Seneca has said—"In him that has power, all men consider not what he has done, but what he may do." He was so strong, so dominating, so ready to crash through obstacles by sheer bulk of will-power, that smaller men could never quite subdue a feeling of alarm while they were in his presence. He was impatient of small talk and small criticisms and small objections. He had no tact at retail, and he saw no differences in little-minded people. All his life he had been plagued and obstructed by the Liliputians of the world, and he had no patience to listen to their chattering. He was often as rude as Carlyle to those who tied their little threads of pessimism across his path.
At fashionable gatherings he would now and then be seen—a dignified figure; but his mind was almost too ponderous an engine to do good service in a light conversation. If a subject did not interest him, he had nothing to say. What gave him, perhaps, the highest degree of social pleasure, was the entertaining, at his house, of such men as Horace Greeley, William H. Seward, Peter Cooper, Abram S. Hewitt, George Peabody, Junius Morgan, Cyrus W. Field, or some old friend from Virginia.
His long years of pioneering had made him a self-sufficient man, and a man who lived from within. He did not pick up his opinions on the streets. His mind was not open to any chance idea. He had certain clear, definite convictions, logical and consistent. What he knew, he knew. There were no hazy imaginings in his mind. The main secret of his power lay in his ability to focus all his energies upon a few subjects. Once, in 1848, he mentioned the French Revolution in one of his letters. "It is a mighty affair," he wrote, "and will be likely to stand." But usually he paid little attention to the world-dramas that were being enacted. He was too busy—too devoted to affairs which, if he did not attend to them, would not be attended to at all.
McCormick was a product of the Protestant Reformation, and of the capitalistic development that came with it. The whole structure of his character was based upon the two great dogmas of the Reformation—the sovereignty of God and the direct responsibility of the individual. Whoever would know the springs at which his life was fed must read the story of Luther, Calvin, and Knox. They must call to mind the attitude of Luther at the Diet of Worms, when he faced the men who had the power to take his life and said, "Here I stand. I can do no other." They must recollect how these three men, who were leaders of nations, not sects, stood out alone against the kings and ecclesiasticisms of Europe, without wealth, without armies, without anything except a higher Moral Idea, and succeeded so mightily they actually changed the course of empires and became the pathfinders of the human race.
McCormick was so essentially a result of this religio-economic movement that it is impossible to separate his religion and his business life. He was an individualist through and through—as well marked a type of the Covenanter in commerce as the United States has ever produced. He believed in presbyters in religion, private capitalists in business, and elected representatives in government. He was opposed to feudalism and bureaucracy in all their myriad forms. He held the middle ground, the via media, between the over-organization of the fourteenth century, when the rights of the individual were forgotten, and the lax liberalism of to-day, when too much is left to individual whim and caprice, and when duties and responsibilities are too apt to be ignored.
Above all constituted authorities stood a man's own conscience. This was McCormick's faith, and it was this that made him the fighter that he was. It gave him courage and the fortitude that is rarer than courage. It compelled him to oppose his own political party at the Baltimore Convention of 1861. It made him stand single-handed against his fellow-manufacturers, in defence of his rights as an inventor. It enabled him to beat down the Pennsylvania Railroad, after a twenty-three year contest, and to prove that a great corporation cannot lawfully do an injustice to an individual.