The Battle of Principles Part 3

Then came Charles Sumner, the scholar in politics, to make practical the student's message. Daniel Webster's defense of Ma.s.sachusetts in his reply to Hayne, and his wonderful eloquence in the years which followed that first great address, lifted the old Bay State into unique preeminence in the Senate: when, therefore, Webster left the Senate and entered the cabinet of Millard Fillmore, the North and the South alike asked, with intense interest, who should succeed the defender of the Const.i.tution. That no dramatic interest might be lacking when, in 1851, Charles Sumner entered the Senate chamber to take the oath of office, it came about that Henry Clay, the great Compromiser, left the Senate, going out at one door, on the very day that Conscience, in the person of this Puritan, entered it by the other door. John C. Calhoun, inflexible, iron to the end, adhering tenaciously to his doctrine of secession, had just died, quite unconscious of the fact that his speeches held the explosives that were to shatter the South and destroy half a million of his beloved people. Clay, too, was death-stricken, and with great pathos referred to himself as "a stag scarred by spears, worried by wounds, dragging his mutilated body to his lair to lie down and die." Webster was now gray and broken, with the shadow of the eclipse already drawing near. In such a moment Charles Sumner began his career by an appeal to the "everlasting yea" and the "everlasting nay."--"I desire to speak to-day of some laws greater than any pa.s.sed in this capital or this country; older than America, older than India--I mean the laws of G.o.d."

Hitherto slavery had been the aggressor, crowding into Texas, edging into Missouri, with bullets forcing its way into Kansas. Freedom had always been on the defensive. Now all was changed, with the coming of a man whose watchword was "Slavery must be destroyed; liberty must be preserved." That cold body called the Senate became immediately conscious of the new influence that entered into the very being of the government, like iron into the rich blood of the physical system.

Charles Sumner made it clear from the beginning that the movement against slavery was from the Everlasting Arm. With expediency he had nothing to do, but only with eternal right and eternal wrong. One day Daniel Webster reminded his young successor of the importance of looking on the other side, indicating that a s.h.i.+eld that was gold on one side might at least be silver on the other, to which Sumner replied, "There is no other side." This Boston scholar became a voice for law, "whose seat is the bosom of G.o.d, and whose speech is the melody of the world."

These eternal laws of G.o.d rose up to stay the progress of slavery like the beetling granite cliffs of Maine, that send forth their voice to the onrus.h.i.+ng tides, saying, "Here stay your proud waves--thus far, and no farther."

Ancestry, opportunity and events all conspired to equip Charles Sumner with those implements that make man great. Like Phillips, he was a descendant of the early settlers of Boston. His father led the men who delivered Garrison out of the hands of the mob, and who told the excited populace that unless Boston was careful "our children's heads will be broken by cannon-b.a.l.l.s." The plastic, critical hours of his youth were spent in Harvard College and in the law office of Judge Story. Never interested in philosophy and metaphysics, he was surpa.s.sed by few as a master of the humanities, general literature, and the story of the rise and progress of democracy and free inst.i.tutions. Not a man of genius, Charles Sumner was gifted with talent of a very high order. He had, what is perhaps better than genius, a capacity for sustained labour and prodigious industry. He did nothing by halves. In his chosen realm he became a master of the details of every movement related to free inst.i.tutions, since the days of the republics of Greece and Switzerland, Holland and England. Long after other students had blown out their lights, Charles Sumner's window was still flaming. At a very early epoch he exhibited his tenacity of will and his const.i.tutional inability to change his mind. Once he planned with a companion to walk to Boston on Sat.u.r.day morning, starting at half-past seven. When the hour struck, a snow-storm was raging. But having decided to go to Boston, to Boston the student went alone, floundering through the blizzard. Snow-drifts were little things, but changing his plan was an impossible thing. The centre of his character, about which all else revolved, was a certain axis of pride and self-esteem, which may be pardoned, perhaps, in view of the fact that the world takes a man largely upon his own estimate of personal worth.

In those days the atmosphere of Boston was charged with enthusiasm for education and the humanities. Among young Sumner's friends were Prescott, who was writing the history of Spain and Mexico; Bancroft, who was outlining his history of the United States; Story, the jurist; Horace Mann, the educator; Dr. Howe, the father of the movement for the education of the deaf and dumb; Emerson, Longfellow, Channing and Whittier--all were not simply friends but correspondents of Charles Sumner.

Nor must we forget the Boston of earlier days, the Boston of Adams, and Otis, of Warren and Quincy. In such a city, surrounded by the n.o.blest traditions of patriotism, stimulated by the greatest group of scholars that the Republic has produced, Charles Sumner pa.s.sed his early manhood.

Then, remembering that Edward Everett had fitted himself for his work in Harvard University by four years abroad, Sumner, in his twenty-seventh year, went to Europe. He spent five months in Germany, where the spirits of Goethe, Richter and Luther lingered upon the scene. In Paris he studied French, French art, French literature, French philosophy, and finally attended the debates in the French Parliament, examining the problems with all the care of a member. He lingered long in England, where he was welcomed and lionized by the foremost men of letters, science, philosophy, as well as by the leading clergymen and statesmen of London. He was an honoured guest not at some, but "at most of the country seats of England and Scotland." He travelled the circuits as the companion of the greatest English judges, Vaughan, Parke and Alderson.

He met on a familiar footing Macaulay and Grote, Carlyle and Jeffrey, Sidney Smith and Wordsworth. But his great year was in Italy, in the Eternal City, the city of Caesar and Cicero, the city of Horace and Virgil. In all, Sumner spent thirty years in preparation for his labour.

Few men in American politics have had a wider horizon, a better equipment in history and literature, or have known so intimately all the great men in the world of his own generation who were worth knowing. He went away to Europe an American; he returned a universal man, a citizen of the world.

Not until 1845, when he was thirty-four years of age, did a really great opportunity come to Sumner. Boston at that far-off day made much of the Fourth of July, and looked forward to the holiday as the great event of the year. During the previous autumn the mayor and aldermen of the city invited Sumner to deliver the oration. Webster made John Adams say, "When we are in our graves, our children will celebrate the day with song and story, with oration and pageant, and the explosion of cannon, and greet it with tears of joy and exultation." But unfortunately the speeches of that time had degenerated into false rhetoric, full of insincerity. In his oration, Sumner left the beaten track and plunged into an unknown way. His theme was the crime of war. He attacked his city and his country for spending millions upon fortifications in the harbour. He affirmed that the best protection of a nation was not dead stones but living patriots and heroes. He called the roll of the great wars of history, and found only one or two, like our Revolution, that were really justifiable. He defined war as the temporary repeal of all the ten commandments, and an enthronement of all the crimes.

In retrospect we know that Sumner overstated his case. His argument against physical force would forbid the police in great cities, the militia on the frontier, and would leave communities exposed to the ravages of brigands on land and pirates by sea. But for the most part, Sumner's argument in favour of peace was sound. To-day all civilized countries are coming to recognize war as a blunder, since questions of justice cannot be settled by brute force.

When we consider that France is an armed camp, Germany and Austria countries of bristling bayonets, that three years at the most critical epoch of the boy's life are consumed in a camp exposed to all manner of temptations and dangers, at the very time when the youth should be mastering his trade or his profession, war seems the capitalization of all the possible follies and wastes. The peasants of Europe plough, each carrying a soldier upon his back. The brick-mason builds, but staggers up the ladder with a heavier load than bricks,--the soldier upon his back. The symbols of nations are still the lion, the eagle and the wolf.

Some political leaders even yet talk about the necessity of an occasional war to put boys upon their mettle, as if invention, the building of railways, the founding of cities, the fighting of economic and social wrongs would not put a man upon his mettle! To put a German on one side of a fence and a Frenchman on the other, and have one peasant empty his shotgun into the bowels of the other is about as n.o.ble as going out into a yard and shooting a Jersey cow. The best way to protect a nation is to build boys into men, through the processes of productive industry. Machine gun and dreadnought will soon be as obsolete in the presence of arbitration and the court at the Hague as an ox-cart is obsolete in the presence of a Pullman palace car.

Wendell Phillips once said that Lord Bacon had a right to lay his hand on the steam engine and say to Watt: "This engine is mine; I gave you the method." So Charles Sumner, after sixty-five years, has a right to stand yonder at the entrance of the Parliament House of Peace, now being completed in the capital of Holland, and say: "I laid the foundation stones of this structure and started a war against war." This oration of Sumner's on "The True Grandeur of Nations" made him a most unpopular figure at home, but Europe soon called for his speech. It was translated into many languages, two hundred and fifty-thousand copies were published and sold, and for the time Sumner was the most talked of man of the year.

Now the one man who was not on the defensive, who was not content to merely stay the forward progress of slavery, but insisted on driving it back into the Gulf and ultimately into the sea, to be drowned forever, was Charles Sumner, with his "Carthago est delenda." His favourite phrase was "freedom is national, slavery is sectional." Burke himself, depicting the sufferings of India, scarcely surpa.s.sed Sumner's speech on the devastation of Kansas by outlaws and guerrillas. Commenting upon the fact that a company of armed slave owners had crossed the borders at night, and destroyed the homes of a group of Northern settlers, Sumner said: "Border incursions, which in barbarous lands fretted and harried an exposed people, are here renewed, with this peculiarity, that our border robbers do not simply levy blackmail and drive off a few cattle, they do not seize a few persons and sweep them away into captivity, like the African slave-traders whom we brand as tyrants, but they commit a succession of deeds in which border sorrows and African wrongs are revived together on American soil, while the whole territory is enslaved. I do not dwell on the anxieties of families exposed to sudden a.s.sault, and lying down to rest with the alarms of war ringing in the ears, not knowing that another day may be spared them. Throughout this bitter winter, with the thermometer thirty degrees below zero, the citizens of Lawrence have slept under arms, with sentinels pacing. In vain do we condemn the cruelties of another age--the refinement of torture, the rack and thumbscrew of the Inquisition; for kindred outrages disgrace these borders. Murder stalks, a.s.sa.s.sination skulks in the tall gra.s.s; where a candidate for the Legislature was gashed with knives and hatchets, and after weltering in blood on the snow-clad earth, trundled along with gaping wounds to fall dead before the face of his wife."

With speeches like these, Sumner attacked slavery. The edge of his argument was keen, but his blows had also the power of sledgehammers.

The Southern leaders were in a frenzy of anger. Harriet Martineau said of the situation that from 1830 to 1850, by general agreement, men in Congress referred to slavery under their breath, believing that only by silence could the Union be preserved. Now came a man who believed that silence was criminal, who would not be bullied, and would be heard, who believed in the Golden Rule, insisted on the Declaration of Independence, and who, in the name of freedom that was national, wished to destroy the Fugitive Slave Law and bring about the immediate and unconditional emanc.i.p.ation of all slaves on the ground.

When two opposing gases come together, an explosion is inevitable. One day in 1856, after the adjournment of the Senate, a Southern member of Congress entered the Chamber, and finding Sumner seated, with his legs under an iron desk screwed to the floor, and, therefore, helpless for defense, with a heavy walking-stick the a.s.sailant beat the powerless man into insensibility, two of his friends protecting him from those who would interfere in his murderous a.s.sault. Having lost enough blood to soak through the carpet and stain the very floor, unconscious, and hovering between life and death, Sumner was carried to a sofa, thence to his hotel. From that time on the scholar endured a living death. He was carried to Paris, where Dr. Brown-Sequard tried "the fire cure" upon the spine. But for years his desk was vacant. Ma.s.sachusetts insisted that the empty seat should proclaim to the world her abhorrence of the barbarism that, unequal to intellectual debate, betakes itself to clubs and murder. Later on Sumner did return to his seat, but he was broken in health, and to the end was tortured with pain. Nevertheless, despite all the physical distresses, he remained the Puritan in politics, adhering inflexibly to his old ideals of liberty. The great lesson of Sumner's life is the importance of fidelity to conviction and singleness of purpose. All Sumner's speeches in Congress, all his lectures on the platform, his appeals to the people of the North during the years when he travelled incessantly, addressing great crowds all over the land, had a single theme, "Liberty is national, Slavery is sectional; Liberty must be established, Slavery must be destroyed." He had his faults and limitations, but men without faults are generally men without force.

Limitations are like banks to a river; they increase the strength of the current for a mill wheel. Sumner's concentration made his enemies call him a narrow man and a fanatic. But Paul was narrow when he said, "This one thing I do." Luther was narrow when he nailed his theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg. Garrison was narrow and a fanatic when he said, "I will not equivocate, I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard." Rus.h.i.+ng between the cliffs of its banks, the Rhine has power through confinement; spreading out over the plains of North Germany, the Rhine becomes a mere marsh, laden with miasm, blown to and fro with the winds.

The tallow candle is small, while the summer lightning flashes across the midnight sky. But for the purpose of studying a guide book in the dark, one lucifer match is worth a sky full of lightning.

Sumner had the courage of his convictions; he was brave as a lion.

Having no physical fear, he was devoid also of moral fear. He had the foresight of far-off things, and could look beyond to-day's defeat to the coming victory for his cause. He had many bitter enemies. His intolerance and intellectual arrogance offended men. When a friend said to President Grant, "Sumner is a skeptic; I fear he does not believe in the Bible," Grant's instant retort was, "Certainly he does not; he did not write it."

But we can forgive much to a man who sacrificed much, and endured the murderous cross of cruelty, obloquy and shame. A lonely and companionless man, at the end, he trod the wine-press of sorrow in solitude and isolation. He had no woman's love to heal his wounded spirit. His one support was the cause he loved. To this cause he clung with a tenacity that was as sublime as it was pathetic. The last time he opened his eyes it was to repeat unconsciously the dearest thoughts of his life, "All humanity is my country." "Take care of my civil rights bill."

When long time has pa.s.sed, many other great names will pa.s.s out of view like tapers that have burned down to the socket. But the name and memory of this Puritan will probably survive, as the highest type of the scholar toiling in the heroic age of the Republic.

V

HORACE GREELEY: THE APPEAL TO THE COMMON PEOPLE

To the work of the statesmen and jurists, the agitators and orators, must now be added the contribution of the editors. A loaf of bread represents many elements united in a single body. The sun lends heat, the clouds lend rain, the soil its chemical elements, the air its rich dust, and the result is the wheaten loaf. Not otherwise is it with the moral and political treasure named the Union and the Emanc.i.p.ation of slaves. The soldier boys at the front stayed the advancing tide of rebellion, and flung back from Pennsylvania waves all tipped with fire.

With not less heroism farmer boys at home toiled in the fields to feed and support the boys in blue. Physicians in the hospitals, nurses at the front, lived also and died, caring for crippled heroes. Mothers and daughters, sisters, sweethearts and wives wrought innumerable garments and hospital supplies, while from full hearts giving inspiration or courageously bearing the miseries of bereavement. Orators went forth to incite, ministers brought divine sanctions to inspire men towards patriotism and self-sacrifice. Statesmen supported the leaders by war measures, manufacturers and bankers stood behind the government. But to all these workers must be added the work of the correspondents at the front, with the editors who consecrated the press to liberty.

The power and wealth of the newspaper of to-day is explained, in no small measure, by the battles of the Civil War, that kindled the interest of millions who had never before read the daily newspaper, but who became after the first battle students of G.o.d's book of daily events. During those terrible days men slept in dread and wakened in fear as to what might have happened on the Potomac or the Mississippi.

Out of these tumultuous conditions the Sunday newspaper was born. Before the battle of Bull Run people of New York and Chicago frowned upon the Sunday newspaper, just as the people of London and Edinburgh to-day will have none of it. But when there were a million men in arms and the whole land trembled with the thunder of cannon and the stroke of battle, anxious parents, fearful wives, knowing that the conflict was on, when Sat.u.r.day's sun set felt that they could not wait till Monday morning for news from the front.

But if the war did much for the press, newspaper men did much for liberty. To supply the people of the country with news from the field, a veritable army of war correspondents was organized, a telegraphic service was organized and built up, plans were laid that developed into the a.s.sociated Press. This telegraphic service became a vast and s.h.i.+ning web lying all over this land, with wires that trembled by night and day, flas.h.i.+ng out now despair, and now hope, to innumerable hearts. Liberty owes a great debt to the press, for it a.s.sembled all the people in one vast speaking chamber, and told them how events were going with the slave and the Union.

If we are to appreciate fully the place of the press during the anti-slavery epoch, we must recall the conditions of American life in the olden time. When the colonies revolted and published their Declaration there were in the United States only forty-three newspapers, most of them weeklies. There were fourteen papers in New England, four in New York State, two in Virginia, two in Carolina and nine in Pennsylvania. The entire forty-three papers, however, held less printed matter than any ten pages of our morning journals. The papers of that time contained no editorials, and were strictly purveyors of the gossip and news of the week, with rude advertis.e.m.e.nts--now a cut of a horse that had strayed, an apprentice that had escaped, a slave that had run away, enlivened, indeed, by frantic and pathetic appeals for the subscribers to pay up their dues. There were no public libraries, no reading rooms, no inns where men could go on winter evenings and read the papers.

That which starved the newspaper was the lack of facilities for distribution. It cost twenty-five cents to send a letter. Most of the correspondents were widely separated lovers. Romeo, knowing that Juliet would not be able to pay twenty-five cents for his weekly effusion, learned the use of the cypher, and by means of a large circle on the outside of the letter and a pink spot within it succeeded in conveying certain mystic symbols of osculation, that told the story of undying fidelity without paying the postman for the letter that was left in his hands. The old postman who jogged along between Philadelphia and New York spent three days on the trip, and put in his time knitting stockings. John Adams tells us that it took him six days on the coach from Boston to New York, and that he rose every morning long before day, took his seat in the cold, dark coach, and listened to the creaking of the wheels on the snow until two hours after dark until late Sat.u.r.day night, cold and exhausted, he entered the little inn near Castle Garden.

For these reasons no newspaper had any circulation beyond its own county.

The first railroads that helped distribute the newspapers began to be built about 1836, and the first s.h.i.+p to carry our newspapers to England sailed in 1838. The first telegraphic message was sent from Was.h.i.+ngton to Baltimore in 1844. The first cablegram in the interest of the press was sent in 1858. Meanwhile the people were isolated, starved, being fully conscious that they were like peasants shut in between mountain walls, while they longed to be citizens of the universe. A single ill.u.s.tration from history will explain the isolation of communities at that time:--the news that Jackson had been elected President in early November did not reach his own State of Tennessee until after New Year's Day!

Horace Greeley entered the scene at a great crisis for the people, and was raised up to fill a national need. G.o.d had prepared the soldiers to fight for the people, the orators to speak to the people, the physicians to heal the people, the educators to instruct the people. He had raised up the statesmen to make the laws, but the world waited for men to cause knowledge to run up and down the land. The common people found a friend in Horace Greeley. He was born in 1811, in Amherst, Ma.s.sachusetts, near the very cabin in which his forefathers had settled. G.o.d gave him a hungry mind, which literally consumed facts of nature and life. Not John Stuart Mill himself was more precocious than Horace Greeley. He was reading without difficulty at three years of age, and read any ordinary book at five. There never was an hour when he was not the best scholar in the little log schoolhouse, where he suffered the long winter through, scorched if he was on the inside circle next to the fire, or freezing if he was on the outer rim.

Reading was the boy's master pa.s.sion. Like the locust, he consumed every dry twig and green branch of knowledge. Before he was ten years of age he believed he had read every book that could be borrowed within a radius of six miles. He read the Bible through, every word, when he was five years old; at eleven he had read Shakespeare and Byron. Spelling was at once a taste and an acquisition. The people of his neighbourhood put the child up against other crack spellers in the school districts.

It is said that in the old evening spelling-bees, his school-teacher, who had him in charge, had to wake the child up when his turn came around to spell. The trustees of Bedford Academy pa.s.sed a resolution permitting Horace Greeley, although outside of the district, to enter their school, while a few teachers raised a purse, and made an offer to his father to send the boy to Phillips Exeter Academy. But pride prevented. Horace Greeley's childhood fell on evil days. Men were miserably poor. It was one long warfare with hunger and cold. The ravages of disease among children were really the result of insufficient food in those poverty-stricken times. Although the mortgage on the farm was a mere bagatelle, the father lost the homestead, and became a hired man on fifty cents a day, on which amount he had to feed and clothe his family. This boy worked by day and studied by night. History and politics, poetry and science, formed the staples of his reading and reflection. For two years he pleaded with his father to apprentice him to a printer; the day that the printer refused the boy and showed the poor farmer and his son the door, brought black gloom to his heart, for when the door of the printing office closed before him, the gates of paradise seemed shut forever.

Trained in the school of experience, and a graduate of the university of hard-knocks, at twenty years of age the boy determined to seek his fortune in New York. There are few scenes more pathetic than the spectacle of this friendless boy starting to walk from Erie, Pa., to this metropolis, then a city of only two hundred thousand people. He had a tow head, a bent form, a singular dress, and carried his entire belongings in a little bundle, supported by a walking stick thrown over his shoulder. Partly on foot, partly on the wagon of some farmer, who gave the traveller a lift, partly on the ca.n.a.l boats, Horace Greeley made his way until, after many days, in August, 1831, he landed at the foot of Wall Street.

Not Benjamin Franklin, landing on the wharves of Philadelphia, and buying a fresh roll on which he breakfasted while he went about looking for work, is so fascinating a figure as this simple-hearted, unworldly, artless, unsophisticated youth, with the step of a clodhopper and the face of an angel. Counting his coin, the boy found he had ten dollars left, and straightway took lodgings on West Street, for which he promised to pay two dollars and a half a week. He soon found a job and began to set type on an edition of the New Testament, with marginal notes in Greek and Latin. In two years he had his own printing office, and in 1834 the youth found his place as the editor of the _New Yorker_, a weekly that first of all took stories and the name of Charles d.i.c.kens to the people of New York. He soon carried the newspaper up to nine thousand subscribers, and a gross income of $25,000. Genius makes its own way. The world is always looking for unique ability. Horace Greeley had the art of putting things. He could make a statement that would go to the intellect like an arrow to the bull's-eye. There is always plenty of room for the man who has a gift and can do a thing better than any one else.

But the panic of 1837 bankrupted Greeley, who knew nothing about the business end of his enterprise. He had 9,000 subscribers, but none of them would pay their bills, and the more his paper grew the worse off he was. One day he struck from the roll the names of 2,500 subscribers. A little later he offered to give the entire establishment to a friend, and pay him $2,000 for taking it off his hands, agreeing to work out by typesetting the large debt. Then came an overture from Thurlow Weed and Benedict, and Greeley founded the _Log Cabin_, a campaign paper advocating the election of General Harrison as president, and sent out the slogan "Tippecanoe and Tyler, too." Politics was his pa.s.sion and delight. An ardent Whig, he loved Henry Clay as an enthusiast, and wors.h.i.+pped him like a disciple. The death of Harrison in 1841, therefore, brought another crisis into Greeley's life. Then he founded the _New York Tribune_. In later years Horace Greeley used to say that the first half of his life was preparatory to founding the _Tribune_, and the other half to building up the newspaper that was his pride.

On April 3, 1841, the _Log Cabin_ contained an announcement of the appearance of "a morning journal of politics, literature and general intelligence." It was to be sold for one penny, was to be free from all immoral reports, to be accurate in its statements, impartial in its judgments, unbia.s.sed and unfettered in its opinions. The _New Yorker_ and the _Log Cabin_ were merged in the new journal. The expenses for the first week of the _Tribune's_ existence were $525, and its income $92.

Greeley was thirty years old, full of health and vigour, pluck and determination. He never knew when he was defeated, and when events knocked him down, he quietly got up again. In seven weeks the _Tribune_ had a circulation of 11,000. Fertile in resources, full of plans to advertise his journal, he gained 20,000 during a single political campaign. Later he sent carrier pigeons to Halifax to bring home special news. When Daniel Webster was to make an important speech in Albany, he sent a case of type up by the night boat, and when the Albany boat reached New York the report of the speech was all ready to be locked up for the press. When the heart sings, the hand works easily. Work for the _Tribune_ was literally food and medicine for Greeley. His daily stint was three or four columns, besides his correspondence, lectures and addresses. For twenty years he had no vacation and no rest. His one ideal was to make the _Tribune_ an accurate and trustworthy guide for the political thinking of the common people.

What literature was to Burke, what patriotism was to Webster, what all mankind was to Paul, that politics and political writing were to Horace Greeley. Dr. Bacon once said of a secretary of the State a.s.sociation of Connecticut that he was "possessed of a statistical devil." And Horace Greeley's _Tribune Almanac_ became so great a power that an envious compet.i.tor once said that Horace Greeley was possessed of a political devil, who helped him in his statistics on Protection. At last the _Tribune_ became a national organ, an acknowledged power. Horace Greeley began to make history, and in 1860 prevented Seward's nomination for the presidency. It was Greeley's personal preference for Governor Bates of Missouri that made possible the nomination of Abraham Lincoln.

As a reformer, Greeley was an extremist in politics. Whatever he wanted, he wanted on the moment, and had no patience in waiting. He was as uncompromising as Garrison, as insistent as Wendell Phillips, and as bitter in his criticism of Lincoln for postponing emanc.i.p.ation as Theodore Parker himself could have been. When the South seceded Greeley said that we must "let the erring sisters go." He thought that the North could do without the South quite as well as the South could do without the North; that is no true marriage that binds husband and wife together with chains when love has fled away. He urged that if any six States would send their representatives to Was.h.i.+ngton and say: "We wish to withdraw from the Union," the North had better let those States depart.

It was not that Greeley felt it was best to dissolve the Union, but that he loathed the idea of compelling States by force to remain in it.

For a long time he carried the head-lines "On to Richmond" and roused the North into such a frenzy of feeling that he goaded the President, the Cabinet and General Winfield Scott into action before they were ready. Scott was at the head of the army. He was a Virginian, and loved the Old Dominion State with every drop of blood in his veins. The great men of the South on their knees begged Scott to join the South and lead the host of rebellion. Scott answered that he had sworn a solemn oath to defend the Const.i.tution and the country, and made himself an outcast that he might be true to G.o.d and the Union. But the cry "On to Richmond"

became the cry of an unreasoning mult.i.tude of editors and their readers.

All unprepared, the advance was ordered and Bull Run was the result.

Greeley, being the leading editor of the land, was made the scapegoat--the target of universal criticism. The barbed arrows found his brain, and becoming excited, sleepless and overwrought, Greeley went into an attack of brain fever, from which he recovered only after long time, to register a vow that he would never again discuss the management of the army. Then came his editorials urging emanc.i.p.ation, ill.u.s.trated by "The prayer of twenty millions," and Lincoln's wonderful reply, written to Greeley, "in deference to an old friend whose heart I have always found to be right." It is honour enough for any editor to have called out Lincoln's letter (August 22, 1862), a letter that placed the President in the first rank as a master of epigrammatic speech, and put in a nutsh.e.l.l the whole position of the government in relation to the war.

Greeley was wrong again in 1864, when he met certain representatives of the South at Niagara Falls and suggested a plan of adjustment for the ending of the war. These so-called peace commissioners, without doubt, used Greeley as a convenient tool, and exhibited him as Don Quixote, riding forth upon a windmill enterprise. But Greeley had the courage of his opinions; threats could not cow him nor blows terrify him, nor scorn and hate drive him from a position which he had taken upon grounds of conscience and sound reasoning.

During the draft riots, in 1863, the mob attacked the _Tribune_, smas.h.i.+ng the windows and doors, and it seemed a miracle that Greeley was not killed. When his friends rescued him the great editor seemed quite unwilling to be forced into a place of safety. "Well, it doesn't matter; I have done my work; I may as well be killed by the mob as die in my bed; between now and the next time is only a little while."

In May, 1867, Greeley signed the bail bond for Jefferson Davis, ex-president of the Confederacy. Burning with anger his friends in the Union League Club of New York called a meeting to expel him. He returned a defiant answer: "Gentlemen, I shall not attend your meeting; I have an engagement out of town and I shall keep it. I do not recognize you as capable of judging me. You evidently regard me as a weak sentimentalist, misled by a maudlin philosophy. I arraign you as narrow-minded blockheads, who would like to be useful to a great and good cause but don't know how. Your attempt to base a great and enduring party on the hate and wrath engendered by a b.l.o.o.d.y civil war is as though you should plant a colony on an iceberg which had somehow drifted into a tropical ocean. I tell you here that out of a life earnestly devoted to the good of human kind, your children will select my going to Richmond and signing that bail bond as the wisest act of my life, and will feel that it did more for freedom and humanity than all of you were competent to do though you lived to the age of Methuselah. Understand, once for all, that I dare you and defy you. So long as any man was seeking to overthrow our government he was my enemy; from the hour when he laid down his arms he was my formerly erring countryman."

In 1872, Greeley became the Republican who was a candidate of the Democratic party for the presidency, and was defeated by Grant.

Doubtless he was actuated by the highest sense of duty. He took the stump and spoke in every great city in the North and South, without swerving a hair's breadth in his pacific att.i.tude towards the South, or in his champions.h.i.+p of the coloured race. His great work, "The American Conflict," on which he spent ten hours a day for many, many months, had made Greeley a master of all the facts bearing upon the reconciliation of the North and South. He showed almost superhuman endurance during that intense campaign. But Grant had captured the imagination of the people. The old soldiers voted as one solid band, the Republican party was looked upon as the saviour of the nation, and the people doubted Mr.

Greeley's fitness for the presidency in a national crisis. He was defeated in November, and went home to watch over his wife during her illness and death. Just before she died, he wrote a friend saying: "I am a broken old man; I have not slept one hour in twenty-four; if she lasts, poor soul, another week, I shall go before her." Sleeplessness brought on brain fever, his old enemy, and on November 29th, the worn-out editor fell on sleep.

His fellow countrymen wakened to realize that the great tribune of the people had left the country poor. His own city rose as one man, in mood of profound grief and affectionate admiration and sympathy. His body lay in state in our city hall the long day through. The poor poured by in unending column, to pay their last tribute to a man who had never betrayed the people. The funeral services were attended by the president and vice-president of the United States, the president-elect, and numerous officials and citizens of distinction. Mr. Beecher made one address and then Greeley's pastor, Dr. Chapin, spoke. Men forgot the wreck of his political fortunes and the tragedy of his later career. He expressed the ambition of his life in the wish "that the stone which covers my ashes may bear to future eyes the still intelligible inscription: 'Founder of the New York Tribune.'"