spared the disaster which befell South Carolina five or six years later, and Justice Swann suffered the penalty of men whose judgment is different from the convictions of their contemporaries. From being one of the most honored leaders of his party, with the prospect of any highest place in its gift, he remained one of the most distinguished jurists of his time whose best reward came coldly from those who would not blame where they could not praise. In Ohio the judiciary is elective, and Judge Swann hastened the decision of the court before the meeting of the Republican State Convention in order that his party might not unwittingly renominate him in the expectation of an opinion from him favorable to the good men of Ohio who had broken the bad law of the United States.
There is a legend, cherished more for its dramatic possibility than for any intrinsic probability, that when Lincoln appointed Noah L. Swayne justice of the Supreme Court of the United States he supposed that he was appointing Joseph Swann, and that he was misled by the similarity of the names, not very great either to ear or eye. Swayne was then one of the most eminent members of the Columbus bar, and, though he lacked the judicial experience of Swann, was entirely fit for the place he was called to fill. If such a mistake was made it was one which could well retrieve itself, but it seems a very idle fancy which has toyed with its occurrence. It would be altogether too nice in the face of its unlikelihood to inquire whether Lincoln might have wished to express a certain sympathy for the eminent jurist in the arrest of his public career which followed his decision. One would first have to establish the fact of such a feeling in him and prove that if he had it he would have been so careless of the jurist’s name as to mistake another name for it. These are the things that happen in fiction when the novelist is hard driven by the exigencies of his plot, but cannot easily occur in sober history.
I met both of these prominent men during my Columbus years, as an improminent young fellow-citizen might, Justice Swayne rather often, and Justice Swann once at least, in their own houses. On this sole occasion, which dimly remains with me, I was paying one of those evening calls which we youth were diligent in making at houses where there were young ladies; and after due introduction to the great jurist, I was aware of him, withdrawn and darkling in the next room, not unkindly, but not sensibly contributing to the gaiety of the time in me. That might have been after I was asked to a party at his house, which I was told, by a lady versed in such mysteries, was the greatest distinction which society had to offer in our city, and I suppose from this fact that the popular blame for his momentous decision, even if it was of much force, did not follow him into more rarefied air.
XI
We young men of that time were mostly Republicans, but some of us were Democrats and some of us were Southerners, or derivatively Southern. I have said how little society with us was affected by New England, even in such a custom as Thanksgiving, and I may go a little farther and say how it was characterized for good as well as for evil by the nearer South rather than the farther East, but more for good than for evil. Many people of Southern origin among us had chosen a Northern home because they would rather live in a Free State than a Slave State; they had not cast their sectional patriotism, but when it came to a question of which ideal should prevail, they preferred the Northern ideal. They derived from that South which antedated the invention of the cotton-gin, and which could take a leading part in keeping the Northwestern Territory free, with Ohio the first Free State born of that great mother of Free States. The younger generation of their blood were native Ohioans, and these were not distinguishable from the children of the New-Englanders and the Scotch-Irish Pennsylvanians by anything that I can remember. We had already begun to be Ohioans, with an accent of our own, and I suppose our manners were simpler and freer than those of the East, but the American manners were then everywhere simple and free, and are so yet, I believe, among ninety-nine hundred-thousandths of our ninety-nine millions. It seems to me now that the manners in Columbus were very good then among the young people. No one can say what change the over-muchness of subsequent money may have made in them, but one likes to think the change, if any, is not for the better. There seems to have been greater pecuniary equality then than there is now; there was an evener sky-line, with scarcely a sky-scraping millionaire breaking it anywhere. Within what was recognized as society there was as much social as pecuniary equality; apparently one met the same people everywhere on that easily ascertained level above the people who worked for their living with their hands. These were excluded, as they always have been excluded from society in all times and places; so that if I had still been a compositor at the printer’s case I could not have been received at any of the houses that welcomed me as a journalist, though that did not occur to me then, and only just now occurs to me, as something strange and sad; something that forever belies our democracy, but is so fast and deep-rooted in the conditions which our plutocracy has kept from our ancestral monarchies and oligarchies and must keep as long as men live upon one another in the law of competition.
In one house there was more singing and playing and in another more reading and talking. All the young ladies were beautiful, with the supremacy of that young lady whom it was our poetry to hold so beautiful that no other might contest it. As I believe the use still is in the South, we called them Miss Lilly, Miss Julia, Miss Sally, Miss Fanny, Miss Maggie, whether they were the older or the younger daughters of the family. We were always meeting them at parties or, failing that or including that, we went to call upon them at their houses. We called in the evening and it was no strange thing for a young man to call every evening of the week, not at one house, but at three or four. How, in the swift sequence of the parties, we managed so often to find the young ladies at home remains one of the mysteries which age must leave youth to solve. Possibly in that sharply foreshortened perspective of the past the parties show of closer succession than they really were.
At most of the houses we saw only the young ladies; it was they whom we asked for; but there were other houses where the mothers of the family received with the daughters, and at one of these my welcome was immediately of a kindness and always of a conscience which it touches me to realize. I was taken at the best I meant as well as the best I was by the friend who was the exquisite spirit of the house, and made me at home in it. My world had been very small, and it has never since been the greatest, but I think yet, as I divined then, that she was of a social genius which would have made her in any great-worldlier capital the leader she was in ours, where her supremacy in that sort was no more questioned than the incomparable loveliness of that most beautiful girl whom every one worshiped. Her house expressed her, so that when her home finally changed to another the new house obeyed the magic of her taste and put on the semblance of the first, with a conservatory breathing through it the odor of her flowers and the murmur of the dove that lived among them: herself a flower-like and birdlike presence, delicate, elegant, such as might have been fancied of some fine, old-world condition in a new-world reading of it. She lived to rule socially in a community which attested its gentleness by its allegiance to her until she was past eighty, but when I knew her first she was too young to be titularly accepted as their mother by her stepdaughters and was known to them as their cousin in what must have been her own convention; but I suppose she liked to be not less than sovereign among her equals. With me she was not only the kindest, but the most candid of my friends; my literary journalism and later my literature may have been to her liking, but she never flattered me for them when, as I now know, too much praise had made me hungry for flattery. No young man such as I was then could have had a wiser and faithfuler friend, and I render her memory my tribute after so many years from a gratitude which cannot be spoken. After so many years I cannot make out whether she accepted or merely suffered my extreme opinions in politics; though she was wholly Ohioan, her husband’s family had close affiliations with the South; but hers was certainly a Republican house, as nearly all the houses I frequented were. What may have made her even anticipatively my friend was our common acceptance of the Swedenborgian philosophy, which long, long afterward, the last time I saw her, I spoke of as a philosophy. But then she rejected the notion with scorn; it might be a pleasant fancy, she said, but a philosophy, no; and I perceived that she had come the way of that agnosticism which the whole cultivated world had taken. Now I have heard that in her last years she went back to the faith which was perhaps more inherited than reasoned in both of us. But I am sure that it was at first a bond and that she was conscientiously true to this bond of a common spiritual tradition, when upon some public recognition of my work she reminded me how according to Swedenborg every beautiful thing we said or did was by an influx from the divine. I submitted outwardly, but inwardly I rebelled: not that my conceit of the things I did was so very great; I believe I thought rather modestly of myself for doing them, and I always meant to do much better things; in fact I still have my masterpiece before me; but, poor things as they were, I wished to feel them wholly mine.
For a kindred reason I quite as altogether refused, and more explicitly, the theory of my old friend, Moncure D. Conway, as to the true function of the West in literature. He was then a young Unitarian minister, preaching at Cincinnati an ever-widening liberalism in religion, and publishing a slight monthly magazine named after The Dial of Emerson at Concord, and too carefully studied from it. For this paler avatar of that transcendental messenger he had asked me for contributions, and so a friendship, which lasted throughout our lives, sprang up between us. When he once came to Columbus he came to lunch with me, and quite took my appetite away by propounding his theory that the West was to live its literature, especially its poetry, rather than write it, the East being still in that darkling period when it could not live its literature. I do not remember the arguments by which he supported his thesis; but proofs as of holy writ could not have persuaded me of it as far as I myself was concerned. My affair was to make poetry, let who would live it, and to make myself known by both the quality and quantity of my poetry. It is not clear to me now how I declared my position without immodesty, but somehow I declared it, and so finally that Conway was very willing to carry away with him for his magazine a piece of rhyme which I had last made. He could the more willingly do this because The Dial was one of those periodicals, commoner then than now, that paid rather in glory than in money; in fact it was not expected to pay anything in money, so that I doubly defeated him: I was not only not living my poetry, I was not even living by it.