Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White

which, when any money was tendered him, he was obliged to consult in order to know, first, whether the bill was a counterfeit, as it frequently was; secondly, whether it was on a solvent bank; and thirdly, if good, what discount should be deducted from the face of it. Under this system bank-notes varied in value from week to week, and even from day to day, with the result that all buying and selling became a sort of gambling.

When, then, Mr. Chase established the new system of national banks so based that every bill-holder had security for the entire amount which his note represented, so controlled that a bill issued from any little bank in the remotest State, or even in the remotest corner of a Territory, was equal to one issued by the richest bank in Wall Street, so engraved that counterfeiting was practically impossible, there was an immense gain to every man, woman, and child in the country.

To appreciate this gain one must have had experience of the older system. I remember well the panic of 1857, which arose while I was traveling in eastern and northern New England, and that, arriving in the city of Salem, Ma.s.sachusetts, having tendered, in payment of my hotel bill, notes issued by a leading New York city bank, guaranteed under what was known as the ""Safety Fund System,"" they were refused. The result was that I had to leave my wife at the hotel, go to Boston, and there manage to get Ma.s.sachusetts money.

But this was far short of the worst. Professor Roberts of Cornell University once told me that, having in those days collected a considerable debt in one of the Western States, he found the currency so worthless that he attempted to secure New York funds, but that the rate of exchange was so enormous that, as the only way of saving anything, he bought a large quant.i.ty of cheap clothing, shipped it to the East, and sold it for what it would bring.

As to the way in which the older banking operations were carried on in some of the Western States, Governor Felch of Michigan once gave me some of his experiences as a bank examiner, and one of them especially amused me. He said that he and a brother examiner made an excursion through the State in a sleigh with a pair of good horses in order to inspect the various banks established in remote villages and hamlets which had the power of issuing currency based upon the specie contained in their vaults. After visiting a few of these, and finding that each had the amount of specie required by law, the examiners began to note a curious similarity between the specie packages in these different banks, and before long their attention was drawn to another curious fact, which was that wherever they went they were preceded by a sleigh drawn by especially fleet horses. On making a careful examination, they found that this sleigh bore from bank to bank a number of kegs of specie sufficient to enable each bank in its turn to show the examiners a temporary basis in hard money for its output of paper.

Such was the state of things which the national banks remedied, and the system had the additional advantage of being elastic, so that any little community which needed currency had only to combine its surplus capital and establish a bank of issue.

But throughout the country there were, as there will doubtless always be, a considerable number of men who, not being able to succeed themselves, distrusted and disliked the successful. There was also a plentiful supply of demagogues skilful in appealing to the prejudices of the ignorant, envious, or perverse, and as a result came a cry against the national banks.

In Mr. Conkling"s Ithaca speech (1878), he argued the question with great ability and force. He had a sledge- hammer way which broke down all opposition, and he exulted in it. One of his favorite tactics, which greatly amused his auditors, was to lead some prominent gainsayer in his audience to interrupt him, whereupon, in the blandest way possible, he would invite him to come forward, urge him to present his views, even help him to do so, and then, having gradually entangled him in his own sophistries and made him ridiculous, the senator would come down upon him with arguments--cogent, pithy, sarcastic--much like the fist of a giant upon a mosquito.

In whatever town Mr. Conkling argued the question of the national banks, that subject ceased to be a factor in politics: it was settled; his attacks upon the anti-bank demagogues annihilated their arguments among thinking men, and his sarcasm made them ridiculous among unthinking men. This was the sort of thing which he did best. While utterly deficient in constructive power, his destructive force was great indeed, and in this campaign it was applied, as it was not always applied, for the advantage of the country.

The other great speaker in the campaign was General James A. Garfield, then a member of the House of Repre- sentatives. My acquaintance with him had begun several years before at Syracuse, when my old school friend, his college mate, Charles Elliot Fitch, brought him into my library. My collection of books was even at that date very large, and Garfield, being delighted with it, soon revealed his scholarly qualities. It happened that not long before this I had bought in London several hundred volumes from the library left by the historian Buckle, very many of them bearing copious annotations in his own hand. Garfield had read Buckle"s ""History of Civilization in England""

with especial interest, and when I presented to him and discussed with him some of these annotated volumes, there began a friendly relation between us which ended only with his life.

I also met him under less favorable circ.u.mstances.

Happening to be in Washington at the revelation of the Crdit Mobilier operations, I found him in the House of Representatives, and evidently in the depths of suffering.

An effort was making to connect him with the scandal, and while everything I know of him convinces me that he was not dishonest, he had certainly been imprudent. This he felt, and he asked me, in an almost heart-broken tone, if I really believed that this had forever destroyed his influence in the country. I answered that I believed nothing of the kind; that if he came out in a straightforward, manly way, without any of the prevarication which had so greatly harmed some others, he would not be injured, and the result showed that this advice was good.

On our arrival at the great hall in Ithaca (October 28, 1878), we found floor and stage packed in every part.

Never had a speaker a better audience. There were present very many men of all parties anxious to hear the currency question honestly discussed, and among them many of the more thoughtful sort misled by the idea that a wrong had been done to the country in the restoration of the currency to a sound basis; and there was an enormous attendance of students from the university.

As Garfield began he showed the effects of fatigue from the many speeches he had been making for weeks,--morning, noon, and night; but soon he threw himself heartily into the subject, and of all the thousands of political speeches I have heard it was the most effective. It was eloquent, but it was far more than that; it was HONESTLY argumentative; there was no sophistry of any sort; every subject was taken up fairly and every point dealt with thoroughly. One could see the supports of the Greenback party vanishing as he went on. His manner was the very opposite of Mr. Conkling"s: it was kindly, hearty, as of neighbor with neighbor,--indeed, every person present, even if greenbacker or demagogue, must have said within himself, ""This man is a friend arguing with friends; he makes me his friend, and now speaks to me as such.""

The main line of his argument finished, there came something even finer; for, inspired by the presence of the great ma.s.s of students, he ended his speech with an especial appeal to them. Taking as his test the noted pa.s.sage in the letter written by Macaulay to Henry Randall, the biographer of Jefferson,--the letter in which Macaulay prophesied destruction to the American Republic when poverty should pinch and discontent be wide-spread in the country, --he appealed to these young men to see to it that this prophecy should not come true; he asked them to follow in this, as in similar questions, their reason and not their prejudices, and from this he went on with a statement of the motives which ought to govern them and the line they ought to pursue in the effort to redeem their country.

Never was speech more successful. It carried the entire audience, and left in that region hardly a shred of the greenback theory. When the election took place it was observed that in those districts where Conkling and Garfield had spoken, the greenback heresy was annihilated, while in other districts which had been counted as absolutely sure for the Republican party, and to which, therefore, these orators had not been sent, there was a great increase in the vote for currency inflation.

I have often alluded to this result as an answer to those who say that speaking produces no real effect on the convictions of men regarding party matters. Some speaking does not, but there is a kind of speaking which does, and of this were these two masterpieces, so different from each other in matter and manner, and yet converging upon the same points, intellectual and moral.

Before I close regarding Garfield, it may be well to give a few more recollections of him. The meeting ended, we drove to my house on the university grounds, and shortly before our arrival he asked me, ""How did you like my speech?"" I answered: ""Garfield, I have known you too long and think too highly of you to flatter you; but I will simply say what I would say under oath: it was the best speech I ever heard. ""This utterance of mine was deliberate, expressing my conviction, and he was evidently pleased with it.

Having settled down in front of the fire in my library, we began to discuss the political situation, and his talk remains to me among the most interesting things of my life. He said much regarding the history of the currency question and his relations to it, and from this ran rapidly and suggestively through a mult.i.tude of other questions and the relations of public men to them. One thing which struck me was his judicially fair and even kindly estimates of men who differed from him. Very rarely did he speak harshly or sharply of any one, differing in this greatly from Mr. Conkling, who, in all his conversations, and especially in one at that same house not long before, seemed to consider men who differed from him as enemies of the human race.

Under Mr. Hayes, the successor of General Grant in the Presidency, I served first as a commissioner at the Paris Exposition, and then as minister to Germany. Both these services will be discussed in the chapters relating to my diplomatic life, but I may refer briefly to my acquaintance with him at this period.

I had met him but once previously, and that was during his membership of Congress when he came to enter his son at Cornell. I had then been most favorably impressed by his large, sincere, manly way. On visiting Washington to receive my instructions before going to Berlin, I saw him several times, and at each meeting my respect for him was increased. Driving to Arlington, walking among the soldiers"

graves there, standing in the portico of General Lee"s former residence, and viewing from the terrace the Capitol in the distance, he spoke very n.o.bly of the history we had both personally known, of the sacrifices it had required, and of the duties which it now imposed. At his dinner- table I heard him discuss with his Secretary of State, Mr.

Evarts, a very interesting question--the advisability of giving members of the cabinet seats in the Senate and House of Representatives, as had been arranged in the const.i.tution of the so-called Confederate States; but of this I shall speak in another chapter.

It should further be said regarding Mr. Hayes that, while hardly any President was ever so systematically denounced and depreciated, he was one of the truest and best men who has ever held our Chief Magistracy. I remember, just at the close of his administration, dining with an eminent German statesman who said to me: ""I have watched the course of your President with more and more surprise. We have been seeing constantly in our German newspapers extracts from American journals holding up your President to contempt as an ignoramus, but more and more I have seen that he is one of the most substantial, honest, and capable Presidents that you have had.""

This opinion was amply justified by what I saw of Mr.

Hayes after the close of his Presidency. Twice I met him during conferences at Lake Mohonk, at which matters relating to the improvement of the freedmen and Indians were discussed, and in each he took broad, strong, and statesmanlike views based on thoughtful experience and permeated by honesty.

I also met him at a great public meeting at Cleveland, where we addressed some four thousand people from the same platform, and again I was impressed by his manly, far-seeing grasp of public questions.

As to my after relations with Garfield, I might speak of various pleasant interviews, but will allude to just one incident which has a pathetic side. During my first residence in Germany as minister of the United States, I one day received a letter from him asking me to secure for him the best editions of certain leading Greek and Latin cla.s.sics, adding that it had long been his earnest desire to re-read them, and that now, as he had been elected to the United States Senate, he should have leisure to carry out his purpose. I had hardly sent him what he desired when the news came that he had been nominated to the Presidency, and so all his dream of literary leisure vanished. A few months later came the news of his a.s.sa.s.sination.

My term of service as minister in Berlin being ended, I arrived in America in September, 1881, and, in accordance with custom, went to present my respects to the new President and his Secretary of State. They were both at Long Branch. Mr. Blaine I saw and had with him a very interesting conversation, but President Garfield I could not see.

His life was fast ebbing out, and a week later, on Sunday morning, I heard the bells tolling and knew that his last struggle was over.

So closed a career which, in spite of some defects, was beautiful and n.o.ble. Great hopes had been formed regarding his Presidency, and yet, on looking back over his life, I have a strong feeling that his a.s.sa.s.sination was a service rendered to his reputation. I know from those who had full information that during his campaign for the Presidency he had been forced to make concessions and pledges which would have brought great trouble upon him had he lived through his official term. Gifted and good as he was, advantage had been taken of his kindly qualities, and he would have had to pay the penalty.

It costs me a pang to confess my opinion that the administration of Mr. Arthur, a man infinitely his inferior in nearly all the qualities which men most justly admire, was far better than the administration which Mr Garfield would have been allowed to give to the country.

Upon my return to the university I was asked by my fellow-citizens of Ithaca in general, as also by the university faculty and students, to give the public address at the celebration of President Garfield"s funeral. This I did and never with a deeper feeling of loss.

One thing in the various tributes to him had struck me painfully: Throughout the whole country his career was constantly referred to in funeral addresses as showing how a young American under all the disadvantages of poverty could rise to the highest possible position. I have always thought that such statements, as they are usually presented, are injurious to the character and lowering to the aspirations of young men. I took pains, therefore, to show that while Garfield had risen under the most discouraging circ.u.mstances from complete poverty, his rise was due to something other than mere talent and exertion --that it was the result of talent and exertion originating in n.o.ble instincts and directed to worthy ends. Garfield"s life proves this abundantly, and whatever may have been his temporary weakness under the fearful pressure brought upon him toward the end of his career, these instincts and purposes remained his main guiding influences from first to last.

CHAPTER XII

ARTHUR, CLEVELAND, AND BLAINE--1881-1884

The successor of Garfield, President Arthur, I had met frequently in my old days at Albany. He was able, and there never was the slightest spot upon his integrity; but in those early days n.o.body dreamed that he was to attain any high distinction. He was at that time charged with the main military duties under the governor; later he became collector of the port of New York, and in both positions showed himself honest and capable. He was lively, jocose, easy-going, with little appearance of devotion to work, dashing off whatever he had to do with ease and accuracy. At various dinner-parties and social gatherings, and indeed at sundry State conventions, where I met him, he seemed, more than anything else, a bon vivant, facile and good-natured.

His nomination to the Vice-Presidency, which on the death of Garfield led him to the Presidency, was very curious, and an account of it given me by an old friend who had previously been a member of the Garfield cabinet and later an amba.s.sador in Europe, was as follows:

After the defeat of the ""Stalwarts,"" who had fought so desperately for the renomination of General Grant at the Chicago Convention of 1880, the victorious side of the convention determined to concede to them, as an olive- branch, the Vice-Presidency, and with this intent my informant and a number of other delegates who had been especially active in preventing Grant"s renomination went to the room of the New York delegation, which had taken the leading part in his support, knocked at the door, and called for Mr. Levi P. Morton, previously a member of Congress, and, several years later, Vice-President of the United States and Governor of New York. Mr. Morton came out into the corridor, and thereupon the visitors said to him, ""We wish to give the Vice-Presidency to New York as a token of good will, and you are the man who should take it; don"t fail to accept it."" Mr. Morton answered that he had but a moment before, in this conference of his delegation, declined the nomination. At this the visitors said, ""Go back instantly and tell them that you have reconsidered and will accept; we will see that the convention nominates you."" Mr. Morton started to follow this advice, but was just too late: while he was outside the door he had been taken at his word, the place which he had declined had been offered to General Arthur, he had accepted it, and so the latter and not Mr. Morton became President of the United States.

Up to the time when the Presidency devolved upon him, General Arthur had shown no qualities which would have suggested him for that high office, and I remember vividly that when the news of Garfield"s a.s.sa.s.sination arrived in Berlin, where I was then living as minister, my first overwhelming feeling was not, as I should have expected, horror at the death of Garfield, but stupefaction at the elevation of Arthur. It was a common saying of that time among those who knew him best, "" "Chet" Arthur President of the United States! Good G.o.d!"" But the change in him on taking the Presidency was amazing. Up to that time he had been known as one of Mr. Conkling"s henchmen, though of the better sort. As such he had held the collectorship of the port of New York, and as such, during his occupancy of the Vice-Presidency, he had visited Albany and done his best, though in vain, to secure Mr. Conkling"s renomination; but immediately on his elevation to the Presidency all this was changed, and there is excellent authority for the statement that when Mr. Conkling wished him to continue, as President, in the subservient position which he had taken as Vice-President, Mr.

Arthur had refused, and when taxed with ingrat.i.tude he said: ""No. For the Vice-Presidency I was indebted to Mr. Conkling, but for the Presidency of the United States my debt is to the Almighty.""

The new President certainly showed this spirit in his actions. Rarely has there been a better or more dignified administration; the new Secretary of State, Mr. Frelinghuysen, was in every respect fitted for his office, and the other men whom Mr. Arthur summoned about him were satisfactory.

Although I had met him frequently, and indeed was on cordial terms with him before his elevation to the Presidency, I never met him afterward. During his whole administration my duties in connection with Cornell University completely absorbed me. I was one of the last university presidents who endeavored to unite professorial with executive duties, and the burden was heavy.

The university had made at that period its first great sale of lands, and this involved a large extension of its activity; the famous Fiske lawsuit, involving nearly two millions of dollars, had come on; there was every sort of detail requiring attention at the university itself, and addresses must be given in various parts of the country, more especially before alumni a.s.sociations, to keep them in proper relations with the inst.i.tution; so that I was kept completely out of politics, was hardly ever in Washington during this period, and never at the White House.

The only matter which connected me with politics at all was my conviction, which deepened more and more, as to the necessity of reform in the civil service; and on this subject I conferred with Mr. Dorman B. Eaton, Mr. John Jay, and others at various times, and prepared an article for the ""North American Review"" in which I presented not only the general advantages of civil service reform, but its claims upon men holding public office. My main effort was to show, what I believed then and believe still more strongly now, that, evil as the whole spoils system was in its effects on the country, it was quite as vexatious and fertile in miseries and disappointments to political leaders. In the natural order of things, where there is no spoils system, and where the bestowal of offices is not in the hands of senators, representatives, and the like, these senators and representatives, when once elected, have time to discharge their duties, and with very little pains can maintain their hold upon their const.i.tuents as long as they please. The average man, when he has cast his vote for a candidate and sees that candidate elected, takes an interest in him; the voter, feeling that he has, in a certain sense, made an investment in the man thus elected, is naturally inclined to regard him favorably and to continue him in office. But with the spoils system, no sooner is a candidate elected than, as has been well observed, for every office which he bestows he makes ""ninety-nine enemies and one ingrate."" The result is that the unsuccessful candidates for appointment return home bent on taking revenge by electing another person at the end of the present inc.u.mbent"s term, and hence comes mainly the wretched system of rapid rotation in office, which has been in so many ways injurious to our country.

This and other points I urged, but the evil was too deeply seated. Time was required to remove all doubts which were raised. I found with regret that my article had especially incurred the bitter dislike of my old adviser, Thurlow Weed, the great friend of Mr. Seward and former autocrat of Whig and Republican parties in the State of New York. Being entirely of the old school, he could not imagine the government carried on without the spoils system.

On one of my visits to New York in the interest of this reform, I met at dinner Mr. William M. Evarts, then at the head of the American bar, who had been Secretary of State under Mr. Hayes, and who was afterward senator from the State of New York. I had met him frequently before and heard much of his brilliant talk, and especially his admirable stories of all sorts.

But on this occasion Mr. Evarts surpa.s.sed himself. I recall a series of witty repartees and charming ill.u.s.trations, but will give merely one of the latter. Something was said of people"s hobbies, whereupon Mr. Evarts said that a gentleman visiting a lunatic asylum went into a room where several patients were a.s.sembled, and saw one of them astride a great dressing-trunk, holding fast to a rope drawn through the handle, seesawing and urging it forward as if it were a horse at full speed. The visitor, to humor the patient, said, ""That "s a fine horse you are riding."" ""Why, no,"" said the patient, ""this is not a horse."" ""What is it, then?"" asked the visitor. The patient answered, ""It "s a hobby."" ""But,"" said the visitor, ""what "s the difference between a horse and a hobby?"" ""Why,"" said the patient, ""there "s an enormous difference; a horse you can get off from, a hobby you can"t.""

As to civil-service reform, my efforts to convert leading Republicans by personal appeals were continued, and in some cases with good results; but I found it very difficult to induce party leaders to give up the immediate and direct exercise of power which the spoils system gave them.

Especially was it difficult with sundry editors of leading papers and party managers; but time has wrought upon them, and some of those who were most obdurate in those days are doing admirable work in these. The most serious effort I ever made was to convert my old friend and cla.s.smate, Thomas C. Platt, the main manager and, as he was called, the ""boss"" of the Republican party in the State of New York, a man of great influence throughout the Union. He treated me civilly, but evidently considered me a ""crank."" He, like Mr. Thurlow Weed, was unable to understand how a party could be conducted without the promise of spoils for the victors; but I have lived to see him take a better view. As I write these lines word comes that his influence is thrown in favor of the bill for reforming the civil service of the State of New York, championed by my nephew, Mr. Horace White, a member of the present State Senate, and favored by Colonel Roosevelt, the governor.

It was upon a civil-service errand in Philadelphia that I met, after a long separation, my old friend and cla.s.smate Wayne MacVeagh. He had been minister to Constantinople, Attorney-General in the Garfield cabinet, and, at a later period, amba.s.sador at Rome. At this period he had returned to practise his profession in Philadelphia, and at his hospitable table I met a number of interesting men, and on one occasion sat next an eminent member of the Philadelphia bar, Judge Biddle. A subject happened to come up in which I had taken great interest, namely, American laxity in the punishment of crime, and especially the crime of murder, whereupon Judge Biddle dryly remarked: ""The taking of life, after due process of law, as a penalty for murder, seems to be the only form of taking life to which the average American has any objection.""

In the autumn of 1882 came a tremendous reverse for the Republican party. There was very wide-spread disgust at the apparent carelessness of those in power regarding the redemption of pledges for reforms. Judge Folger, who had been nominated to the governorship of New York, had every qualification for the place, but an opinion had widely gained ground that President Arthur, who had called Judge Folger into his cabinet as Secretary of the Treasury, was endeavoring to interfere with the politics of the State, and to put Judge Folger into the governor"s chair. There was a suspicion that ""the machine"" was working too easily and that some of its wheels were of a very bad sort. All this, coupled with slowness in redeeming platform pledges, brought on the greatest disaster the Republican party had ever experienced. In November, 1882, Mr. Cleveland was elected governor by the most enormous majority ever known, and the defeat extended not only through the State of New York, but through a number of other States. It was bitter medicine, but, as it afterward turned out, very salutary.