HENRY WATTERSON.
I—BY WHITELAW REID
Dorchester House,
Park Lane, W., London, England,
May 3, 1911.
My dear Watterson:
I have read the manuscript with the greatest interest. On a few little matters I shouldn’t have put things quite the same way; but that of course is to be expected from the different points of view from which we necessarily regard the subject. On the whole, it seems to me extremely fair and accurate.
I shall append a few notes, which I have made on different points suggested by the manuscript, not with the idea that you will find any occasion to incorporate any of my suggestions in your account, but only by way of refreshing your memory, as your manuscript has refreshed mine, about interesting incidents of a period which now seems so remote as to belong exclusively to our romantic youth.
On page 27 it would seem to be implied that Ben Wade was somewhat influenced in his support of the impeachment policy by the fact that if impeachment succeeded, he was the inevitable successor. I saw a great deal of Wade in those days. He certainly knew what the consequence to himself of a successful impeachment would be, but I never saw any reason to suppose that if somebody else had been acting Vice-President, Wade’s attitude would not have been the same. Probably he would have been even more outspoken.
Page 31. What you say of the attitude of three of the Quadrilateral toward myself is not news to me. I knew, however, the reasons for it (which would probably have influenced me if I had been in their places), and I bore no grudges. In fact, at the time I had a pretty strong conviction that they were the people who were going to be badly disappointed in the end; so that, while you all thought you were taking me into camp, I was comforting myself with the belief that I was taking the Quadrilateral into camp, and should find them very useful articles to begin housekeeping with.
Page 35. Did McCullagh come from Chicago? I thought we always counted him as belonging to Cincinnati until he went to St. Louis. When I first went to Cincinnati, he was a reporter on the “Gazette,” from which he went to the “Commercial.”
Page 40. The “bravery” of Greeley’s outstretched hand may have been fully recognized, but I doubt if its self-sacrifice ever was. First and last it must have cost him (poor man that he was) nearly a million dollars. Shortly after the first volume of his history, “The American Conflict,” was published, I remember congratulating him on the pecuniary success. His reply was: “Oh, I haven’t made as much as the newspapers say. Still, I’ve made a hundred thousand dollars that I know of, for I have spent every cent of it. The past at least is secure.” With that figure as a basis, you can calculate how much he would probably have made from the enormously augmented sale of the first volume when the second came out, as well as from the copyrights on the second. The circulation of “The Tribune” was also affected for a time in the same disastrous way.