To him place was not a badge of bondage; it was a decoration, preferment, promotion, popular recognition. He had always yearned for office as the legitimate destination of public life and the honorable reward of party service. During the greater part of his career, the conditions of journalism had been rather squalid and servile. He was really great as a journalist. He was truly and highly fit for nothing else, but, seeing less deserving and less capable men about him advanced from one post of distinction to another, he wondered why his turn proved so tardy in coming, and when it would come. It did come with a rush. What more natural than that he should believe it real instead of the empty pageant of a vision?
After the first shock and surprise of the Cincinnati nomination, it had taken me only a day and a night to pull myself together and to plunge into the swim to help fetch the water-logged factions ashore. This was clearly indispensable to forcing the Democratic organization to come to the rescue of what would prove otherwise but a derelict upon a stormy sea. Schurz was deeply disgruntled. Before he could be appeased, a bridge found in what was called the Fifth Avenue Hotel Conference had to be constructed in order to carry him across the stream which flowed between his disappointed hopes and aims and what appeared to him an illogical and repulsive alternative. Like another Achilles, he had taken to his tent and sulked. He was harder to deal with than any of the Democratic file-leaders; but he finally yielded, and did splendid work in the campaign.
Carl Schurz was a stubborn spirit, not readily adjustable. He was a nobly gifted man, but from first to last an alien in an alien land. He once said to me, “If I should live a thousand years, they would still call me a Dutchman.” No man of his time spoke so well or wrote to better purpose. He was equally skilful in debate, an overmatch for Conkling and Morton, whom, especially in the French Arms matter, he completely dominated and outshone. As sincere and unselfish, as patriotic and as courageous, as any of his contemporaries, he could never attain the full measure of the popular heart and confidence, albeit reaching its understanding directly and surely. Within himself a man of sentiment, he was not the cause of sentiment in others. He knew this and felt it.
During the campaign the Nast cartoons in “Harper’s Weekly,” which while unsparing to the last degree to Greeley and Sumner, and treating Schurz with a kind of considerate, qualifying humor, nevertheless greatly offended him. I do not think Greeley minded them much, if at all. They were very effective, notably the “Pirate Ship,” which represented Greeley rising above the taffrail of a vessel carrying the Stars-and-Stripes and waving his handkerchief at the man-of-war Ship of State in the distance, while the political leaders of the Confederacy, dressed in true corsair costume, crouched below, ready to spring. Nothing did more to sectionalize Northern opinion and fire the Northern heart, or to lash the fury of the rank and file of those who were urged to vote as they had shot, and who had hoisted above them “the bloody shirt” for a banner.
In the first half of the canvass the impetus was with Greeley; the second half, beginning in eclipse, seemed about to end in something very like collapse. The old man seized his flag and set out upon his own account for a tour of the country. And right well he bore himself. If speech-making ever does any good toward the shaping of results, Greeley’s speeches surely should have elected him. They were marvels of impromptu oratory, mostly homely and touching appeals to the better sense and the magnanimity of a people not ripe or ready for generous impressions, convincing in their simplicity and integrity, unanswerable from any point of view of sagacious statesmanship or true patriotism, if the North had been in any mood to listen, to reason, and to respond.
I met him at Cincinnati and acted as his escort to Louisville and thence to Indianapolis, where others were waiting to take him in charge. He was in a state of querulous excitement. Before the vast and noisy audiences which we faced he stood apparently pleased and composed, delivering his words as he might have dictated them to a stenographer. As soon as we were alone he would break out into a kind of lamentation, punctuated by occasional bursts of objurgation. He especially distrusted the Quadrilateral, making an exception in my case as well he might, because, however his nomination had jarred my judgment, I had a real affection for him, dating back to the years immediately preceding the war, when I was wont to encounter him in the reporters’ galleries at Washington, which he preferred to using his floor privilege as an ex-member of Congress.
It was mid-October. We had heard from Maine. Indiana and Ohio had voted, and Greeley was for the first time realizing the hopeless nature of the contest. The South, in irons and under military rule and martial law sure for Grant, there had never been any real chance. Now it was obvious that there was to be no compensating ground-swell at the North. That he should pour forth his chagrin to one whom he knew so well and even regarded as one of his “boys” was inevitable. Much of what he said was founded on a basis of fact, some of it was mere suspicion and surmise, all of it came back to the main point that defeat stared us in the face.
I was glad and yet loath to part with him. If ever a man needed a strong friendly hand and heart to lean upon he did during those dark days—the end in darkest night nearer than any one could divine. He showed stronger mettle than had been allowed him; bore a manlier part than was commonly ascribed to his slovenly, slipshod habiliments and his aspect in which benignancy and vacillation seemed to struggle for the ascendancy. Abroad, the elements conspired against him. At home his wife lay ill, as it proved, unto death. The good gray head he still carried like a hero, but the worn and tender heart was beginning to break.
Happily the end came quickly. Overwhelming defeat was followed by overwhelming affliction. He never quitted his dear one’s bedside until the last pulse-beat, and then he sank beneath the load of grief. “‘The Tribune’ is gone and I am gone,” he said, and spoke no more.
The death of Greeley fell upon the country with a sudden shock. It aroused a wide-spread sense of pity and sorrow and awe. All hearts were hushed. In an instant the bitterness of the campaign was forgotten, though the huzzas of the victors still rent the air. President Grant, his late antagonist, with his cabinet, and the leading members of the two Houses of Congress, attended his funeral. As he lay in his coffin, he was no longer the arch-rebel leading a combine of buccaneers and insurgents, which the Republican orators and newspapers had depicted him, but the brave old apostle of freedom, who had done more than all others to make the issues upon which a militant and triumphant party had risen to power. The multitude remembered only the old white hat and the sweet, old baby face beneath it, heart of gold, and hand wielding the wizard pen; the incarnation of probity and kindness, of steadfast devotion to his duty, as he saw it, and to the needs of the whole human family. It was, indeed, a tragedy; and yet, as his body was lowered into its grave, there rose above it, invisible, unnoted, a flower of matchless beauty—the flower of peace and love between the parts of the Union to which his life had been a sacrifice.