The Last Leaf by James Kendall Hosmer

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The Last Leaf

Observations, during Seventy-five Years,
of Men and Events in America and Europe

By
James Kendall Hosmer, LL.D.

Member of the Minnesota Historical Society, Corresponding Member
of the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Colonial Society of
Massachusetts

Author of "A Short History of German Literature," "The Story of the
Jews," the Lives of Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Sir Henry Vane,
etc.

1912

FOREWORD

Standing on the threshold of my eightieth year, stumbling badly,
moreover, through the mutiny, well justified, of a pair of worn-out
eyes, I, a veteran maker of books, must look forward to the closing of
an over-long series.

I retain in my memory certain films, which record impressions of long
ago. Can I not possibly develop and present these film records for a
moving picture of the men and events of an eventful period?

We old story-tellers do our talking under a heavy handicap. Homer,
long ago, found us garrulous, and compared us to cicadas chirping
unprofitably in the city-gate. In the modern time, too, Dr. Holmes,
ensconced in smug youth, could "sit and grin" at one of our kind as he

"Totters o'er the ground
With his cane."

He thought

"His breeches and all that
Were so queer."

The "all that" is significant. To the callow young doctor, men of our
kind were throughout queered, and so, too, think the spruce and jaunty
company who are shouldering us so fast out of the front place. In
their thought we are more than depositors of last leaves, in fact we
are last leaves ourselves, capable in the green possibly of a pleasant
murmur, but in the dry with no voice but a rattle prophetic of winter.
I hope Dr. Holmes lived to repent his grin. At any rate he lived to
refute the notion that youthful fire and white hairs exclude each
other. If we must totter, what ground we have to totter over, with
two generations and more behind us! The ground is ours. We only have
looked into the faces of the great actors, and have taken part in the
epoch-making events. As I unroll my panorama I may totter, but I hope
I shall not dodder.

Retiring, as I must soon do from my somewhat Satanic activity, from
"going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in it," I can
claim, like my ill-reputed exemplar, to have encountered some patient
Jobs, servants of the Lord, but more who were impatient, yet not the
less the Lord's servants, and the outward semblance of these I try to
present. My pictures have to some extent been exhibited before, in
the _Atlantic Monthly_, the New York _Evening Post_, and
the Boston _Transcript_, and I am indebted to the courtesy of the
publishers of these periodicals for permission to utilise them here.
I am emboldened by the favour they met to present them again to
the public, retouched, and expanded. I attempt no elaborate
characterisation of men, or history of events or exposition of
philosophies. My films are snap-shots, caught from the curbstone, from
the gallery of an assembly, in a scholar's study, or by the light of
a camp-fire. I have ventured to address my reader as friend might talk
to a friend, with the freedom of familiar intercourse, and I hope that
the reader may not be conscious of any undue intrusion of the showman
as the figures and scenes appear. Go, little book, with this setting
forth of what you are and aim to do.

J.K.H.

MINNEAPOLIS, October, 4, 1912.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

STATESMEN OF OUR CRITICAL PERIOD

"Tippecanoe and Tyler too." Millard Fillmore. Abraham Lincoln at
Church. Stephen A. Douglas. Daniel Webster. William H. Seward. Edward
Everett. Robert C. Winthrop. Charles Sumner. John A. Andrew.

CHAPTER II

SOLDIERS I HAVE MET

U.S. Grant. Philip H. Sheridan. George G. Meade. W.T. Sherman. Jacob
D. Cox. N.P. Banks. B.F. Butler. John Pope. Henry W. Slocum. O.O.
Howard. Rufus Saxton. James H. Wilson. T.W. Sherman. Horatio G.
Wright. Isaac I. Stevens. Harvard Soldiers. W.F. Bartlett. Charles R.
Lowell. Francis C. Barlow.

CHAPTER III

HORACE MANN AND ANTIOCH COLLEGE

Horace Mann. "The New Wrinkle at Sweetbrier." Dramatics in the Schools
of Germany, of France, of England, at Antioch College.

CHAPTER IV

THE GIANT IN THE SPIKED HELMET

Prussia in 1870. Militarism in the Schools, in the Universities, in
the Home, in the Sepulchre. The Hohenzollern Lineage.

CHAPTER V

A STUDENT'S EXPERIENCE IN THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR

Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse. The Emperor Frederick. Wilhelm II. Francis
Joseph of Austria. King Ludwig of Bavaria. Munich in War-time. A
Deserted Switzerland. France in Arms. Paris on the Verge of the Siege.

CHAPTER VI

AMERICAN HISTORIANS

George Bancroft. Justin Winsor. John Fiske.

CHAPTER VII

ENGLISH AND GERMAN HISTORIANS

Sir Richard Garnett. S.R. Gardiner. E.A. Freeman. Goldwin Smith.
James Bryce. The House of Commons. Lord Randolph Churchill and W.E.
Gladstone as Makers of History. Von Treitschke. Ernst Curtius. Leopold
von Ranke. Theodor Mommsen. Lepsius. Hermann Grimm.

CHAPTER VIII

POETS AND PROPHETS

Henry W. Longfellow. Oliver Wendell Holmes. James Russell Lowell.
The Town of Concord. Henry D. Thoreau. Louisa M. Alcott. Nathaniel
Hawthorne. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Phillips Brooks.

CHAPTER IX

MEN OF SCIENCE

German Scientists: Kirchoff, the Physicist. Bunsen, the Chemist.
Helmholtz. American Scientists: Simon Newcomb, Asa Gray, Louis
Agassiz, Alexander Agassiz.

CHAPTER X

AT HAPHAZARD

William Grey, Ninth Earl of Stamford. The Franciscan of Salzburg. The
Berlin Dancer. Visits to Old Battle-fields. Eupeptic Musings.

INDEX

The Last Leaf

CHAPTER I

STATESMEN OF OUR CRITICAL PERIOD

I came to consciousness in the then small town of Buffalo in western
New York, whither, in Andrew Jackson's day, our household gods and
goods were conveyed from Massachusetts for the most part by the Erie
Canal, the dizzy rate of four miles an hour not taking away my baby
breath. Speaking of men and affairs of state, as I shall do in this
opening paper, I felt my earliest political thrill in 1840. I have a
distinct vision, the small boy's point of view being not much above
the sidewalk, of the striding legs in long processions, of wide-open,
clamorous mouths above, and over all of the flutter of tassels and
banners. Then began my knowledge of log-cabins, coon-skins, and of
the name hard cider, the thump of drums, the crash of brass-bands,
cockades, and torch-lights. My powers as a singer, always modest,
I first exercised on "For Tippecanoe and Tyler too," which still
obtrudes too obstinately upon my tympanum, though much fine harmony
heard since in cathedrals and the high shrines of music is quite
powerless now to make that organ vibrate. Four years later, my
emerging voice did better justice to "Harry Clay of Old Kentucky," and
my early teens found me in an environment that quickened prematurely
my interest in public affairs. My father, the pioneer apostle of an
unpopular faith, ministered in a small church of brick faced with
stone to a congregation which, though few in numbers, contained some
remarkable people. Millard Fillmore and his partner, Nathan K. Hall,
soon to be Postmaster-General, were of his fold, together with Hiram
Barton, the city's mayor, and other figures locally noteworthy.
Fillmore was only an accidental President, dominated, no doubt, and
dwarfed in the perspective by greater men, while the part he played
in a great crisis brought upon him obloquy with many good people. "Say
what you will about Fillmore," said a fellow-totterer to me the other
day, adjusting his "store" teeth for an emphatic declaration, "by
signing the Fugitive Slave Bill he saved the country. That act
postponed the Civil War ten years. Had it come in 1850, as it
assuredly would but for that scratch of Fillmore's pen, the Union
would have gone by the board. The decade that followed greatly
increased the relative strength of the North. A vast immigration
poured in which almost universally came to stand for the Union.
Moreover the expanding West, whose natural outlet until then had been
down the Mississippi to the South, became now linked to the East by
great lines of railroad, and West and East entered into such a new
bond of sympathy that there was nothing for it, in a time of trial,
but to stand together. As it was, it was only by the narrowest margin
that the Union weathered the storm. Had it come ten years earlier,
wreck would have been inevitable, and it is to Fillmore's signature
that we owe that blessed postponement." As the old man spoke, I had a
vision of the grave, troubled face of my father as he told us once of
a talk he had just had with Mr. Fillmore. The relations of the
pastor and the parishioner, always cordial, had become more than ever
friendly through an incident creditable to both. Mr. Fillmore had
good-naturedly offered my father a chaplaincy in the Navy, a post with
a comfortable salary, which he might easily hold, taking now and then
a pleasant sea-cruise with light duties, or indeed not leaving home
at all, by occasional trips and visits to the one man-of-war which the
Government maintained on the Great Lakes. To an impecunious minister,
with a large family to educate, it was a tempting offer. But my father
in those days was a peace-man, and he was also disinclined to nibble
at the public crib while rendering no adequate service. He declined
the appointment, a course much censured. "The fool parson, to let
such a chance go!" Mr. Fillmore admired it and their friendship became
heartier than ever. In the interview, my father had asked his friend
to explain his course on the Fugitive Slave Law, an act involving
suffering for so many, and no doubt took on a tone of remonstrance. He
told us the President raised his hands in vehement appeal. He had only
a choice between terrible evils--to inflict suffering which he hoped
might be temporary, or to precipitate an era of bloodshed with the
destruction of the country as a probable result. He did not do
evil that good might come, but of two imminent evils he had, as he
believed, chosen the lesser.

Fillmore lives in my memory a stately, massive presence, with hair
growing grey and kindly blue eyes looking down upon the little boy
with a pleasant greeting. His wife was gentle and unassuming. His
daughter Abby matured into much beauty and grace, and her sudden
death, by cholera, in the bloom of young womanhood cast a shadow
on the nation. They were homely folk, thrust up suddenly into high
position, but it did not turn their heads. In their lives they were
plainly sweet and honest. No taint of corruption attaches to Fillmore
in either his private or public career. He was my father's friend. I
think he meant well, and am glad that our most authoritative historian
of the period, Rhodes, can say that he discharged the duties of his
high office "with ability and honour."

When in February, 1861, Abraham Lincoln, on his way to Washington,
arrived in Buffalo Saturday night and it became known he would spend
Sunday, the town was alive with curiosity as to where he would go
to church. Mr. Lincoln was Mr. Fillmore's guest. They had known
each other well in Congress--Fillmore a veteran at the head of the
Committee of Ways and Means, Lincoln then quite unknown, serving his
only term. Both were Whigs of the old school, in close contact and I
suppose not afterwards far apart. Lincoln was prepared to execute
the Fugitive Slave Law, while Fillmore was devoted to the Union,
and probably would have admitted at the end that Lincoln's course
throughout was good. My father's church was looked on somewhat
askance. "It's lucky," said a parishioner once, "that it has a
stone face." Would Lincoln go to the Unitarian church? Promptly at
service-time Mr. Fillmore appeared with his guest, the two historic
figures side by side in the pew. Two or three rows intervened between
it and that in which sat my mother and our household. I beheld the
scene only through the eyes of my kindred, for by that time I had
flown the nest. But I may be pardoned for noting here an interesting
spectacle. As they stood during the hymns, the contrast was
picturesque. Both men had risen from the rudest conditions through
much early hardship. Fillmore had been rocked in a sap-trough in a
log-cabin scarcely better than Lincoln's early shelter, and the two
might perhaps have played an even match at splitting rails. Fillmore,
however, strangely adaptive, had taken on a marked grace of manner,
his fine stature and mien carrying a dignified courtliness which is
said to have won him a handsome compliment from Queen Victoria--a
gentleman rotund, well-groomed, conspicuously elegant. Shoulder to
shoulder with him rose the queer, raw-boned, ramshackle frame of
the Illinoisan, draped in the artless handiwork of a prairie tailor,
surmounted by the rugged, homely face. The service, which the new
auditor followed reverently, being finished, the minister, leaving the
pulpit, gave Lincoln God-speed--and so he passed on to his greatness.
My mother, sister, and brothers--the youngest of whom before two years
were gone was to fill a soldier's grave--stood close at hand.

I once saw Stephen A. Douglas, the man who was perhaps more closely
associated than any other with the fame of Lincoln, for he was the
human obstacle by overcoming whom Lincoln proved his fitness for the
supreme place. Douglas was a man marvellously strong. Rhodes declares
it would be hard to set bounds to his ability. I saw him in 1850, when
he was yet on the threshold, just beginning to make upon the country
an impress of power. Fillmore had recently, through Taylor's death,
become President, and was making his first visit to his home after his
elevation, with members of his Cabinet and other conspicuous figures
of his party. How Douglas came to be of the company I wonder, for he
was an ardent Jacksonian Democrat, but there he was on the platform
before the multitude, and I, a boy of sixteen, watched him curiously,
for he was young as compared with the grey heads about him. His
image, as he stood up to speak, is very clear to me even now--a face
strong-featured and ruddy with vigour beneath a massive forehead
whose thatch had the blackness and luxuriance of youth. His trunk was
disproportionately large, carried on legs sturdy enough but noticeably
short. The wits used to describe him as the statesman "with coat-tails
very near the ground." It is worth while to remark on this physical
peculiarity because it was the direct opposite of Lincoln's
configuration. He, while comparatively short-bodied, had, as all the
world knows, an abnormal length of limb, a fact which I suppose will
account for much of his ungainly manner. In an ordinary chair he was
undoubtedly uncomfortable, and hence his familiar attitude with his
feet on the table or over the mantelpiece. The two fought each other
long and sternly on those memorable platforms in Illinois in 1858, and
in their physique there must have been, as they stood side by side,
a grotesque parody of their intellectual want of harmony. Douglas's
usual sobriquet was "the little giant," and it fitted well--a man
of stalwart proportions oddly "sawed off." His voice was vibrant and
sonorous, his mien compelling. It was no great speech, a few sentences
of compliment to the city and of good-natured banter of the political
foes among whom he found himself; but it was _ex pede Herculem_,
a leader red-blooded to the finger-tips. I treasure the memory of this
brief touch into which I once came with Douglas for I have come to
think more kindly of him as he has receded. Not a few will now admit
that, taken generally, his doctrine of "squatter sovereignty" was
right. Congress ought not to have power to fix a status for people of
future generations. If a status so fixed becomes repugnant it will be
repudiated, and rightfully. Douglas was certainly cool over the woes
of the blacks; but he refused, it is said, to grow rich, when the
opportunity offered, from the ownership of slaves or from the proceeds
of their sale. His rally to the side of Lincoln at last was finely
magnanimous and it was a pleasant scene, at the inauguration of March
4, 1861, when Douglas sat close by holding Lincoln's hat. There was
an interview between the two men behind closed doors, on the night the
news of Sumter came, of which one would like to have a report. Lincoln
came out from it to issue, through the Associated Press, his call
for troops, and Douglas to send by the same channel the appeal to his
followers to stand by the Government. What could the administration
have done without the faithful arms and hearts of the War Democrats?
And what other voice but that of Douglas could have rallied them to
its support? Had he lived it seems inevitable that the two so long
rivals would have been close friends--that Douglas would have been in
Lincoln's Cabinet, perhaps in Stanton's place. This, however, is not
a memory but a might-have-been, and those are barred out in this Last
Leaf.

Daniel Webster came home to die in 1852. He was plainly failing fast,
but the State for which he stood hoped for the best, and arranged that
he should speak, as so often before, in Faneuil Hall. As I walked
in from Harvard College, over the long "caterpillar bridge" through
Cambridge Street and Dock Square, my freshman mind was greatly
perplexed. My mother's family were perfervid Abolitionists, accepting
the extremest utterances of Garrison and Wendell Phillips. I was
now in that environment, and felt strong impress from the power
and sincerity of the anti-slavery leaders. Fillmore and his
Postmaster-General, N.K. Hall, were old family friends. We children
had chummed with their children. Their kindly, honest faces were among
the best known to us in the circle of our elders. I had learned to
respect no men more. I was about to behold Webster, Fillmore's chief
secretary and counsellor. On the one hand he was much denounced, on
the other adored, in each case with fiery vehemence, and in my little
world the contrasting passions were wildly ablaze. In the mass that
crowded Faneuil Hall we waited long, an interval partly filled by the
eccentric and eloquent Father Taylor, the seamen's preacher, whom
the crowd espied in the gallery and summoned clamorously. My mood was
serious, and it jarred upon me when a classmate, building on current
rumours, speculated irreverently as to the probable contents of
the pitcher on Mr. Webster's desk. He came at last, tumultuously
accompanied and received, and advanced to the front, his large frame,
if I remember right, dressed in the blue coat with brass buttons and
buff vest usual to him on public occasions, which hung loosely
about the attenuated limbs and body. The face had all the majesty I
expected, the dome above, the deep eyes looking from the caverns, the
strong nose and chin, but it was the front of a dying lion. His colour
was heavily sallow, and he walked with a slow, uncertain step. His
low, deep intonations conveyed a solemn suggestion of the sepulchre.
His speech was brief, a recognition of the honour shown him, an
expression of his belief that the policy he had advocated and followed
was necessary to the country's preservation. Then he passed out to
Marshfield and the death-bed. What he said was not much, but it made
a strange impression of power, and here I am minded to tell an ancient
story. Sixty years ago, when I was ensconced in my smug youth, and
could "sit and grin," like young Dr. Holmes, at the queernesses of
the last leaves of those days, I heard a totterer whose ground was the
early decades of the last century, chirp as follows:

"This Daniel Webster of yours! Why, I can remember when he had a hard
push to have his ability acknowledged. We used to aver that he never
said anything, and that it was only his big way that carried the
crowd. I have in mind an old-time report of one of his deliverances:
'Mr. Chairman (_applause_), I did not graduate at this university
(_greater applause_), at this college (_tumultuous applause_),
I graduated at another college (_wild cheering with hats thrown
in the air_), I graduated at a college of my native State
(_convulsions of enthusiasm, during which the police spread
mattresses to catch those who leaped from the windows_).'"

That day in Faneuil Hall I felt his "big way" and it overpowered,
though the sentences were really few and commonplace. What must he
have been in his prime! What sentences in the whole history of oratory
have more swayed men than those he uttered! I recall that in 1861 we
young men of the North did not much argue the question of the right
of secession. The Constitution was obscure about it, and one easily
became befogged if he sought to weigh the right and the wrong of it.
But Webster had replied to Hayne. Those were the days when schoolboys
"spoke pieces," and in thousands of schoolhouses the favourite piece
was his matchless peroration. From its opening, "When my eyes shall
be turned to behold for the last time the sun in the heavens," to
the final outburst, "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and
inseparable!" it was all as familiar to us as the sentences of the
Lord's Prayer, and scarcely less consecrated. No logical unravelling
of the tangle, but that burning expression of devotion to the Union,
lay behind the enthusiasm with which we sprang to arms. The ghost of
Webster hovered in the battle-smoke, and it was his call more than any
other that rallied and kept us at the firing-line.

I think my mother told me once that on the canal-boat as we went West
in the thirties, we had Webster for a time as a fellow-passenger, who
good-naturedly patted the heads of the two little boys who then made
up her brood. I wish I could be sure that the hand of Webster had once
rested on my head. His early utterances as to slavery are warm with
humane feeling. I have come to feel that his humanity did not cool,
but he grew into the belief that agitation at the time would make sure
the destruction of the country, in his eyes the supreme calamity. The
injustice, hoary from antiquity, not recognised as injustice until
within a generation or two, might wait a generation or two longer
before we dealt with it. Let the evil be endured a while that the
greater evil might not come. I neither defend nor denounce him. I am
now only remembering; and what a stately and solemn image it is to
remember!

* * * * *

William H. Seward, unlike Webster, had the handicap of an unimpressive
exterior, nor had his voice the profound and conquering note which
is so potent an ally of the mind in subduing men. I heard Seward's
oration at Plymouth in 1855, a worthy effort which may be read in his
works, but I do better here to pick up only the straws, not meddling
with the heavy-garnered wheat. I recall an inconspicuous figure, of
ordinary stature, and a face whose marked feature was the large nose
(Emerson called it "corvine"), but that, as some one has said, is the
hook which nature makes salient in the case of men whom fortune is
to drag forward into leadership. He spoke in the pulpit of my
grandfather, who at the time had been for nearly sixty years minister
of the old Pilgrim parish. From that coign of vantage, my faithful
grandsire had no doubt smoked out many a sinner, and had not been
sparing of the due polemic fulminations in times of controversy. The
old theology, too, had undergone at his hands faithful fumigation to
make it sanitary for the modern generations. From one kind of smoke,
however, that venerable pulpit had been free until the hour of
Seward's arrival. It arched my eyebrows well when I saw him at the end
of his address light a cigar in the very shrine, a burnt-offering, in
my good grandfather's eyes certainly, more fitting for altars satanic.
My grandfather promptly called him down, great man though he was,
a rub which the statesman received from the white-haired minister,
good-naturedly postponing his smoke. But Seward rode rough-shod too
often over conventions, and sometimes over real proprieties. In an
over-convivial frame once, his tongue, loosened by champagne, nearly
wagged us into international complications, and there is a war-time
anecdote, which I have never seen in print and I believe is
unhackneyed, which casts a light. A general of the army, talking with
Lincoln and the Cabinet, did not spare his oaths. "What church do you
attend?" interposed the President at last, stroking his chin in his
innocent way. Confused at an inquiry so foreign to the topic under
discussion, the soldier replied he did not attend much of any church
himself, but his folks were Methodists. "How odd!" said. Lincoln,
"I thought you were an Episcopalian. You swear just like Seward, and
Seward is an Episcopalian."

But I should be sorry to believe there was any trouble with Seward but
a surface blemish. Though in '61 he advocated a foreign war as a
means for bringing together North and South, and desired to shelve
practically Lincoln while he himself stood at the front to manage the
turmoil, he made no more mistakes than statesmen in general. He had
been powerful for good before the war, and during its course, with
what virile stiffness of the upper lip did he face and foil the
frowning foreign world! He had the insight and candour to do full
justice at last to Lincoln, whom at first he depreciated. Then the
purchase of Alaska! Writing as I do on the western coast I am perhaps
affected by the glamour of that marvellous land. When news of the
bargain came in the seventies, the scorners sang:

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