Historical Essays Part 10

JACOB D. c.o.x

A paper read before the Ma.s.sachusetts Historical Society at the October meeting of 1900.

JACOB D. c.o.x

A useful member of the legislature of his state, a general in the army during the Civil War, governor of his state, Secretary of the Interior in President Grant's Cabinet, a member of Congress, the president of a large railroad, a writer of books, dean and teacher in a law school, and a reviewer of books in the _Nation_,--such were the varied activities of General c.o.x. All this work was done with credit. He bore a prominent part in the battle of Antietam, where Ropes speaks of his "brilliant success"; he was the second in command at the battle of Franklin, and bore the brunt of the battle. "Brigadier-General J. D. c.o.x," wrote Schofield, the commanding general, in his report, "deserves a very large share of credit for the brilliant victory at Franklin."

The governor of the state of Ohio did not then have a great opportunity of impressing himself upon the minds of the people of his state, but c.o.x made his mark in the canva.s.s for that office. We must call to mind that in the year 1865, when he was the Republican candidate for governor, President Johnson had initiated his policy of reconstruction, but had not yet made a formal break with his party. Negro suffrage, which only a few had favored during the last year of the war, was now advocated by the radical Republicans, and the popular sentiment of the party was tending in that direction. c.o.x had been a strong antislavery man before the war, a supporter of President Lincoln in his emanc.i.p.ation measures, but soon after his nomination for governor he wrote a letter to his radical friends at Oberlin in opposition to negro suffrage. "You a.s.sume," he said, "that the extension of the right of suffrage to the blacks, leaving them intermixed with the whites, will cure all the trouble. I believe it would rather be like the decision in that outer darkness of which Milton speaks where

"'chaos umpire sits, And by decision more embroils the fray.'"

While governor, he said in a private conversation that he had come to the conclusion "that so large bodies of black men and white as were in presence in the Southern States never could share political power, and that the insistence upon it on the part of the colored people would lead to their ruin."

President Grant appointed General c.o.x Secretary of the Interior, and he remained for nearly two years in the Cabinet. James Russell Lowell, on a visit to Was.h.i.+ngton in 1870, gave expression to the feeling among independent Republicans. "Judge h.o.a.r," he wrote, "and Mr. c.o.x struck me as the only really strong men in the Cabinet." This was long before the Civil Service Reform Act had pa.s.sed Congress, but Secretary c.o.x put the Interior Department on a merit basis, and he was ever afterwards an advocate of civil service reform by word of mouth and with his pen.

Differences with the President, in which I feel pretty sure that the Secretary was in the right, caused him to resign the office.

Elected to Congress in 1876, he was a useful member for one term. He has always been known to men in public life, and when President McKinley offered him the position of Minister to Spain something over three years ago, it was felt that a well-known and capable man had been selected.

For various reasons he did not accept the appointment, but if he had done so, no one could doubt that he would have shown tact and judgment in the difficult position.

As president of the Wabash Railroad, one of the large railroads in the West, he gained a name among business men, and five or six years ago was offered the place of Railroad Commissioner in New York City. This was practically the position of arbitrator between the trunk lines, but he was then Dean of the Cincinnati Law School and interested in a work which he did not care to relinquish.

Besides a controversial monograph, he wrote three books on military campaigns: "Atlanta"; "The March to the Sea; Franklin and Nashville"; "The Battle of Franklin"; and he wrote four excellent chapters for Force's "Life of General Sherman." In these he showed qualities of a military historian of a high order. Before his death he had finished his Reminiscences, which will be brought out by the Scribners this autumn.

His differences with President Grant while in his Cabinet left a wound, and in private conversation he was quite severe in his strictures of many of the President's acts, but he never let this feeling influence him in the slightest degree in the consideration of Grant the General.

He had a very high idea of Grant's military talents, which he has in many ways emphatically stated.

Since 1874 he had been a constant contributor to the literary department of the _Nation_. In his book reviews he showed a fine critical faculty and large general information, and some of his obituary notices--especially those of Generals Buell, Grant, Sherman, Joseph E.

Johnston, and Jefferson Davis--showed that power of impartial characterization which is so great a merit in a historian. He was an omnivorous reader of serious books. It was difficult to name any noteworthy work of history or biography or any popular book on natural science with which he was not acquainted.

As I saw him two years ago, when he was seventy years old, he was in the best of health and vigor, which seemed to promise many years of life. He was tall, erect, with a frame denoting great physical strength, and he had distinctively a military bearing. He was an agreeable companion, an excellent talker, a scrupulously honest and truthful man, and a gentleman.

EDWARD g.a.y.l.o.r.d BOURNE

A paper read before the Ma.s.sachusetts Historical Society at the March meeting of 1908.

EDWARD g.a.y.l.o.r.d BOURNE

When an a.s.sociate dies who was not yet forty-eight years old, whom most of us knew as a strong enduring man, who was capable of an immense amount of intellectual work, it is a real calamity,--a calamity which in this case History mourns, as Edward g.a.y.l.o.r.d Bourne was an excellent teacher and a thorough historical scholar. The physical details of any illness are apt to be repulsive, but the malady in Bourne's case was somehow so bound up in his life that an inquiry into it comes from no morbid curiosity. When ten years old he was attacked with tubercular disease of the hip, and for some weeks his life was despaired of; but he was saved by the loving care of his parents, receiving particular devotion from his father, who was a Congregational minister in charge of a parish in Connecticut. As the left leg had out-grown the other, Bourne was obliged to use crutches for three years, when his father took him to a specialist in Boston, and the result was that he was able to abandon crutches and in the end to get about by an appliance to adjust the lengths of the different legs, such as his friends were familiar with.

Despite this disability he developed great physical strength, especially in the chest and arms, but his lameness prevented his accompanying his college companions on long tramps, so that the bicycle was for him a most welcome invention. He became expert in the use of it, riding on it down Pike's Peak at the time of his visit to Colorado; and he performed a similar feat of endurance on another occasion when stopping with me at Jefferson in the White Mountains. Starting early in the morning, he traveled by rail to the terminus of the mountain railroad, went up Mount Was.h.i.+ngton on the railroad, and rode down the carriage road on his wheel to the Glen House, which ought to have been enough of fatigue and exertion for one day, but he then had about ten miles to make on his bicycle over a somewhat rough mountain road to reach Jefferson.

Jefferson he did make, but not until after midnight.

During an acquaintance of over nineteen years with Bourne, I was always impressed with his physical strength and endurance; and I was therefore much surprised to learn, in a letter received from him last winter while I was in Rome, that his youthful malady had attacked him, that he was again on crutches and had been obliged to give up his work at Yale. In truth ever since the autumn of 1906 he has had a painful, hopeless struggle. He has had the benefit of all the resources of medicine and surgery, and he and his wife were buoyed up by hope until the last; but as the sequel of one of a series of operations death came to his relief on February 24.

Only less remarkable than his struggle for life and physical strength was his energy in acquiring an education. The sacrifices that parents in New England and the rest of the country make in order to send their boys to school and college is a common enough circ.u.mstance, but not always is the return so satisfactory as it was in the case of Edward Bourne, and his brother. Edward went to the Norwich Academy, where his studious disposition and diligent purpose gained him the favor of the princ.i.p.al.

Thence to Yale, where he attracted the attention of Professor William G.

Sumner, who became to him a guide and a friend. Until his senior year at Yale his favorite studies were Latin and Greek; and his brother, who was in his cla.s.s, informs me that ever since his preparatory school days, it was his custom to read the whole of any author in hand as well as the part set for the cla.s.s. During recitations he recalls seeing him again and again reading ahead in additional books of the author, keeping at the same time "a finger on the page where the cla.s.s was translating, in order not to be caught off his guard." In his senior year at Yale, under the influence of Professor Sumner, he became interested in economics and won the Cobden medal. After graduation he wrote his first historical book, "The History of the Surplus Revenue of 1837," published in 1885 in Putnam's "Questions of the Day" series. For this and his other graduate work his university later conferred upon him the degree of Ph.D. Since I have learned the story of his boyhood and youth, it is with peculiar appreciation that I read the dedication of this first book: "To my Father and Mother." I may add in this connection that while pursuing his indefatigable labors for the support of his large family, his father's sickness and death overtaxed his strength, and the breakdown followed.

At Yale during his graduate work he won the Foote scholars.h.i.+p; he was instructor in history there from 1886 to 1888, then took a similar position at Adelbert College, Cleveland, becoming Professor of History in 1890. This post he held until 1895, when he was called to Yale University as Professor of History, a position that he held at the time of his death.

Besides the doctor's thesis, Bourne published two books, the first of which was "Essays in Historical Criticism," one of the Yale bicentennial publications, the most notable essay in which is that on Marcus Whitman.

A paper read at the Ann Arbor session of the American Historical meeting in Detroit and later published in the _American Historical Review_ is here amplified into a long and exhaustive treatment of the subject. The original paper gained Bourne some celebrity and subjected him to some harsh criticism, both of which, I think, he thoroughly enjoyed. Feeling sure of his facts and ground, he delighted in his final word to support the contention which he had read with emphasis and pleasure to an attentive audience in one of the halls of the University of Michigan.

The final paragraph sums up what he set out to prove with undoubted success:

That Marcus Whitman was a devoted and heroic missionary who braved every hards.h.i.+p and imperilled his life for the cause of Christian missions and Christian civilization in the far Northwest and finally died at his post, a sacrifice to the cause, will not be gainsaid.

That he deserves grateful commemoration in Oregon and Was.h.i.+ngton is beyond dispute. But that he is a national figure in American history, or that he "saved" Oregon, must be rejected as a fiction [p. 100].

Bourne had a good knowledge of American history, and he specialized on the Discoveries period, to which he gave close and continuous attention.

He was indebted to Professor Hart's ambitious and excellent cooperative history, "The American Nation," for the opportunity to obtain a hearing on his favorite subject. His "Spain in America," his third published book, is the book of a scholar. While the conditions of his narrative allowed only forty-six pages to the story of Columbus, he had undoubtedly material enough well arranged and digested to fill the volume on this topic alone. I desire to quote a signal example of compression:

It was November, 1504, when Columbus arrived in Seville, a broken man, something over twelve years from the time he first set sail from Palos. Each successive voyage since his first had left him at a lower point. On his return from the second he was on the defensive; after his third he was deprived of his viceroyalty; on his fourth he was s.h.i.+pwrecked.... The last blow, the death of his patron Isabella, soon followed. It was months before he was able to attend court.

His strength gradually failed, he sank from public view, and on the eve of Ascension Day, May 20, 1506, he pa.s.sed away in obscurity [p. 81].

And I am very fond of this final characterization:

Columbus ... has revealed himself in his writings as few men of action have been revealed. His hopes, his illusions, his vanity, and love of money, his devotion to by-gone ideals, his keen and sensitive observation of the natural world, his credulity and utter lack of critical power in dealing with literary evidence, his practical abilities as a navigator, his tenacity of purpose and boldness of execution, his lack of fidelity as a husband and a lover,... all stand out in clear relief.... Of all the self-made men that America has produced, none has had a more dazzling success, a more pathetic sinking to obscurity, or achieved a more universal celebrity [p. 82].

His chapter on Magellan is thoroughly interesting. The treatment of Columbus and Magellan shows what Bourne might have achieved in historical work if he could have had leisure to select his own subjects and elaborate them at will.

Before "Spain in America" appeared, he wrote a scholarly introduction to the vast work on the "Philippine Islands" published by the Arthur H.

Clark Company, of Cleveland, of which fifty-one volumes are already out.

The study of this subject gave Bourne a chance for the exhibition of his dry wit at one of the gatherings of the American Historical a.s.sociation.

It was a.s.serted that in the acquisition of the Philippine Islands our country had violated the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine, which properly confined our indulgence of the land hunger that is preying upon the world to the Western hemisphere. Bourne took issue with this statement.

He said that it might well be a question whether the Philippine Islands did not belong to the Western hemisphere and that--

for the first three centuries of their recorded history, they were in a sense a dependency of America. As a dependency of New Spain they const.i.tuted the extreme western verge of the Spanish dominions and were commonly known as the Western Islands. When the sun rose in Madrid it was still early afternoon of the preceding day in Manila.

Down to the end of the year 1844 the Manilan calendar was reckoned after that of Spain, that is, Manila time was about sixteen hours slower than Madrid time.

Bourne undertook to write the Life of Motley for Houghton, Mifflin and Company's American Men of Letters series, and he had done considerable work in the investigation of material. He was editor of a number of publications, one of which was John Fiske's posthumous volume, "New France and New England," and he wrote critical notices for the _Nation_, _New York Tribune_, and the _New York Times_. As I have said, he had a large family to support, and he sought work of the potboiling order; but in this necessary labor he never sacrificed his ideal of thoroughness. A remark that he made to me some while ago has come back with pathetic interest. After telling me what he was doing, how much time his teaching left for outside work, why he did this and that because it brought him money, he said: "I can get along all right. I can support my family, educate my children, and get a little needed recreation, if only my health does not break down."

Bourne took great interest in the American Historical a.s.sociation, and rarely if ever missed an annual meeting. He frequently read papers, which were carefully prepared, and a number of them are printed in the volume of Essays to which I have referred. He was the efficient chairman of the programme committee at the meeting in New Haven in 1898; and as chairman of an important committee, or as member of the Council, he attended the November dinners and meetings in New York, so that he came to be looked upon as one of the chief supporters of the a.s.sociation.

Interested also in the _American Historical Review_, he was a frequent contributor of critical book notices.

My acquaintance with Bourne began in 1888, the year in which I commenced the composition of my history. We were both living in Cleveland, and, as it was his custom to dine with me once or twice a month, acquaintance grew into friends.h.i.+p, and I came to have a great respect for his training and knowledge as a historical scholar. The vastness of historical inquiry impressed me, as it has all writers of history.

Recognizing in Bourne a kindred spirit, it occurred to me whether I could not hasten my work if he would employ part of his summer vacation in collecting material. I imparted the idea to Bourne, who received it favorably, and he spent a month of the summer of 1889 at work for me in the Boston Athenaeum on my general specifications, laboring with industry and discrimination over the newspapers of the early '50's to which we had agreed to confine his work. His task completed, he made me a visit of a few days at Bar Harbor, affording an opportunity for us to discuss the period and his material. I was so impressed with the value of his a.s.sistance that, when the ma.n.u.script of my first two volumes was completed in 1891, I asked him to spend a month with me and work jointly on its revision. We used to devote four or five hours a day to this labor, and in 1894, when I had finished my third volume, we had a similar collaboration.[163] I have never known a better test of general knowledge and intellectual temper.

Bourne was a slow thinker and worker, but he was sure, and, when he knew a thing, his exposition was clear and pointed. The chance of reflection over night and the occasional discussion at meal times, outside of our set hours, gave him the opportunity to recall all his knowledge bearing on the subject in hand, to digest and cla.s.sify it thoroughly, so that, when he tackled a question, he talked, so to speak, like a book. Two chapters especially attracted him,--the one on Slavery in my first volume, and the one on general financial and social conditions at the beginning of the third; and I think that I may say that not only every paragraph and sentence, but every important word in these two chapters was discussed and weighed. Bourne was a good critic, and, to set him entirely at ease, as he was twelve years younger, I told him to lay aside any respect on account of age, and to speak out frankly, no matter how hard it hit, adding that I had better hear disagreeable things from him than to have them said by critics after the volumes were printed.