Chapter VII

I suppose that every young man presently attempting journalism feels something of the pride and joy I felt when I began it; though pride and joy are weak words for the passion I had for the work. If my soul was more in my verse, I did not know it, and I am sure my heart was as much in my more constant labors. I could find time for poetry only in my brief noonings, and at night after the last proofs had gone to the composing-room, or I had come home from the theater or from an evening party, but the long day was a long delight to me over my desk in the room next my senior. To come upon some inviting fact, or some flattering chance for mischief in an exchange, above all a Northern contemporary with Southern principles, and to take this to him and talk it or laugh it over and leave it with him, or bring it back and exploit it myself, was something that made every day a heyday. We shunned personalities, then the stock in trade of most newspaper wits; we meant to deal only with the public character of men and things. It seems to have been all pleasure as I tell it, but there was a great deal of duty in it, too; though if burlesquing the opposite opinions of our contemporaries happened to be a duty, so much the better. If it were to do again, I should not do it, or not so much; but at the time I cannot deny that I liked doing it. So, too, I liked to write cutting criticisms of the books which it was part of my work to review; and I still hope to be forgiven by the kindness which I sinned against without winning the authority as reviewer which I aimed at.

I had much better been at the theater than writing some of the things I then wrote. But it may as well be owned here as anywhere that whatever might have been its value to me as a school of morals the theater was not good society in Columbus then; and I was now in a way of being good society, and had been so for some time. The rehabilitation of our newspaper was coincident with the rise of the Republican party to the power which it held almost unbroken for fifty years. It had of course lost the Presidential election in 1856, but its defeat left it in better case than an untimely victory might have done. Ohio had, at any rate, a Republican Governor in a man afterward of a prime national importance, and already known as a statesman-like politician well fitted by capacity and experience for that highest office which never ceased to be his aim while he lived. Salmon P. Chase had been a lawyer of the first standing in Cincinnati, where, although a Democrat, he had early distinguished himself by his services in behalf of friendless negroes. The revolt of the whole self-respecting North against the repeal of the Missouri Compromise swept him finally out of the Democracy into that provisional organization which loosely knew itself as the Anti-Nebraska party; but before he was chosen Governor by it he had already served a term in the United States Senate, where with one other Freesoiler he held the balance of power in an otherwise evenly divided body. He was a large, handsome man, of a very senatorial presence, and now in the full possession of his uncommon powers; a man of wealth and breeding, educated perhaps beyond any of the other Presidential aspirants except Seward, versed in the world, and accustomed to ease and state; and he gave more dignity to his office, privately and publicly, than it had yet known among us. He lived in a pretty house of the Gothic make then much affected by our too eclectic architecture, with his brilliant young daughter at the head of it; for the Governor was a widower.

He was naturally much interested in the new control of the Republican organ, and it would not be strange if he had taken some active part in its rehabilitation, but I do not know that he had. At any rate, he promptly made the editorial force welcome to his house, where Reed and I were asked to Thanksgiving dinner; Mr. Cooke had not yet brought his family to Columbus. Thanksgiving was not then observed on the present national terms; it was still the peculiar festival of New England, and in our capital its recognition was confined to families of New England origin; our Kentuckians and Virginians and Marylanders kept Christmas, though the custom of New-Year's calls was domesticated among us with people of all derivations, and in due time suffered the lapse which it fell into in its native New York. Our Governor was born in New Hampshire, where his family name was already distinguished in public life; and he kept the Thanksgiving which he had probably not officially invited his fellow-citizens to commemorate. I suppose we had turkey for our dinner, but I am surer of the manner than the make of the feast, for it was served with a formality new to my unworldly experience. The turkey was set before the governor who carved it, and then it was brought to the guests by a shining black butler, instead of being passed from hand to hand among them, as I had always seen it done. That was, in fact, my first dinner in society.

The young editors were the only guests; and after dinner the family did not forbid itself the gaieties befitting its young people's years. We had charades, then much affected in society, and I believe the Governor alone was not pressed into helping dramatize the riddle to be finally guessed as Canterbury Bell. I do not remember how the secret was kept to the end, or guessed from the successive parts. My fear and pride were put to a crucial test in the first dissyllable, which the girlish hostess assigned me, and nothing but the raillery glancing through the deep lashes of her brown eyes which were very beautiful, could have brought me to the self-sacrifice involved. I lived through the delight and anguish of that supreme evening, and found myself, as it were, almost immediately afterward in society. It could not have been quite immediately, for when I called at the Governor's soon after New-Year's and he asked me if I had made many New-Year's calls I answered that I had not made any because I knew no one. Then he said I might have called at _his_ house; and I did not fail, on this kind reproach, to go to Miss Chase's next reception, where again she laughed at my supposed dignity in refusing to dance; she would not suppose my inability.

But before entering that field so flowery fair which society now seemed to open before me perhaps I had better continue my recollections of a man whose public career has its peculiar pathos. It was his constant, his intense, his very just desire to be President; no man of his long time was fitter to be President, unless his ambition was a foible that unfitted him. He accepted not the first place, but the second place, in the administration of the man whose place as President he had so ardently longed to fill, and after he had resigned his governorship of Ohio and gone to Washington as Secretary of the Treasury under Lincoln I saw him there when I went to look after the facts of the consulship which had been offered me. His fellow Ohioans must have swarmed upon him in the eagerness for public service afterward much noted in them, and I do not blame him for imagining that I had called upon him in the hope that he would urge my case upon the President. He said, rather eagerly, that he had no influence with the administration (it likewise became Lincoln's own humorous complaint) quite before I had asked it, and was sorry that he could not help me; and when I thanked him and remarked that I believed the President's private secretaries, Hay and Nicolay, were interested in my affair, he said, with visible relief, Oh well, then, I was in the best possible hands; as indeed it turned out. I had heard before that he had spoken to the President in my behalf, and he may very well have felt that he had done his best.

Four years later, and ten years after my first acquaintance with Chase, I went to call upon him at his hotel in New York, when I was lately returned from my consular post in Venice, and ventured to offer him my congratulations upon his accession to the chief-justiceship of the Supreme Court. He answered bluntly that it was not the sort of office he had aspired to, and intimated that it was a defeat of his real aspirations. He was not commonly a frank man, I believe, but perhaps he felt that he could be frank with the boy I must still have seemed even at twenty-eight, bringing the devotion he possibly over-imagined in me. Since then those words of his, which were the last I was to hear from him, have been of an increasing appeal with me; and if the Republicans had not had Lincoln I still think it was a pity they could not have had Chase. At the end, the Democrats would not have him.