1881-1884

On July 2, 1881, an attempt was made to assassinate President Garfield, at the Pennsylvania Station, Washington, where he was about to board a train. I heard the news first on the railroad train at Williamstown, Mass., where the President was expected in three or four days.

“Absurd, impossible,” I said. Why should anyone want to kill him? He had nothing but that which he had earned with his own brain and hand. He had fought his own way up from country home to college hall, and from college hall to the House of Representatives, and from House of Representatives to the Senate Chamber, and from the Senate Chamber to the Presidential chair. Why should anyone want to kill him? He was not a despot who had been treading on the rights of the people. There was nothing of the Nero or the Robespierre in him. He had wronged no man. He was free and happy himself, and wanted all the world free and happy. Why should anyone want to kill him? He had a family to shepherd and educate, a noble wife and a group of little children leaning on his arm and holding his hand, and who needed him for many years to come.

Only a few days before, I had paid him a visit. He was a bitter antagonist of Mormonism, and I was in deep sympathy with his Christian endeavours in this respect. I never saw a more anxious or perturbed countenance than James A. Garfield’s, the last time I met him. It seemed a great relief to him to turn to talk to my child, who was with me. He had suffered enough abuse in his political campaign to suffice for one lifetime. He was then facing three or four years of insult and contumely greater than any that had been heaped upon his predecessors. He had proposed greater reforms, and by so much he was threatened to endure worse outrages. His term of office was just six months, but he accomplished what forty years of his predecessors had failed to do the complete and eternal pacification of the North and the South. There were more public meetings of sympathy for him, at this time, in the South than there were in the North. His death-bed in eight weeks did more for the sisterhood of States than if he had lived eight years two terms of the Presidency. His cabinet followed the reform spirit of his leadership. Postmaster General James made his department illustrious by spreading consternation among the scoundrels of the Star Route, saving the country millions of dollars. Secretary Windom wrought what the bankers and merchants called a financial miracle. Robert Lincoln, the son of another martyred President, was Secretary of War.

Guiteau was no more crazy than thousands of other place-hunters. He had been refused an office, and he was full of unmingled and burning revenge. There was nothing else the matter with him. It was just this: “You haven’t given me what I want; now I’ll kill you.” For months after each presidential inauguration the hotels of Washington are roosts for these buzzards. They are the crawling vermin of this nation. Guiteau was no rarity. There were hundreds of Guiteaus in Washington after the inauguration, except that they had not the courage to shoot. I saw them some two months or six weeks after. They were mad enough to do it. I saw it in their eyes.

They killed two other Presidents, William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor. I know the physicians called the disease congestion of the lungs or liver, but the plain truth was that they were worried to death; they were trampled out of life by place-hunters. Three Presidents sacrificed to this one demon are enough. I urged Congress at the next session to start a work of presidential emancipation. Four Presidents have recommended civil service reform, and it has amounted to little or nothing. But this assassination I hoped would compel speedy and decisive action.

James A. Garfield was prepared for eternity. He often preached the Gospel. “I heard him preach, he preached for me in my pulpit,” a minister told me. He preached once in Wall Street to an excited throng, after Lincoln was shot. He preached to the wounded soldiers at Chickamauga. He preached in the United States Senate, in speeches of great nobility. When a college boy, camped on the mountains, he read the Scriptures aloud to his companions. After he was shot, he declared that he trusted all in the Lord’s hand was ready to live or die.

“If the President die, what of his successor?” was the great question of the hour. I did not know Mr. Arthur at that time, but I prophesied that Mr. Garfield’s policies would be carried out by his successor.

I consider President Garfield was a man with the most brilliant mind who ever occupied the White House. He had strong health, a splendid physique, a fine intellect. If Guiteau’s bullet had killed the President instantly, there would have been a revolution in this country.

He lingered amid the prayers of the nation, surrounded by seven of the greatest surgeons and physicians of the hour. Then he passed on. His son was preparing a scrap-book of all the kind things that had been said about his father, to show him when he recovered. That was a tender forethought of one who knew how unjustly he had suffered the slanders of his enemies. There was much talk about presidential inability, and in the midst of this public bickering Chester A. Arthur became president. He took office, amid severe criticism. I urged the appointment of Frederick T. Frelinghuysen to the President’s Cabinet, feeling that. Mr. Arthur would have in this distinguished son of New Jersey, a devout, evangelical, Christian adviser. In October I paid a visit, to Mr. Garfield’s home in Mentor, Ohio. On the hat-rack in the hall was his hat, where he had left it, when the previous March he left for his inauguration in Washington. I left that bereaved household with a feeling that a full explanation of this event must be adjourned to the next state of my existence.

The new President was gradually becoming, on all sides, the bright hope of our national future. In after years I learned to know him and admire him.

In the period of transition that followed the President’s assassination we lost other good men.

We lost Senator Burnside of Rhode Island, at one time commander of the Army of the Potomac, and three times Governor of his State. I met him at a reception given in the home of my friend Judge Hilton, in Woodlawn, at Saratoga Springs. He had an imperial presence, coupled with the utterance of a child. The Senator stood for purity in politics. No one ever bought him, or tried to buy him. He held no stock in the Credit Mobilier. He shook hands with none of the schemes that appealed to Congress to fleece the people. He died towards the close of 1881.

A man of greater celebrity, of an entirely different quality, who had passed on, was about this time to be honoured with an effigy in Westminster Abbey Dean Stanley. I still remember keenly the afternoon I met him in the Deanery adjoining the abbey. There was not much of the physical in his appearance. His mind and soul seemed to have more than a fair share of his physical territory. He had only just enough body to detain the soul awhile on earth.

And then we lost Samuel B. Stewart. The most of Brooklyn knew him the best part of Brooklyn knew him. I knew him long before I ever came to Brooklyn. He taught me to read in the village school. His parents and mine were buried in the same place. A few weeks later, the Rev. Dr. Bellows of New York went. I do not believe that the great work done by this good man was ever written. It was during that long agony when the war hospitals were crowded with the sick, the wounded, and the dying. He enlisted his voice and his pen and his fortune to alleviate their suffering. I was on the field as a chaplain for a very little while, and a little while looking after the sick in Philadelphia, and I noticed that the Sanitary Commission, of which Dr. Bellows was the presiding spirit, was constantly busy with ambulances, cordials, nurses, necessaries and supplies. Many a dying soldier was helped by the mercy of this good man’s energies, and many a farewell message was forwarded home. The civilians who served the humanitarian causes of the war, like Dr. Bellows, have not received the recognition they should. Only the military men have been honoured with public office.

The chief menace of the first year of President Arthur’s administration was the danger of a policy to interfere in foreign affairs, and the danger of extravagance in Washington, due to innumerable appropriation bills. There was a war between Chili and Peru, and the United States Government offered to mediate for Chili. It was a pitiable interference with private rights, and I regretted this indication of an unnecessary foreign policy in this country. In addition to this, there were enough appropriation bills in Washington to swamp the nation financially. I had stood for so many years in places where I could see clearly the ungodly affairs of political life in my own country, that the progress of politics became to me a hopeless thing.

The political nominations of 1882 involved no great principles. In New York State this was significant, because it brought before the nation Mr. Grover Cleveland as a candidate for Governor against Mr. Folger. The general opinion of these two men in the unbiassed public mind was excellent. They were men of talent and integrity. They were not merely actors in the political play. I have buried professional politicians, and the most of them made a very bad funeral for a Christian minister to speak at. I always wanted, at such a time, an Episcopal prayer book, which is made for all eases, and may not be taken either as invidious or too assuring.

There was another contest, non-political, that interested the nation in 1882. It was the Sullivan-Ryan prize-fight. I had no great objection to find with it, as did so many other ministers. It suggested a far better symbol of arbitration between two differing opinions than war. If Mr. Disraeli had gone out and met a distinguished Zulu on the field of English battle, and fought their national troubles out, as Sullivan and Ryan did, what a saving of life and money! How many lives could have been saved if Napoleon and Wellington, or Moltke and McMahon had emulated the spirit of the Sullivan-Ryan prize fight! I saw no reasonable cause why the law should interfere between two men who desired to pound one another in public; I stood alone almost among my brethren in this conclusion.

The persecution of the Jews in Russia, which came to us at this time with all its details of cruelty and horror, was the beginning of an important chapter in American history. Dr. Adler, in London, had appealed for a million pounds to transport the Jews who were driven out of Russia to the United States. It seemed more important that civilisation should unite in an effort to secure protection for them in their own homes, than compel them to obey the will of Russia. This was no Christian remedy. We might as well abuse the Jews in America, and then take up a collection to send them to England or Australia. The Jews were entitled to their own rights of property and personal liberty and religion, whether they lived in New York, or Brooklyn, or London, or Paris, or Warsaw, or Moscow, or St. Petersburg. And yet we were constantly hearing of the friendly feeling between Russia and the United States.

In after years I was privileged personally to address the Czar and his family, in a private audience, and questions of the Russian problem were discussed; but the Jews flocked to America, and we welcomed them, and they learned to be Americans very rapidly. Their immigration to this country was a matter of religious conscience, in which Russia had no interest.

A man’s religious convictions are most important. I remember in October, 1882, what criticism and abuse there was of my friend Henry Ward Beecher, when he decided to resign from the religious associations of which he was a member. I was asked by members of the press to give my opinion, but I was out when they called. Mr. Beecher was right. He was a man of courage and of heart. I shall never forget the encouragement and goodwill he extended to me, when I first came to Brooklyn in 1869 and took charge of a broken-down church. Mr. Beecher did just as I would have done under the same circumstances. I could not nor would stay in the denomination to which I belonged any longer than it would take me to write my resignation, if I disbelieved its doctrines. Mr. Beecher’s theology was very different from mine, but he did not differ from me in the Christian life, any more than I differed from him. He never interfered with me, nor I with him. Every little while some of the ministers of America were attacked by a sort of Beecher-phobia, and they foamed at the mouth over something that the pastor of Plymouth Church said. People who have small congregations are apt to dislike a preacher who has a full church. For thirteen years, or more, Beecher’s church and mine never collided. He had more people than he knew what to do with, and so had I. I belonged to the company of the orthodox, but if I thought that orthodoxy demanded that I must go and break other people’s heads I would not remain orthodox five minutes. Brooklyn was called the city of churches, but it could also be called the city of short pastorates. Many of the churches, during fifteen years of my pastorate, had two, three, and four pastors. Dr. Scudder came and went; so did Dr. Patten, Dr. Frazer, Dr. Buckley, Dr. Mitchell, Dr. Reid, Dr. Steele, Dr. Gallagher, and a score of others. The Methodist Church was once famous for keeping a minister only three or four years, but it is no longer peculiar in this respect. Mr. Beecher had been pastor for thirty-six years in Brooklyn when, in the summer of 1883, he celebrated the anniversary of his seventieth birthday.

Every now and then, for many years, there was an investigation of some sort in Brooklyn. Our bridge was a favourite target of investigation. “Where has the money for this great enterprise been expended?” was the common question. I defended the trustees, because people did not realise the emergencies that arose as the work progressed and entailed greater expenditures. Originally, when projected, it was to cost $7,000,000, but there was to be only one waggon road. It was resolved later to enlarge the structure and build two waggon roads, and a place for trains, freight, and passenger cars. Those enlarged plans were all to the ultimate advantage of the growth of Brooklyn. It was at first intended to make the approaches of the bridge in trestle work, then plans were changed and they were built of granite. The cable, which was originally to be made of iron, was changed to steel. For three years these cables were the line on which the passengers on ferry-boats hung their jokes about swindling and political bribery. No investigation was able to shake my respect for the integrity of Mr. Stranahan, one of the bridge trustees. He did as much for Brooklyn as any man in it. He was the promoter of Prospect Park, designed and planned from his head and heart. With all the powers at my disposal I defended the bridge trustee.

There was an attempt in New York, towards the close of 1882, to present the Passion Play on the stage of a theatre. A licence was applied for. The artist, no matter how high in his profession, who would dare to appear in the character of the Divine Person, was fit only for the Tombs prison or Sing-Sing. I had no objection to any man attempting the rôle of Judas Iscariot. That was entirely within the limitations of stage art. Seth Low was Mayor of Brooklyn, and Mr. Grace was Mayor of New York a Protestant and a Catholic and yet they were of one opinion on this proposed blasphemy.

I think everyone in America realised that the Democratic victory in the election of Grover Cleveland, by a majority of 190,000 votes, as Governor of New York, was a presidential prophecy. The contest for President came up, seriously, in the spring of 1883, and the same headlines appeared in the political caucus. Among the candidates was Benjamin F. Butler, Governor of Massachusetts. I believed then there was not a better man in the United States for President than Chester A. Arthur. I believed that his faithfulness and dignity in office should be honoured with the nomination. There was some surprise occasioned when Harvard refused to confer an LL.D. on Governor Butler, a rebuke that no previous Governor of Massachusetts had suffered. After all, the country was chiefly impressed in this event with the fact that an LL.D., or a D.D., or an F.R.S., did not make the man. Americans were becoming very good readers of character; they could see at a glance the difference between right and wrong, but they were tolerant of both. Much more so than I was. There was one great fault in American character that the whole world admired; it was our love of hero-worship. A great man was the man who did great things, no matter what that man might stand for in religion or in morals.

There was Gambetta, whose friendship for America had won the admiration of our country. I myself admired his eloquence, his patriotism, his courage in office as Prime Minister of France; but his dying words rolled like a wintry sea over all nations, “I am lost!” Gambetta was an atheist, a man whose public indignities to womanhood were demonstrated from Paris to Berlin. Gambetta’s patriotism for France could never atone for his atheism, and his infamy towards women. His death, in the dawn of 1883, was a page in the world’s history turned down at the corner.

What an important year it was to be for us! In the spring of 1883 the Brooklyn bridge was opened, and our church was within fifteen or twenty minutes of the hotel centre of New York. I said then that many of us would see the population of Brooklyn quadrupled and sextupled. In many respects, up to this time, Brooklyn had been treated as a suburb of New York, a dormitory for tired Wall Streeters. With the completion of the bridge came new plans for rapid transit, for the widening of our streets, for the advancement of our municipal interests. A consolidation of Brooklyn and New York was then under discussion. It was a bad look-out for office-holders, but a good one for tax-payers. At least that was the prospect, but I never will see much encouragement in American politics.

The success of Grover Cleveland and his big majority, as Governor, led both wings of the Democratic party to promise us the millennium. Even the Republicans were full of national optimism, going over to the Democrats to help the jubilee of reform. Four months later, although we were told that Mr. Cleveland was to be President, he could not get his own legislature to ratify his nomination. His hands were tied, and his idolaters were only waiting for his term of office to expire. The politicians lied about him. Because as Governor of New York he could not give all the office-seekers places, he was, in a few months, executed by his political friends, and the millennium was postponed that politics might have time to find someone else to be lifted up and in turn hurled into oblivion.

That the politics of our country might serve a wider purpose, a great agitation among the newspapers began. The price of the great dailies came down from four to three cents, and from three to two cents. In a week it looked as though they would all be down to one cent. I expected to see them delivered free, with a bonus given for the favour of taking them at all. It was not a pleasant outlook, this deluge of printed matter, cheapened in every way, by cheaper labour, cheaper substance, and cheaper grammar. It was a plan that enlarged the scope of influence over what was arrogantly claimed as editorial territory public opinion. Public opinion is sound enough, so long as it is not taken too seriously in the newspapers.

The difference between a man as his antagonists depict him, and as he really is in his own character, may be as wide as the ocean. I was particularly impressed with this fact when I met the Rev. Dr. Ewer of New York, who had been accused of being disputatious and arrogant. Truth was, he was a master in the art of religious defence, wielding a scimitar of sharp edge. I never met a man with more of the childlike, the affable, and the self-sacrificing qualities than Dr. Ewer had.

He was an honest man in the highest sense, with a never-varying purity of purpose. Dr. Ewer died in the fall of 1883.

I began to feel that in the local management of our own big city there was an uplift, when two such sterling young men as James W. Ridgeway, and Joseph C. Hendrix, were nominated for District Attorney. They were merely technical opponents, but were united in the cause of reform and honest administration against our criminal population. We were fortunate in the degree of promise there was, in having a choice of such competent nominees. But it was a period of historical jubilee in our country, this fall of 1883.

We were celebrating centennials everywhere, even at Harvard. It seemed to be about a hundred years back since anything worth while had really happened in America. Since 1870 there had been a round of centennials. It was a good thing in the busy glorification of a brilliant present, and a glorious future, that we rehearsed the struggle and hardships by which we had arrived to this great inheritance of blessing and prosperity.

“The United States Government is a bubble-bursting nationality,” said Lord John Russell, but every year since has disproved the accuracy of this jeer. Even our elections disproved it. Candidates for the Presidency are pushed out of sight by a sudden wave of split tickets. In the elections of 1883, in Ohio ten candidates were obliterated; in Pennsylvania five were buried and fifteen resurrected. In Indiana, the record of names in United States political quicksands is too long too consider, the new candidates that sprang up being still larger in numbers. And yet only six men in any generation become President. Out of five thousand men, who consider themselves competent to be captains, only six are crowned with their ambition. And these six are not generally the men who had any prospect of becoming the people’s choice. The two political chiefs in convention, failing on the thirtieth ballot to get the nomination, some less conspicuous man is chosen as a compromise. Political ambition seems to me a poor business. There are men more worthy of national praise than the successful politicians; men like Isaac Hull; men whose generous gifts and Christian careers perpetuate the magnificent purposes of our lives. Isaac Hull was a Quaker one of the best in that sect. I lived among quakers for seven years in Philadelphia, and I loved them. Mr. Hull illustrated in his life the principles of his sect, characterised by integrity of finance and of soul. He rose to the front rank of public-spirited men, from the humble duties of a farmer’s boy. He was one of the most important members of the Society of Friends, and I valued the privilege of his friendship more than that of any celebrity I ever knew. He lived for the profit in standards rather than for wealth, and he passed on to a wider circle of friends beyond.

I have a little list of men who about this time passed away amid many antagonisms men who were misunderstood while they lived. I knew their worth. There was John McKean, the District Attorney of New York, who died in 1883, when criticism against him, of lawyers and judges, was most bitter and cruel. A brilliant lawyer, he was accused of non-performance of duty; but he died, knowing nothing of the delays complained of. He was blamed for what he could not help. Some stroke of ill-health; some untoward worldly circumstances, or something in domestic conditions will often disqualify a man for service; and yet he is blamed for idleness, for having possessions when the finances are cramped, for temper when the nerves have given out, for misanthropy when he has had enough to disgust him for ever with the human race. After we have exhausted the vocabulary of our abuse, such men die, and there is no reparation we can make. In spite of the abuse John McKean received, the courts adjourned in honour of his death but that was a belated honour. McKean was one of the kindest of men; he was merciful and brave.

There was Henry Villard, whose bankruptcy of fortune killed him. He was compelled to resign the presidency of the Northern Pacific Railroad Company, to resign his fortune, to resign all but his integrity. That he kept, though every dollar had gone. Only two years before his financial collapse he was worth $30,000,000. In putting the great Northern Pacific Railroad through he swamped everything he had. All through Minnesota and the North-west I heard his praises. He was a man of great heart and unbounded generosity, on which fed innumerable human leeches, enough of them to drain the life of any fortune that was ever made. On a magnificent train he once took, free of charge, to the Yellowstone Park, a party of men, who denounced him because, while he provided them with every luxury, they could not each have a separate drawing-room car to themselves. I don’t believe since the world began there went through this country so many titled nonentities as travelled then, free of cost, on the generous bounty of Mr. Villard. The most of these people went home to the other side of the sea, and wrote magazine articles on the conditions of American society, while Mr. Villard went into bankruptcy. It was the last straw that broke the camel’s back. It would not be so bad if riches only had wings with which to fly away; but they have claws with which they give a parting clutch that sometimes clips a man’s reason, or crushes his heart. It is the claw of riches we must look out for.

Then there was Wendell Phillips! Not a man in this country was more admired and more hated than he was. Many a time, addressing a big audience, he would divide them into two parts those who got up to leave with indignation, and those who remained to frown. He was often, during a lecture, bombarded with bricks and bad eggs. But he liked it. He could endure anything in an audience but silence, and he always had a secure following of admirers.

He told me once that in some of the back country towns of Pennsylvania it nearly killed him to lecture. “I go on for an hour,” he told me, “without hearing one response, and I have no way of knowing whether the people are instructed, pleased, or outraged.”

He enjoyed the tempestuous life. His other life was home. It was dominant in his appreciation. He owed much of his courage to that home. Lecturing in Boston once, during most agitated times, he received this note from his wife: “No shilly-shallying, Wendell, in the presence of this great public outrage.” Many men in public life owe their strength to this reservoir of power at home.

The last fifteen years of his life were devoted to the domestic invalidism of his home. Some men thought this was unjustifiable. But what exhaustion of home life had been given to establish his public career! A popular subscription was started to raise a monument in Boston to Wendell Phillips. I recommended that it should be built within sight of the monument erected to Daniel Webster. If there were ever two men who during their life had an appalling antagonism, they were Daniel Webster and Wendell Phillips. I hoped at that time their statues would be erected facing each other. Wendell Phillips was fortunate in his domestic tower of strength; still, I have known men whose domestic lives were painful in the extreme, and yet they arose above this deficiency to great personal prominence.

What is good for one man is not good for another. It is the same with State rights as it is with private rights. In ’83-’84, the whole country was agitated about the questions of tariff reform and free trade. Tariff reform for Pennsylvania, free trade for Kentucky. New England and the North-west had interests that would always be divergent. It was absurd to try and persuade the American people that what was good for one State was good for another State. Common intelligence showed how false this theory was. Until by some great change the manufacturing interests of the country should become national interests, co-operation and compromise in inter-state commerce was necessary. No one section of the country could have its own way. The most successful candidate for the Presidency at this time seemed to be the man who could most bewilder the public mind on these questions. Blessed in politics is the political fog!

The most significantly hopeful fact to me was that the three prominent candidates for Speakership at the close of 1883 Mr. Carlisle, Mr. Randall, and Mr. Cox never had wine on their tables. We were, moreover, getting away from the old order of things, when senators were conspicuous in gambling houses. The world was advancing in a spiritual transit of events towards the close. It was time that it gave way to something even better. It had treated me gloriously, and I had no fault to find with it, but I had seen so many millions in hunger and pain, and wretchedness and woe that I felt this world needed either to be fixed up or destroyed.

The world had had a hard time for six thousand years, and, as the new year of 1884 approached, there were indications that our planet was getting restless. There were earthquakes, great storms, great drought. It may last until some of my descendants shall head their letters with January 1, 15,000, A.D.; but I doubt it.