Marse Henry, Complete. Henry Watterson
target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#fb3_img_img_e7c28ab4-e9d0-53bf-8437-36264923f1d7.png" alt="W. P. Hardee, Lieutenant General C.S.A."/> W. P. Hardee, Lieutenant General C.S.A.
"Mr. President," said Toombs, "in my European migrations I have made it a rule when arriving in a city to call first and pay my respects to the Chief of Police."
The result was a most agreeable hour and an invitation to dinner. Not long after this at the hospitable board of a Confederate general, then an American senator, Toombs began to prod Lamar about his speech in the House upon the occasion of the death of Charles Sumner. Lamar was not quick to quarrel, though when aroused a man of devilish temper and courage. The subject had become distasteful to him. He was growing obviously restive under Toombs' banter. The ladies of the household apprehending what was coming left the table.
Then Lamar broke forth. He put Toombs' visit to Grant, "crawling at the seat of power," against his eulogy of a dead enemy. I have never heard such a scoring from one man to another. It was magisterial in its dignity, deadly in its diction. Nothing short of a duel could have settled it in the olden time. But when Lamar, white with rage, had finished, Toombs without a ruffle said, "Lamar, you surprise me," and the host, with the rest of us, took it as a signal to rise from table and rejoin the ladies in the drawing-room. Of course nothing came of it.
Toombs was as much a humorist as an extremist. I have ridden with him under fire and heard him crack jokes with Minié balls flying uncomfortably about. Some one spoke kindly of him to old Ben Wade. "Yes, yes," said Wade; "I never did believe in the doctrine of total depravity."
But I am running ahead in advance of events.
VI
There came in 1853 to the Thirty-third Congress a youngish, dapper and graceful man notable as the only Democrat in the Massachusetts delegation. It was said that he had been a dancing master, his wife a work girl. They brought with them a baby in arms with the wife's sister for its nurse--a mis-step which was quickly corrected. I cannot now tell just how I came to be very intimate with them except that they lived at Willard's Hotel. His name had a pretty sound to it--Nathaniel Prentiss Banks.
A schoolmate of mine and myself, greatly to the mirth of those about us, undertook Mr. Banks' career. We were going to elect him Speaker of the next House and then President of the United States. This was particularly laughable to my mother and Mrs. Linn Boyd, the wife of the contemporary Speaker, who had very solid presidential aspirations of his own.
The suggestion perhaps originated with Mrs. Banks, to whom we two were ardently devoted. I have not seen her since those days, more than sixty years ago. But her beauty, which then charmed me, still lingers in my memory--a gentle, sweet creature who made much of us boys--and two years later when Mr. Banks was actually elected Speaker I was greatly elated and took some of the credit to myself. Twenty years afterwards General Banks and I had our seats close together in the Forty-fourth Congress, and he did not recall me at all or the episode of 1853. Nevertheless I warmed to him, and when during Cleveland's first term he came to me with a hard-luck story I was glad to throw myself into the breach. He had been a Speaker of the House, a general in the field and a Governor of Massachusetts, but was a faded old man, very commonplace, and except for the little post he held under Government pitiably helpless.
Colonel George Walton was one of my father's intimates and an imposing and familiar figure about Washington. He was the son of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a distinction in those days, had been mayor of Mobile and was an unending raconteur. To my childish mind he appeared to know everything that ever had been or ever would be. He would tell me stories by the hour and send me to buy him lottery tickets. I afterward learned that that form of gambling was his mania. I also learned that many of his stories were apocryphal or very highly colored.
One of these stories especially took me. It related how when he was on a yachting cruise in the Gulf of Mexico the boat was overhauled by pirates, and how he being the likeliest of the company was tied up and whipped to make him disgorge, or tell where the treasure was.
"Colonel Walton," said I, "did the whipping hurt you much?"
"Sir," he replied, as if I were a grown-up, "they whipped me until I was perfectly disgusted."
An old lady in Philadelphia, whilst I was at school, heard me mention Colonel Walton--a most distinguished, religious old lady--and said to me, "Henry, my son, you should be ashamed to speak of that old villain or confess that you ever knew him," proceeding to give me his awful, blood-curdling history.
It was mainly a figment of her fancy and prejudice, and I repeated it to Colonel Walton the next time I went to the hotel where he was then living--I have since learned, with a lady not his wife, though he was then three score and ten--and he cried, "That old hag! Good Lord! Don't they ever die!"
Seeing every day the most distinguished public men of the country, and with many of them brought into direct acquaintance by the easy intercourse of hotel life, destroyed any reverence I might have acquired for official station. Familiarity may not always breed contempt, but it is a veritable eye opener. To me no divinity hedged the brow of a senator. I knew the White House too well to be impressed by its architectural grandeur without and rather bizarre furnishments within.
VII
I have declaimed not a little in my time about the ignoble trade of politics, the collective dishonesty of parties and the vulgarities of the self-exploiting professional office hunters. Parties are parties. Professional politics and politicians are probably neither worse nor better--barring their pretensions--than other lines of human endeavor. The play actor must be agreeable on the stage of the playhouse; the politician on the highways and the hustings, which constitute his playhouse--all the world a stage--neither to be seriously blamed for the dissimulation which, being an asset, becomes, as it were, a second nature.
The men who between 1850 and 1861 might have saved the Union and averted the War of Sections were on either side professional politicians, with here and there an unselfish, far-seeing, patriotic man, whose admonitions were not heeded by the people ranging on opposing sides of party lines. The two most potential of the party leaders were Mr. Davis and Mr. Seward. The South might have seen and known that the one hope of the institution of slavery lay in the Union. However it ended, disunion led to abolition. The world--the whole trend of modern thought--was set against slavery. But politics, based on party feeling, is a game of blindman's buff. And then--here I show myself a son of Scotland--there is a destiny. "What is to be," says the predestinarian Mother Goose, "will be, though it never come to pass."
That was surely the logic of the irrepressible conflict--only it did come to pass--and for four years millions of people, the most homogeneous, practical and intelligent, fought to a finish a fight over a quiddity; both devoted to liberty, order and law, neither seeking any real change in the character of its organic contract.
Human nature remains ever the same. These days are very like those days. We have had fifty years of a restored Union. The sectional fires have quite gone out. Yet behold the schemes of revolution claiming the regenerative. Most of them call themselves the "uplift!"
Let us agree at once that all government is more or less a failure; society as fraudulent as the satirists describe it; yet, when we turn to the uplift--particularly the professional uplift--what do we find but the same old tunes, hypocrisy and empiricism posing as "friends of the people," preaching the pussy gospel of "sweetness and light?"
"Words, words, words," says Hamlet. Even as veteran writers for the press have come through disheartening experience to a realizing sense of the futility of printer's ink must our academic pundits begin to suspect the futility of art and letters. Words however cleverly writ on paper are after all but words. "In a nation of blind men," we are told, "the one-eyed