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FAMOUS AMERICANS OF RECENT TIMES

By

JAMES PARTON

Author of "Life of Andrew Jackson," "Life and Times of Aaron Burr,"
"Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin," etc.

1867







[Illustration: J.C. Calhoun]




CONTENTS


HENRY CLAY

DANIEL WEBSTER

JOHN C. CALHOUN

JOHN RANDOLPH

STEPHEN GIRARD AND HIS COLLEGE

JAMES GORDON BENNETT AND THE NEW YORK HERALD

CHARLES GOODYEAR

HENRY WARD BEECHER AND HIS CHURCH

COMMODORE VANDERBILT

THEODOSIA BURR

JOHN JACOB ASTOR




NOTE

The papers contained in this volume were originally published in the
_North American Review_, with four exceptions. Those upon THEODOSIA
BURR and JOHN JACOB ASTOR first appeared in _Harper's Magazine_; that
upon COMMODORE VANDERBILT, in the _New York Ledger_; and that upon
HENRY WARD BEECHER AND HIS CHURCH, in the _Atlantic Monthly_.




HENRY CLAY.

The close of the war removes the period preceding it to a great
distance from us, so that we can judge its public men as though we
were the "posterity" to whom they sometimes appealed. James Buchanan
still haunts the neighborhood of Lancaster, a living man, giving and
receiving dinners, paying his taxes, and taking his accustomed
exercise; but as an historical figure he is as complete as Bolingbroke
or Walpole. It is not merely that his work is done, nor that the
results of his work are apparent; but the thing upon which he wrought,
by their relation to which he and his contemporaries are to be
estimated, has perished. The statesmen of his day, we can all now
plainly see, inherited from the founders of the Republic a problem
impossible of solution, with which some of them wrestled manfully,
others meanly, some wisely, others foolishly. If the workmen have not
all passed away, the work is at once finished and destroyed, like the
Russian ice-palace, laboriously built, then melted in the sun. We can
now have the requisite sympathy with those late doctors of the body
politic, who came to the consultation pledged not to attempt to
_remove_ the thorn from its flesh, and trained to regard it as the
spear-head in the side of Epaminondas,--extract it, and the patient
dies. In the writhings of the sufferer the barb has fallen out, and
lo! he lives and is getting well. We can now forgive most of those
blind healers, and even admire such of them as were honest and not
cowards; for, in truth, it _was_ an impossibility with which they had
to grapple, and it was not one of their creating.

Of our public men of the sixty years preceding the war, Henry Clay was
certainly the most shining figure. Was there ever a public man, not at
the head of a state, so beloved as he? Who ever heard such cheers, so
hearty, distinct, and ringing, as those which his name evoked? Men
shed tears at his defeat, and women went to bed sick from pure
sympathy with his disappointment. He could not travel during the last
thirty years of his life, but only make progresses. When he left his
home the public seized him and bore him along over the land, the
committee of one State passing him on to the committee of another, and
the hurrahs of one town dying away as those of the next caught his
ear. The country seemed to place all its resources at his disposal;
all commodities sought his acceptance. Passing through Newark once, he
thoughtlessly ordered a carriage of a certain pattern: the same
evening the carriage was at the door of his hotel in New York, the
gift of a few Newark friends. It was so everywhere and with
everything. His house became at last a museum of curious gifts. There
was the counterpane made for him by a lady ninety-three years of age,
and Washington's camp-goblet given him by a lady of eighty; there were
pistols, rifles, and fowling-pieces enough to defend a citadel; and,
among a bundle of walking-sticks, was one cut for him from a tree that
shaded Cicero's grave. There were gorgeous prayer-books, and Bibles of
exceeding magnitude and splendor, and silver-ware in great profusion.
On one occasion there arrived at Ashland the substantial present of
twenty-three barrels of salt. In his old age, when his fine estate,
through the misfortunes of his sons, was burdened with mortgages to
the amount of thirty thousand dollars, and other large debts weighed
heavily upon his soul, and he feared to be compelled to sell the home
of fifty years and seek a strange abode, a few old friends secretly
raised the needful sum, secretly paid the mortgages and discharged the
debts, and then caused the aged orator to be informed of what had been
done, but not of the names of the donors. "Could my life insure the
success of Henry Clay, I would freely lay it down this day," exclaimed
an old Rhode Island sea-captain on the morning of the Presidential
election of 1844. Who has forgotten the passion of disappointment, the
amazement and despair, at the result of that day's fatal work? Fatal
we thought it then, little dreaming that, while it precipitated evil,
it brought nearer the day of deliverance.

Our readers do not need to be reminded that popularity the most
intense is not a proof of merit. The two most mischievous men this
country has ever produced were extremely popular,--one in a State, the
other in every State,--and both for long periods of time. There are
certain men and women and children who are natural heart-winners, and
their gift of winning hearts seems something apart from their general
character. We have known this sweet power over the affections of
others to be possessed by very worthy and by very barren natures.
There are good men who repel, and bad men who attract. We cannot,
therefore, assent to the opinion held by many, that popularity is an
evidence of shallowness or ill-desert. As there are pictures expressly
designed to be looked at from a distance by great numbers of people at
once,--the scenery of a theatre, for example,--so there are men who
appear formed by Nature to stand forth before multitudes, captivating
every eye, and gathering in great harvests of love with little effort.
If, upon looking closely at these pictures and these men, we find them
less admirable than they seemed at a distance, it is but fair to
remember that they were not meant to be looked at closely, and that
"scenery" has as much right to exist as a Dutch painting which bears
the test of the microscope.

It must be confessed, however, that Henry Clay, who was for
twenty-eight years a candidate for the Presidency, cultivated his
popularity. Without ever being a hypocrite, he was habitually an
actor; but the part which he enacted was Henry Clay exaggerated. He
was naturally a most courteous man; but the consciousness of his
position made him more elaborately and universally courteous than any
man ever was from mere good-nature. A man on the stage must overdo his
part, in order not to seem to underdo it. There was a time when almost
every visitor to the city of Washington desired, above all things, to
be presented to three men there, Clay, Webster, and Calhoun, whom to
have seen was a distinction. When the country member brought forward
his agitated constituent on the floor of the Senate-chamber, and
introduced him to Daniel Webster, the Expounder was likely enough to
thrust a hand at him without so much as turning his head or
discontinuing his occupation, and the stranger shrunk away painfully
conscious of his insignificance. Calhoun, on the contrary, besides
receiving him with civility, would converse with him, if opportunity
favored, and treat him to a disquisition on the nature of government
and the "beauty" of nullification, striving to make a lasting
impression on his intellect. Clay would rise, extend his hand with
that winning grace of his, and instantly captivate him by his
all-conquering courtesy. He would call him by name, inquire respecting
his health, the town whence he came, how long he had been in
Washington, and send him away pleased with himself and enchanted with
Henry Clay. And what was his delight to receive a few weeks after, in
his distant village, a copy of the Kentuckian's last speech, bearing
on the cover the frank of "H. Clay"! It was almost enough to make a
man think of "running for Congress"! And, what was still more
intoxicating, Mr. Clay, who had a surprising memory, would be likely,
on meeting this individual two years after the introduction, to
address him by name.

There was a gamy flavor, in those days, about Southern men, which was
very pleasing to the people of the North. Reason teaches us that the
barn-yard fowl is a more meritorious bird than the game-cock; but the
imagination does not assent to the proposition. Clay was at once
game-cock and domestic fowl. His gestures called to mind the
magnificently branching trees of his Kentucky forests, and his
handwriting had the neatness and delicacy of a female copyist. There
was a careless, graceful ease in his movements and attitudes, like
those of an Indian, chief; but he was an exact man of business, who
docketed his letters, and could send from Washington to Ashland for a
document, telling in what pigeon-hole it could be found. Naturally
impetuous, he acquired early in life an habitual moderation of
statement, an habitual consideration for other men's self-love, which
made him the pacificator of his time. The great compromiser was
himself a compromise. The ideal of education is to tame men without
lessening their vivacity,--to unite in them the freedom, the dignity,
the prowess of a Tecumseh, with the serviceable qualities of the
civilized man. This happy union is said to be sometimes produced in
the pupils of the great public schools of England, who are savages on
the play-ground and gentlemen in the school-room. In no man of our
knowledge has there been combined so much of the best of the forest
chief with so much of the good of the trained man of business as in
Henry Clay. This was one secret of his power over classes of men so
diverse as the hunters of Kentucky and the manufacturers of New
England.

It used to be accounted a merit in a man to rise to high station from
humble beginnings; but we now perceive that humble beginnings are
favorable to the development of that force of character which wins the
world's great prizes. Let us never again commend any one for "rising"
from obscurity to eminence, but reserve our special homage for those
who have become respectable human beings in spite of having had every
advantage procured for them by rich fathers. Henry Clay found an Eton,
and an Oxford in Old Virginia that were better for _him_ than those of
Old England. Few men have been more truly fortunate in their education
than he. It was said of a certain lady, that to know her was a liberal
education; and there really have been, and are, women of whom that
could be truly averred. But perhaps the greatest good fortune that can
befall an intelligent and noble-minded youth is to come into intimate,
confidential relations with a wise, learned, and good old man, one who
has been greatly trusted and found worthy of trust, who knows the
world by having long taken a leading part in its affairs, and has
outlived illusions only to get a firmer footing in realities. This,
indeed, is a liberal education; and this was the happiness of Henry
Clay. Nothing in biography is so strange as the certainty with which a
superior youth, in the most improbable circumstances, finds the mental
nourishment he needs. Here, in the swampy region of Hanover County,
Virginia, was a barefooted, ungainly urchin, a poor widow's son,
without one influential relative on earth; and there, in Richmond, sat
on the chancellor's bench George Wythe, venerable with years and
honors, one of the grand old men of Old Virginia, the preceptor of
Jefferson, signer of the Declaration of Independence, the most learned
man in his profession, and one of the best men of any profession. Who
could have foreseen that this friendless orphan, a Baptist preacher's
son, in a State where to be a "dissenter" was social inferiority,
should have found in this eminent judge a friend, a mentor, a patron,
a father?

Yet it came about in the most natural way. We catch our first glimpse
of the boy when he sat in a little log school-house, without windows
or floor, one of a humming score of shoeless boys, where a
good-natured, irritable, drinking English schoolmaster taught him to
read, write, and cipher as far as Practice. This was the only school
he ever attended, and that was all he learned at it. His widowed
mother, with her seven young children, her little farm, and two or
three slaves, could do no more for him. Next, we see him a tall,
awkward, slender stripling of thirteen, still barefoot, clad in
homespun butternut of his mother's making, tilling her fields, and
going to mill with his bag of corn strapped upon the family pony. At
fourteen, in the year 1791, a place was found for him in a Richmond
drug-store, where he served as errand-boy and youngest clerk for one
year.

Then occurred the event which decided his career. His mother having
married again, her husband had influence enough to procure for the lad
the place of copying clerk in the office of the Court of Chancery. The
young gentlemen then employed in the office of that court long
remembered the entrance among them of their new comrade. He was
fifteen at the time, but very tall for his age, very slender, very
awkward, and far from handsome. His good mother had arrayed him in a
full suit of pepper-and-salt "figginy," an old Virginia fabric of silk
and cotton. His shirt and shirt-collar were stiffly starched, and his
coat-tail stood out boldly behind him. The dandy law clerks of
metropolitan Richmond exchanged glances as this gawky figure entered,
and took his place at a desk to begin his work. There was something in
his manner which prevented their indulgence in the jests that usually
greet the arrival of a country youth among city blades; and they
afterwards congratulated one another that they had waited a little
before beginning to tease him, for they soon found that he had brought
with him from the country an exceedingly sharp tongue. Of his first
service little is known, except the immense fact that he was a most
diligent reader. It rests on better authority than "Campaign Lives,"
that, while his fellow-clerks went abroad in the evening in search of
pleasure, this lad stayed at home with his books. It is a pleasure
also to know that he had not a taste for the low vices. He came of
sound English stock, of a family who would not have regarded
drunkenness and debauchery as "sowing wild oats," but recoiled from
the thought of them with horror. Clay was far from being a saint; but
it is our privilege to believe of him that he was a clean, temperate,
and studious young man.

Richmond, the town of the young Republic that had most in it of the
metropolitan, proved to this aspiring youth as true a University as
the printing-office in old Boston was to Benjamin Franklin; for he
found in it the culture best suited to him and his circumstances.
Chancellor Wythe, then sixty-seven years of age, overflowing with
knowledge and good nature, was the president of that university. Its
professors were the cluster of able men who had gone along with
Washington and Jefferson in the measures which resulted in the
independence of the country. Patrick Henry was there to teach him the
arts of oratory. There was a flourishing and famous debating society,
the pride of the young men of Richmond, in which to try his
half-fledged powers. The impulse given to thought by the American
Revolution was quickened and prolonged by the thrilling news which
every vessel brought from France of the revolution there. There was an
atmosphere in Virginia favorable to the growth of a sympathetic mind.
Young Clay's excellent handwriting brought him gradually into the most
affectionate relations with Chancellor Wythe, whose aged hand trembled
to such a degree that he was glad to borrow a copyist from the clerk's
office. For nearly four years it was the young man's principal duty to
copy the decisions of the venerable Chancellor, which were curiously
learned and elaborate; for it was the bent of the Chancellor's mind to
trace the law to its sources in the ancient world, and fortify his
positions by citations from Greek and Latin authors. The Greek
passages were a plague to the copyist, who knew not the alphabet of
that language, but copied it, so to speak, by rote.

Here we have another proof that, no matter what a man's opportunities
are, he only learns what is congenial with his nature and
circumstances. Living under the influence of this learned judge, Henry
Clay might have become a man of learning. George Wythe was a "scholar"
in the ancient acceptation of the word. The whole education of his
youth consisted in his acquiring the Latin language, which his mother
taught him. Early inheriting a considerable fortune, he squandered it
in dissipation, and sat down at thirty, a reformed man, to the study
of the law. To his youthful Latin he now added Greek, which he studied
assiduously for many years, becoming, probably, the best Greek scholar
in Virginia. His mind would have wholly lived in the ancient world,
and been exclusively nourished from the ancient literatures, but for
the necessities of his profession and the stirring political events of
his later life. The Stamp Act and the Revolution varied and completed
his education. His young copyist was not attracted by him to the study
of Greek and Latin, nor did he catch from him the habit of probing a
subject to the bottom, and ascending from the questions of the moment
to universal principles. Henry Clay probed nothing to the bottom,
except, perhaps, the game of whist; and though his instincts and
tendencies were high and noble, he had no grasp of general truths.
Under Wythe, he became a staunch Republican of the Jeffersonian
school. Under Wythe, who emancipated his slaves before his death, and
set apart a portion of his estate for their maintenance, he acquired a
repugnance to slavery which he never lost. The Chancellor's learning
and philosophy were not for him, and so he passed them by.

The tranquil wisdom of the judge was counteracted, in some degree, by
the excitements of the debating society. As he grew older, the raw and
awkward stripling became a young man whose every movement had a
winning or a commanding grace. Handsome he never was; but his ruddy
face and abundant light hair, the grandeur of his forehead and the
speaking intelligence of his countenance, more than atoned for the
irregularity of his features. His face, too, was a compromise. With
all its vivacity of expression, there was always something that spoke
of the Baptist preacher's son,--just as Andrew Jackson's face had the
set expression of a Presbyterian elder. But of all the bodily gifts
bestowed by Nature upon this favored child, the most unique and
admirable was his voice. Who ever heard one more melodious? There was
a depth of tone in it, a volume, a compass, a rich and tender harmony,
which invested all he said with majesty. We heard it last when he was
an old man past seventy; and all he said was a few words of
acknowledgment to a group of ladies in the largest hall in
Philadelphia. He spoke only in the ordinary tone of conversation; but
his voice filled the room as the organ fills a great cathedral, and
the ladies stood spellbound as the swelling cadences rolled about the
vast apartment. We have heard much of Whitefield's piercing voice and
Patrick Henry's silvery tones, but we cannot believe that either of
those natural orators possessed an organ superior to Clay's majestic
bass. No one who ever heard him speak will find it difficult to
believe what tradition reports, that he was the peerless star of the
Richmond Debating Society in 1795.

Oratory was then in the highest vogue. Young Virginians did not need
to look beyond the sea in order to learn that the orator was the man
most in request in the dawn of freedom. Chatham, Burke, Fox, Sheridan,
and Pitt were inconceivably imposing names at that day; but was not
Patrick Henry the foremost man in Virginia, only because he could
speak and entertain an audience? And what made John Adams President
but his fiery utterances in favor of the Declaration of Independence?
There were other speakers then in Virginia who would have had to this
day a world-wide fame if they had spoken where the world could hear
them. The tendency now is to undervalue oratory, and we regret it. We
believe that, in a free country, every citizen should be able to stand
undaunted before his fellow-citizens, and give an account of the faith
that is in him. It is no argument against oratory to point to the
Disraelis of both countries, and say that a gift possessed by such men
cannot be a valuable one. It is the unmanly timidity and
shamefacedness of the rest of us that give to such men their
preposterous importance. It were a calamity to America if, in the
present rage for ball-playing and boat-rowing, which we heartily
rejoice in, the debating society should be forgotten. Let us rather
end the sway of oratory by all becoming orators. Most men who can talk
well seated in a chair can _learn_ to talk well standing on their
legs; and a man who can move or instruct five persons in a small room
can learn to move or instruct two thousand in a large one.

That Henry Clay cultivated his oratorical talent in Richmond, we have
his own explicit testimony. He told a class of law students once that
he owed his success in life to a habit early formed, and for some
years continued, of reading daily in a book of history or science, and
declaiming the substance of what he had read in some solitary
place,--a cornfield, the forest, a barn, with only oxen and horses for
auditors. "It is," said he,

"to this early practice of the art of all arts that I am
indebted for the primary and leading impulses that
stimulated my progress, and have shaped and moulded my
entire destiny."

We should be glad to know more of this self-training; but Mr. Clay's
"campaign" biographers have stuffed their volumes too full of eulogy
to leave room for such instructive details. We do not even know the
books from which he declaimed. Plutarch's Lives were favorite reading
with him, we accidentally learn; and his speeches contain evidence
that he was powerfully influenced by the writings of Dr. Franklin. We
believe it was from Franklin that he learned very much of the art of
managing men. Franklin, we think, aided this impetuous and
exaggerating spirit to acquire his habitual moderation of statement,
and that sleepless courtesy which, in his keenest encounters,
generally kept him within parliamentary bounds, and enabled him to
live pleasantly with men from whom he differed in opinion. Obsolete as
many of his speeches are, from the transient nature of the topics of
which they treat, they may still be studied with profit by young
orators and old politicians as examples of parliamentary politeness.
It was the good-natured and wise Franklin that helped him to this. It
is certain, too, that at some part of his earlier life he read
translations of Demosthenes; for of all modern orators Henry Clay was
the most Demosthenian. Calhoun purposely and consciously imitated the
Athenian orator; but Clay was a kindred spirit with Demosthenes. We
could select passages from both these orators, and no man could tell
which was American and which was Greek, unless he chanced to remember
the passage. Tell us, gentle reader, were the sentences following
spoken by Henry Clay after the war of 1812 _at_ the Federalists who
had opposed that war, or by Demosthenes against the degenerate Greeks
who favored the designs of Philip?

"From first to last I have uniformly pursued the just and
virtuous course,--asserter of the honors, of the
prerogatives, of the glory of my country. Studious to
support them, zealous to advance them, my whole being is
devoted to this glorious cause. I was never known to walk
abroad with a face of joy and exultation at the success of
the enemy, embracing and announcing the joyous tidings to
those who I supposed would transmit it to the proper place.
I was never known to receive the successes of my own country
with trembling, with sighs, with my eyes bent to the earth,
like those impious men who are the defamers of their
country, as if by such conduct they were not defamers of
themselves."

Is it Clay, or is it Demosthenes? Or have we made a mistake, and
copied a passage from the speech of a Unionist of 1865?

After serving four years as clerk and amanuensis, barely earning a
subsistence, Clay was advised by his venerable friend, the Chancellor,
to study law; and a place was procured for him in the office of the
Attorney-General of the State. In less than a year after formally
beginning his studies he was admitted to the bar. This seems a short
preparation; but the whole period of his connection with Chancellor
Wythe was a study of the law. The Chancellor was what a certain other
chancellor styles "a full man," and Henry Clay was a receptive youth.

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