Wallace dabbled in politics without ever being a politician; and I might add that he practiced law without ever being, by any high standard, a lawyer. He once spoke of the law as “that most detestable of human occupations.” First and last he tried his hand at all the arts. He painted a little; he moulded a little in clay; he knew something of music and played the violin; he made three essays in romance. As boy and man he went soldiering; he was a civil governor, and later a minister to Turkey. In view of his sympathetic interest in Eastern life and character, nothing could have been more appropriate than his appointment to Constantinople. The Sultan Abdul Hamid, harassed and anxious, used to send for him at odd hours of the night to come and talk to him, and offered him on his retirement a number of positions in the Turkish Government.
With all this rich experience of the larger world, he remained the simplest of natures. He was as interested in a new fishing-tackle as in a new book, and carried both to his houseboat on the Kankakee, where, at odd moments, he retouched a manuscript for the press, or discussed politics with the natives. Here was a man who could talk of the “Song of Roland” as zestfully as though it had just been reported from the telegraph-office.
I frankly confess that I never met him without a thrill, even in his last years and when the ardor of my youthful hero-worship may be said to have passed. He was an exotic, our Hoosier Arab, our story-teller of the bazaars. When I saw him in his last illness, it was as though I looked upon a gray sheik about to fare forth unawed toward unmapped oases.
No lesson of the Civil War was more striking than that taught by the swift transitions of our citizen soldiery from civil to military life, and back again. This impressed me as a boy, and I used to wonder, as I passed my heroes on their peaceful errands in the street, why they had put down the sword when there must still be work somewhere for fighting men to do. The judge of the federal court at this time was Walter Q. Gresham, brevetted brigadier-general, who was destined later to adorn the Cabinets of Presidents of two political parties. He was cordial and magnetic; his were the handsomest and friendliest of brown eyes, and a noble gravity spoke in them. Among the lawyers who practiced before him were Benjamin Harrison and Thomas A. Hendricks, who became respectively President and Vice-President.
Those Hoosiers who admired Gresham ardently were often less devotedly attached to Harrison, who lacked Gresham’s warmth and charm. General Harrison was akin to the Covenanters who bore both Bible and sword into battle. His eminence in the law was due to his deep learning in its history and philosophy. Short of stature, and without grace of person,—with a voice pitched rather high,—he was a remarkably interesting and persuasive speaker. If I may so put it, his political speeches were addressed as to a trial judge rather than to a jury, his appeal being to reason and not to passion or prejudice. He could, in rapid flights of campaigning, speak to many audiences in a day without repeating himself. He was measured and urbane; his discourses abounded in apt illustrations; he was never dull. He never stooped to pietistic clap-trap, or chanted the jaunty chauvinism that has so often caused the Hoosier stars to blink.
Among the Democratic leaders of that period, Hendricks was one of the ablest, and a man of many attractive qualities. His dignity was always impressive, and his appearance suggested the statesman of an earlier time. It is one of immortality’s harsh ironies that a man who was a gentleman, and who stood moreover pretty squarely for the policies that it pleased him to defend, should be published to the world in a bronze effigy in his own city as a bandy-legged and tottering tramp, in a frock coat that never was on sea or land.
Joseph E. McDonald, a Senator in Congress, was held in affectionate regard by a wide constituency. He was an independent and vigorous character who never lost a certain raciness and tang. On my first timid venture into the fabled East I rode with him in a day-coach from Washington to New York on a slow train. At some point he saw a peddler of fried oysters on a station platform, alighted to make a purchase, and ate his luncheon quite democratically from the paper parcel in his car seat. He convoyed me across the ferry, asked where I expected to stop, and explained that he did not care for the European plan himself; he liked, he said, to have “full swing at a bill of fare.”
I used often to look upon the towering form of Daniel W. Voorhees, whom Sulgrove, an Indiana journalist with a gift for translating Macaulay into Hoosierese, had named “The Tall Sycamore of the Wabash.” In a crowded hotel lobby I can still see him, cloaked and silk-hatted, the centre of the throng, and my strict upbringing in the antagonistic political faith did not diminish my admiration for his eloquence.
Such were some of the characters who came and went in the streets of our provincial capital in those days.