NAST’S CARTOON, “‘THE PIRATES’ UNDER FALSE COLORS—CAN THEY CAPTURE THE ‘SHIP OF STATE’?”
At the left Sumner is reading a book; Andrew Johnson is behind the capstan; August Belmont in the gangway with a knife in his mouth; Fenton in the background; Whitelaw Reid on a keg of powder playing a violin tagged, “This is not an organ”; David Davis is behind Archbishop Hughes with the cross; Manton Marble is hiding behind his newspaper “The World”; Senator Tipton is bawling near Greeley; Carl Schurz is waving his hat to friends on the Ship of State and Theodore Tilton is embracing him; Governor Hoffman holds a parasol; Horatio Seymour kneels to Jeff Davis lying on the Confederate flag, behind him a group of Confederates with Wade Hampton standing near Greeley; John Kelly holds the Tammany knife, and above his head are faces of Tweed, and Mayor Oakey Hall with eye-glasses.
I got into the thick of the session in time to see the close, not without an angry collision with that one of the newly arrived actors whose coming had changed the course of events, and with whom I had lifelong relations of affectionate intimacy. Recently, when I was sailing in Mediterranean waters with Joseph Pulitzer, who, then a mere youth, was yet the secretary of the convention, he recalled the scene: the unexpected and not over-attractive appearance of B. Gratz Brown, the Governor of Missouri; his not very pleasing yet ingenious speech in favor of the nomination of Greeley; the stoical, almost lethargic indifference of Schurz. “Carl Schurz,” said Pulitzer, “was the most industrious and the least energetic man I have ever known and worked with. A word from him at that crisis would have completely routed Blair and squelched Brown. It was simply not in him to speak it.”
From a photograph by Sarony, taken in 1872
THOMAS NAST
The result was that Greeley was nominated amid a whirl of enthusiasm, his workers, with Whitelaw Reid at their head, having maintained an admirable and effective organization, and being thoroughly prepared to take advantage of the opportune moment. It was the logic of the event that B. Gratz Brown should be placed on the ticket with him.
The Quadrilateral was “nowhere.” It was done for. The impossible had come to pass. There arose thereafter a friendly issue of veracity between Schurz and me, which illustrates our state of mind. My version is that we left the convention hall together, with an immaterial train of after incidents; his that we did not meet after the adjournment. He was quite sure of this because he had ineffectually sought me. “Schurz was right,” said Joseph Pulitzer, upon the occasion of our yachting cruise just mentioned, “because he and I went directly from the hall with Judge Stallo to his home on Walnut Hills, where we dined and passed the afternoon.”
The Quadrilateral had been knocked into a cocked hat. Whitelaw Reid was the sole survivor. He was the only one of us who clearly understood the situation and thoroughly knew what he was about. He came to me and said: “I have won, and you people have lost. I shall expect that you stand by the agreement and meet me as my guests at dinner to-night. But, if you do not personally look after this, the others will not be there.” I was as badly hurt as any; but a bond is a bond, and I did as he desired, succeeding partly by coaxing and partly by insisting, though it was uphill work.
Frostier conviviality I have never sat down to than Reid’s dinner. Horace White looked more than ever like an iceberg; Sam Bowles was diplomatic, but ineffusive; Schurz was as a death’s head at the board; Halstead and I, through sheer bravado, tried to enliven the feast. But they would none of us, nor it, and we separated early and sadly, reformers hoist by their own petard.