Cyrus Hall McCormick: His Life and Work

by Herbert Newton Casson

Thirteen years later he bought The Interior and made it what it has remained ever since—a religious weekly of the highest rank. These two—the college and the paper—were his pride and delight. He fathered them in the most affectionate way. No matter what crisis might be impending in the war of business, he always had time to talk to his editors and his professors. So, though McCormick had received much from his religious inheritance, it is also true that he gave back much. His last public speech, which was read for him by his son Cyrus because he was too weak to deliver it himself, was given at the laying of the corner-stone of a new building which he had given to the college. Its last sentence was typical of McCormick—full of hope and optimism: "I never doubted that success would ultimately reward our efforts," he said; "and now, on this occasion, we may fairly say that the night has given place to the dawn of a brighter day than any which has hitherto shone upon us."

McCormick went into politics, too, with the same conscientious abandon with which he plunged into business and religion. He was a Democrat of the Jeffersonian type. One of his keenest pleasures was to go to the Senate and listen to its debates. He was not a fluent speaker himself, but he delighted in the orations of Clay, Calhoun, and Webster. He believed in politics. He thought it a public danger that the strong and competent men of the republic should willingly permit men of little ability and low character to manage public affairs. In fact, he was almost as much a pathfinder and pioneer in this matter as he had been in matters of business, but without the same measure of success. Politics, he found, was not like business. Its successes depended not upon your own efforts, but upon the votes of the majority.

What McCormick tried to do as a citizen and a patriot was the one heroic failure of his life. He ran for office on several occasions, but he was never elected. He was not the sort of man who gets elected. He stood for his whole party at a time when the average politician was standing only for himself. He talked of "fundamental principles" while the other leaders, for the most part, were thinking of salaries. He gave up his time and his money as freely for politics as he did for religion; but he was out of his element. He was too sincere, too simple, too intent upon a larger view of public questions. He could never talk the flexible language of diplomacy nor suit his theme to the prejudice of his listeners. Usually, to the political managers and delegates with whom he felt it his duty to co-operate, he was like a man from another world. They could never understand him, and tolerated his leadership mainly because of his generous contributions. Again and again he astonished them by developing a party speech into a sermon on national righteousness, or by speaking nobly of a political opponent. On one memorable occasion, for instance, in the white-hot passion of the Hayes-Tilden controversy, and after he had lavished time and money in support of Tilden, he sprang to his feet in a Democratic convention and amazed the delegates by saying: "Mr. Hayes is not a Democrat, but he is too patriotic and honest to suit his party managers and we must sustain him so far as he is right."

He was one of the first Americans who rose above sectional interests and party loyalties, and surveyed his country as a whole. No other man of his day, either in or out of public office, was so free from local prejudices and so intensely national in his beliefs and sympathies. He refused to stamp himself with the label of the North or of the South. He had been reared in the one and matured in the other. And in the ominous days before the Civil War he strove like a beneficent giant to make the wrangling partisans listen to the voice of reason and arbitration.

THE REAPER IN HEAVY GRAIN

He went to the Democratic Convention at Baltimore, just before the war, and set before the Southerners the standpoint of the North. Then he bought a daily paper—The Times—to explain to Chicago the standpoint of the South. He wrote editorials. He made speeches. He poured into the newspapers, day after day for two years, a large share of the profits that he derived from his Reaper. He was no more popular as an editor than as a political candidate. He was a maker, not a collector, of public opinion; and instead of pandering to the war frenzy, he opposed it,—put his newspaper squarely in its path, and held it there until the feet of the crowd had trampled it into an impossible wreck.

He was so strong, so indomitable, this heir of the Covenanters, that when the war had openly begun, he strode between the North and South and labored like a Titan to bring them to a reconciliation. He actually believed that he could establish peace. He proposed a plan. Horace Greeley indorsed it, and the two men, who were throughout life the closest of comrades, undertook to bring the severed nation back to union and the paths of law.

The "McCormick Plan," in a word was to call immediately two conventions—one to represent the Democrats of the North and the other the Democrats of the South. These conventions would elect delegates to a board of arbitration, which would consider the various causes of the war and arrange a just basis upon which both sides could agree to disband their armies and reëstablish peace.

After the war, too, almost before the nation had finished counting its dead, it was Cyrus H. McCormick whose voice was first heard in favor of church unity. Among the many speeches and letters of his which have been preserved, the most beautifully phrased paragraph is the ending of an article that he published in 1869, protesting against the invasion of political partisanism into the religious life.