Laurent Milliadon and the millionaire John McDonough were litigious in their characters; and their names occur in the report of the Supreme Court decisions more frequently than those of any ten other men in the State. Grymes was the attorney for both of them for many years. They were both men of great shrewdness, and both speculative in their characters, and both had accumulated large fortunes. Without any assignable cause, McDonough ceased to employ Grymes, and intrusted his business to other counsel, who did not value their services so extravagantly. Mentioning the fact upon one occasion to Grymes, "Ah! yes," said he, "I can explain to your satisfaction the cause. In a certain case of his, in which he had law and justice with him, he suddenly became very uneasy. 'I shall certainly lose it, Grymes,' he said excitedly to me. I told him it was impossible; he had never had so sure a thing since I had been his attorney. In his dogmatical manner, which you know, he still persisted in saying, he was no great lawyer as I was, but some things he knew better than any lawyer, and 'I shall lose that case.' At the same time he significantly touched his pocket and then his palm, signifying that money had been paid by his adversary to the court, or some member of it. 'Ah!' said I, 'are you sure—very sure?' 'Very sure—I know it; and you will see I shall lose this suit.' He was not wont to speak so positively, without the best evidence of any fact. 'Well, Mac,' said I, jestingly, 'if that is the game, who can play it better than you can—you have a larger stake than any of them, and of course better ability?' Well, sir, he did lose one of the plainest cases I ever presented to a court. From that day forward I have not received a fee from him: and now the secret is before the world. He has been detected in bribing one of the judges of the Supreme Court."
As an orator, Grymes was among the first of the country. All he wanted, to have been exceedingly eloquent, was earnestness and feeling; of this he was devoid. His manner was always collected and cool; his style chaste and beautiful, with but little ornament; he spoke only from the brain—there was nothing from the heart. In argument he was exceedingly cogent and lucid, and when the subject seemed most complicated, the acuteness of his analytical mind seemed to unravel and lay bare the true features of the case, with an ease and power that required scarce an effort. His powers of ratiocination were very great, and this was the forte of his mind; his conclusions were clearly deduced from arguments always logical.
There were times when he would be serious—and then there was a grandeur about him very striking. At such times, bursts of passionate feeling would break from him that seemed like volcanic eruptions. They appeared to come from a deep and intense tenderness of heart. These were momentary—the lightning's flash illuminating the gloom and darkness of its parent cloud. I have thought this was the man's nature, born with a heart capable of intense feeling, which had been educated to believe this weakness. Coming very young away from his home and early associations, to live and mingle with strangers of a different race—leaving the rural scenes and home associations which were forming and developing nature's glorious gifts, to come to a profligate and heartless city—the whole current of his susceptible nature was changed, and the feeling and good perverted and overshadowed, yet not entirely rooted out. Hence the contradictions in his character. Sometimes nature was too strong for art, and would break out in beauty, as the flower, rich in fragrance and delicate loveliness, when touched by the genial sun, will burst from the black and uninviting bud.
Upon one occasion, when there was a United States senator to be elected, and when the Democratic party held a majority in the Legislature, rendering it impossible for the Whigs to elect any member of their own party, yet, with the assistance of three from the Democratic party, could choose from this party any man they would select and unite upon—they determined to propose Grymes, and had secured the requisite assistance from the Democracy. I was a member, and a Whig, and was delegated to communicate the facts to Grymes. I knew the Senate had been his ambition for years. I knew he felt his powers would give him a position with the greatest of that body, and an immediate national reputation, and had no doubt of his cheerful acquiescence. To my astonishment he assumed a grave and most serious manner. "I am grateful, most grateful to you," he said, "for I know this has been brought about by you, and that you sincerely desire to gratify me; but I cannot consent to be a candidate. Most frankly will I tell you my reasons. I admit it has been my desire for years. It has been, I may say to you, my life-long ambition; but I have always coupled the possession of the position with the power of sustaining it reputably. I was never ambitious of the silly vanity of simply being a senator and known as such; but of giving to it the character and dignity due it. Louisiana is a proud State, her people are a noble and a proud people, they have a right to be so—look at her! With a soil and a climate congenial to the production of the richest staples now ministering to the luxuries and necessities of man—with a river emptying into her commercial mart the productions of a world, her planters are princes, in feeling, fortune, and position. At their mansions is dispensed a noble hospitality, rich in the feasts of body and mind, generous and open as was Virginia's in her proudest days. At Washington I would represent these, and the merchant-princes of her metropolis. You have said, as eloquently as truly, 'There is but one Mississippi River; but one Louisiana; but one New Orleans on the face of the earth.' As she is, and as her people are, I would represent her as her senator.
"I am a beggar, and cannot consent, in this character, to be made more conspicuous, by being made a beggarly senator. I cannot take a house in Washington, furnish it, and live in it as a gentleman. I could not, in any other manner, entertain my people visiting Washington, consistently with my ideas of what a senator should do. I cannot go to Washington, and, as one of them, stand among the great men of the Senate, in that magnificent hall, and feel my soul swell to theirs and its proportions, and then dodge you, or any other gentleman from Louisiana, and sneak home to a garret. My means would allow me no better apartment. I could not live in the mean seclusion of a miserable penury, nor otherwise than in a style comporting, in my estimation, with the dignity and the duty of a senator from Louisiana, as some have done, who were able to live and entertain as gentlemen, for the purpose of the degraded saving of half my per diem to swell my coffers at home.
"Now, my friend, I feel how miserably foolish I have been all my life. I have thrown away fortune because I despised it. It was too grovelling a pursuit, too mean a vocation, to make and to hoard money. In my soul I despised it, and now you see it is revenged; for without it, I have learned, there is no gratification for ambition—no independence of a sneering, envious world. A bankrupt is a felon, though his mind, his virtues, and his attainments may be those of a god. He is a useless waif upon the world; for all he has, or all he may be, is, to himself and the world, unavailable without money. I have discarded all my ambitious aspirations long since, and tried to reconcile myself to the fact that my life has been and is a failure. And I am sorry you have come to me to remind me that the aim of my young life was within my reach, when I have no means to grasp it, and, now that I am miserable, to show me what I might have been. No, my friend, I must go on with the drudgery of the law, to earn my bread, and thus eke out a miserable future. I am grateful to you and my other friends, who have delegated you to this mission. Say so to them, if you please. I must go to court. The horse of the bark-mill must go to his daily circle. Good morning!"
Some years after the event above mentioned, Grymes, as the attorney of the city of New Orleans, succeeded, before the Supreme Court of the United States, in making good the title to the batture property in the city. What is termed batture in Louisiana is the land made by accretion or deposits of the Mississippi. One strange feature of this great river is, that it never gets any wider. It is continually wearing and caving on one side or the other, and making a corresponding deposit on the other bank. Opposite a portion of the city of New Orleans this deposit has been going on for many years, while the opposite bank has been wearing away. There are living citizens who saw in youth the river occupying what is now covered by many streets and many blocks of buildings, and is one of the most valuable portions of the city. In truth, what was a century ago entire river, is now one-fourth of the city, and this deposit goes on annually without any decrease in its ratio.
By agreement of all parties, this batture was surveyed into squares and lots, and sold at public auction, and the money deposited in the Bank of Louisiana, to the credit of the Supreme Court of the United States, to abide the decision of that tribunal as to the rightful ownership. The decision gave it to the city. Grymes, as attorney for the city, by order of the court, received a check for the money. The bank paid the check, and Grymes appropriated one hundred thousand dollars of it, as a fee for his services, and then deposited the balance to the credit of the mayor and council of the city. This was a large fee, but was not really what he was entitled to, under the custom of chancery for collecting money. He had agreed to pay Daniel Webster for assistance rendered; but Mr. Webster, some years after, informed me that he had never received a cent, and I am sure he never did, after that.
Grymes was well aware, if the city fathers got their hands upon the money, it would be years before he got this amount, if ever. With a portion of this money he liquidated all claims not antiquated and forgotten by him, and the balance was intrusted to the hands of a friend to invest for his benefit. This, together with his practice, which was now declining, furnished a handsome support for him. Age appeared to effect little change in his personnel. At sixty-seven, he was as erect in person and as elastic in step as at thirty. There was none of that embonpoint usually the consequence of years and luxurious living. He was neither slender nor fat; but what is most agreeable to the eye—between the two, with a most perfectly formed person. His features were manly, and strikingly beautiful; his blue eyes beaming with the hauteur of high breeding and ripe intelligence. These features were too often disfigured with the sneer of scorn, or the curled lip of expressive contempt. His early hopes, his manhood's ambition had been disappointed; and, soured and sore, he sneered at the world, and despised it. He had no confidence in man or woman, and had truly reached Hamlet's condition, when "Man delighted him not, nor woman either." He felt the world was his debtor, and was niggardly in its payments. He grew more and more morose as the things of time receded. Others, full of youth, talent, and vigor, were usurping the positions and enjoying the honors of life, which were slipping away from him unenjoyed. He turned upon these the bitterness engendered by disappointment. Cynicism lent edge to his wit, and bitterness to his sarcasm. He was at war with himself, and consequently with all the world. His mind felt none of the imbecility of age, and to the last retained its perspicuity and power. As he came into life a man, and never knew a boyhood, so he went from it a man, without the date of years. At sixty-eight years of age, he went quietly from life without suffering, and, to himself, without regret. He was a man—take him all in all—whose like we shall not look on soon again.
The virtues and the vices, the loves and the hates of life were strangely blended in the character of John Randolph Grymes; but if we judge from the fact that he had and left many warm and devoted friends, and few enemies, we must suppose the good in his nature greatly preponderated. But notwithstanding the great space he had filled in the eyes of the people of the city, his death startled only for a moment, and straightway he was forgotten; as the falling pebble dimples for a moment the lake's quiet surface—then all is smooth again.