Brave Men and Women Part 4

Mrs. Hill had never heard, and, expressing an anxiety to do so, was told the following story:

"His wife, you know, was she that was Sally May, and it's an old saying--

'To change the name and not the letter, You marry for worse and not for better.'

"Sally was a dressy, extravagant girl; she had her bonnet 'done up'

twice a year always, and there was no end to her frocks and ribbons and fine things. Her mother indulged her in every thing; she used to say Sally deserved all she got; that she was worth her weight in gold. She used to go everywhere, Sally did. There was no big meeting that she was not at, and no quilting that she didn't help to get up. All the girls went to her for the fas.h.i.+ons, for she was a good deal in town at her Aunt Hanner's, and always brought out the new patterns. She used to have her sleeves a little bigger than anybody else, you remember, and then she wore great stiffeners in them--la, me! there was no end to her extravagance.

"She had a changeable silk, yellow and blue, made with a surplus front; and when she wore that, the ground wasn't good enough for her to walk on, so some folks used to say; but I never thought Sally was a bit proud or lifted up; and if any body was sick there was no better-hearted creature than she; and then, she was always good-natured as the day was long, and would sing all the time at her work. I remember, along before she was married, she used to sing one song a great deal, beginning

'I've got a sweetheart with bright black eyes;'

and they said she meant William McMicken by that, and that she might not get him after all--for a good many thought they would never make a match, their dispositions were so contrary. William was of a dreadful quiet turn, and a great home body; and as for being rich, he had nothing to brag of, though he was high larnt and followed the river as dark sometimes."

Mrs. Hill had by this time prepared her currants, and Mrs. Troost paused from her story while she filled the kettle and attached the towel to the end of the well-sweep, where it waved as a signal for Peter to come to supper.

"Now, just move your chair a leetle nearer the kitchen door, if you please," said Mrs. Hill, "and I can make up my biscuit and hear you, too."

Meantime, coming to the door with some bread-crumbs in her hands, she began scattering them on the ground and calling, "Biddy, biddy, biddy--chicky, chicky, chicky"--hearing which, a whole flock of poultry was around her in a minute; and, stooping down, she secured one of the fattest, which, an hour afterward, was broiled for supper.

"Dear me, how easily you get along!" said Mrs. Troost.

And it was some time before she could compose herself sufficiently to take up the thread of her story. At length, however, she began with--

"Well, as I was saying, n.o.body thought William McMicken would marry Sally May. Poor man! they say he is not like himself any more. He may get a dozen wives, but he'll never get another Sally. A good wife she made him, for all she was such a wild girl.

"The old man May was opposed to the marriage, and threatened to turn Sally, his own daughter, out of house and home; but she was headstrong, and would marry whom she pleased; and so she did, though she never got a st.i.tch of new clothes, nor one thing to keep house with. No; not one single thing did her father give her when she went away but a hive of bees. He was right down ugly, and called her Mrs. McMicken whenever he spoke to her after she was married; but Sally didn't seem to mind it, and took just as good care of the bees as though they were worth a thousand dollars. Every day in Winter she used to feed them--maple-sugar, if she had it; and if she had not, a little Muscovade in a saucer or some old broken dish.

"But it happened one day that a bee stung her on the hand--the right one, I think it was--and Sally said right away that it was a bad sign; and that very night she dreamed that she went out to feed her bees, and a piece of black c.r.a.pe was tied on the hive. She felt that it was a token of death, and told her husband so, and she told me and Mrs. Hanks.

No, I won't be sure she told Mrs. Hanks, but Mrs. Hanks got to hear it some way."

"Well," said Mrs. Hill, wiping the tears away with her ap.r.o.n, "I really didn't know, till now, that poor Mrs. McMicken was dead."

"O, she is not dead," answered Mrs. Troost, "but as well as she ever was, only she feels that she is not long for this world." The painful interest of her story, however, had kept her from work, so the afternoon pa.s.sed without her having accomplished much--she never could work when she went visiting.

Meantime Mrs. Hill had prepared a delightful supper, without seeming to give herself the least trouble. Peter came precisely at the right moment, and, as he drew a pail of water, removed the towel from the well-sweep, easily and naturally, thus saving his wife the trouble.

"Troost would never have thought of it," said his wife; and she finished with an "Ah, well!" as though all her tribulations would be over before long.

As she partook of the delicious honey she was reminded of her own upset hive; and the crispred radishes brought thoughts of the weedy garden at home; so that, on the whole, her visit, she said, made her perfectly wretched, and she should have no heart for a week; nor did the little basket of extra nice fruit which Mrs. Hill presented her as she was about to take leave heighten her spirits in the least. Her great heavy umbrella, she said, was burden enough for her.

"But Peter will take you in the carriage," insisted Mrs. Hill.

"No," said Mrs. Troost, as though charity was offered her; "it will be more trouble to get in and out than to walk"--and so she trudged home, saying, "Some folks are born to be lucky."

VI.

HORACE GREELEY.

(BORN 1811--DIED 1872.)

THE MOLDER OF PUBLIC OPINION--THE BRAVE JOURNALIST.

Mr. Greeley lived through the most eventful era in our public history since the adoption of the Federal Const.i.tution. For the eighteen years between the, formation of the Republican party, in 1854, and his sudden death in 1872, the stupendous civil convulsions through which we have pa.s.sed have merely translated into acts, and recorded in our annals, the fruits of his thinking and the strenuous vehemence of his moral convictions. Whether he was right or wrong, is a question on which opinions will differ; but no person conversant with our history will dispute the influence which this remarkable and singularly endowed man has exerted in shaping the great events of our time. Whatever may be the ultimate judgment of other cla.s.ses of his countrymen respecting the real value of his services, the colored race, when it becomes sufficiently educated to appreciate his career, must always recognize him as the chief author of their emanc.i.p.ation from slavery and their equal citizens.h.i.+p. Mr. Lincoln, to whom their ignorance as yet gives the chief credit, was a chip tossed on the surface of a resistless wave.

THE MOLDER OF PUBLIC OPINION.

It was Mr. Greeley, more than any other man, who let loose the winds that lifted the waters and drove forward their foaming, tumbling billows. Mr. Greeley had lent his hand to stir public feeling to its profoundest depths before Mr. Lincoln's election became possible. He contributed more than any other man to defeat the compromise and settlement for which Mr. Lincoln and his chief adviser, Mr. Seward, were anxious in the exciting, expectant Winter of 1860-61, and to precipitate an avoidable b.l.o.o.d.y war. It was he, carrying a majority of the Republican party with him, who kept insisting, in the early stages of the conflict, that the emanc.i.p.ation of the slaves was an indispensable element of success. Mr. Lincoln stood out and resisted, ridiculing an emanc.i.p.ation proclamation as 'a bull against the comet.' Mr. Greeley roused the Republican party by that remarkable leader signed by his name and addressed to Mr. Lincoln, headed 'The Prayer of Twenty Millions,'

the effect of which the President tried to parry by a public letter to the editor of the _Tribune_, written with all the dexterous ingenuity and telling aptness of phrase of which Mr. Lincoln was so great a master. But Mr. Greeley victoriously carried the Republican party, which he had done more than all other men to form, with him; and within two months after Mr. Lincoln's reply to 'The Prayer of Twenty Millions,' his reluctance was overborne, and he was constrained to issue his celebrated Proclamation, which committed the Government to emanc.i.p.ation, and staked the success of the war on that issue. This culminating achievement, the greatest of Mr. Greeley's life, is the most signal demonstration of his talents. It was no sudden, random stroke. It was the effect of an acc.u.mulated, ever-rising, widening, deepening stream of influence, which had been gathering volume and momentum for years, and whose piling waters at last burst through and bore down every barrier. Mr. Greeley had long been doing all in his power to swell the tide of popular feeling against slavery, and it was chiefly in consequence of the tremendous force he had given to the movement that that barbarous inst.i.tution was at last swept away. It is the most extraordinary revolution ever accomplished by a single mind with no other instrument than a public journal.

It may be said, indeed, that Mr. Greeley had many zealous coadjutors.

But so had Luther able coadjutors in the Protestant Reformation; so had Cromwell in the Commonwealth; so had Was.h.i.+ngton in our Revolution; so had Cobden in the repeal of the corn laws. They are nevertheless regarded as the leading minds in the respective innovations which they championed; and by as just a t.i.tle Mr. Greeley will hold the first place with posterity on the roll of emanc.i.p.ation. This is the light in which he will be remembered so long as the history of our times shall be read.

It may be said, again, that Mr. Greeley's efforts in this direction were aided by the tendencies of his time. But so were Luther's, and Cromwell's, and Was.h.i.+ngton's, and everybody's who has left a great mark on his age, and accomplished things full of consequences to future generations. The first qualification for exerting this kind of fruitful influence is for the leader to be in complete sympathy with the developing tendencies of his own epoch. This is necessary to make him the embodiment of its spirit, the representative of its ideas, the quickener of its pa.s.sions, the reviver of its courage in adverse turns of fortune, the central mind whom other advocates of the cause consult, whose action they watch in every new emergency, and whose guidance they follow because he has resolute, unflagging confidence to lead. In the controversies in which Mr. Greeley has been behind his age, or stood against the march of progress, even he has accomplished little. Since Henry Clay's death, he has been the most noted and active champion of Protection; but that cause steadily declined until the war forced the government to strain every source of revenue, and since the close of the war free-trade ideas have made surprising advances in Mr. Greeley's own political party. On this subject he was the disciple of dead masters, and hung to the skirts of a receding cause; but in this school he acquired that dexterity in handling the weapons of controversy which proved so effective when he advanced from the position of a disciple to that of a master, and led a movement in the direction towards which the rising popular feeling was tending. Mr. Greeley's name will always be identified with the extirpation of negro slavery as its most distinguished, powerful, and effective advocate.

THE BRAVE JOURNALIST.

This is his valid t.i.tle to distinction and lasting fame. Instrumental to this, and the chief means of its attainment, he founded a public journal which grew, under his direction, to be a great moving force in the politics and public thought of our time. This alone would have attested his energy and abilities; but this is secondary praise. It is the use he made of his journal when he had created it, the moral ends to which (besides making it a vehicle of news and the discussion of ephemeral topics) he devoted it, that will give him his peculiar place in history.

If he had had no higher aim than to supply the market for current intelligence, as a great merchant supplies the market for dry-goods, he would have deserved to rank with the builders-up of other prosperous establishments by which pa.s.sing contemporary wants were supplied, but would have had no claim on the remembrance of coming generations. But he regarded his journal not primarily as a property, but as the instrument of high moral and political ends; an instrument whose great potency for good or ill he fully comprehended, and for whose salutary direction he felt a corresponding responsibility. His simple tastes, inexpensive habits, his contempt for the social show and parade which are the chief use made of wealth, and the absorption of his mind in other aims, made it impossible for him to think of the _Tribune_ merely as a source of income, and he always managed it mainly with a view to make it an efficient organ for diffusing opinions which he thought conducive to the public welfare. It was this which distinguished Mr. Greeley from the founders of other important journals, who have, in recent years, been taken from us. With him the moral aim was always paramount, the pecuniary aim subordinate. Journalism, as he looked upon it, was not an end, but a means to higher ends. He may have had many mistaken and some erratic opinions on particular subjects; but the moral earnestness with which he pursued his vocation, and his constant subordination of private interest to public objects, n.o.bly atone for his occasional errors.

Among the means by which Mr. Greeley gained, and so long held, the first place among American journalists, was his manner of writing. His negative merits as a writer were great; and it would be surprising to find these negative merits so rare as to be a t.i.tle to distinction, if observation did not force the faults he avoided so perpetually upon our notice. He had no verbiage. We do not merely mean by this that he never used a superfluous word (which, in fact, he rarely did), but that he kept quite clear of the hazy, half-relevant ideas which enc.u.mber meaning and are the chief source of prolixity. He threw away every idea that did not decidedly help on his argument, and expressed the others in the fewest words that would make them clear. He began at once where the pith of his argument began; and had the secret, possessed by few writers, of stopping the moment he was done; leaving his readers no chaff to sift out from the simple wheat. This perfect absence of cloudy irrelevance and enc.u.mbering superfluity was one source of his popularity as a writer. His readers had to devour no husks to get at the kernel of what he meant.

Besides these negative recommendations, Mr. Greeley's style had positive merits of a very high order. The source of these was in the native structure of his mind; no training could have conferred them; and it was his original mental qualities, and not any special culture, that pruned his writing of verbiage and redundancies. Whatever he saw, he saw with wonderful distinctness. Whether it happened to be a sound idea or a crotchet, it stood before his mind with the clearness of an object in sunlight. He never groped at and around it, like one feeling in the dark. He saw on which side he could lay hands on it at once with the firmest grasp. It was his vividness of conception which made Mr. Greeley so clear and succinct a writer. He knew precisely what he would be at, and he hastened to say it in the fewest words. His choice of language, though often homely, and sometimes quaint or coa.r.s.e, was always adapted to his purpose. He had a great command of racy phrases in common use, and frequently gave them an unexpected turn which enlivened his style as by a sudden stroke of wit or grotesque humor. But these touches were rapid, never detained him; he kept grappling with his argument, and hurried on.

This peculiar style was aided by the ardor of his feelings and his vehement moral earnestness. Bent on convincing, he tried to flash his meaning on the minds of his readers in the readiest and manliest way; and he was so impatient to make them see the full force of his main points that he stripped them as naked as he could. This combined clearness of perception, strength of conviction, and hurrying ardor of feeling, were the sources of a style which enabled him to write more than any other journalist of his time, and yet always command attention.

But he is a model which none can successfully imitate without his strongly marked individuality and peculiarities of mental structure. We have mentioned his occasional coa.r.s.eness; but it was merely his preference of strong direct expression to dainty feebleness; he was never vulgar.

Mr. Greeley has contributed to the surprising growth and development of journalism in our time, chiefly by his successful efforts to make it a guide of public opinion, as well as a chronicle of important news. In his hands, it was not merely a mirror which indifferently reflects back the images of all objects on which it is turned, but a creative force; a means of calling into existence a public opinion powerful enough to introduce great reforms and sweep down abuses. He had no faith in purposeless journalism, in journalism which has so little insight into the tendencies of the time that it s.h.i.+fts its view from day to day in accommodation to transient popular caprices. No great object is accomplished without constancy of purpose, and a guide of public opinion can not be constant unless he has a deep and abiding conviction of the importance of what he advocates. Mr. Greeley's remarkable power, when traced back to its main source, will be found to have consisted chiefly in that vigorous earnestness of belief which held him to the strenuous advocacy of measures which he thought conducive to the public welfare, whether they were temporarily popular or not. Journalism may perhaps gain more success as a mercantile speculation by other methods; but it can be respected as a great moral and political force only in the hands of men who have the talents, foresight, and moral earnestness which fit them to guide public opinion. It is in this sense that Mr. Greeley was our first journalist, and n.o.body can successfully dispute his rank, any more than Mr. Bennett's could be contested in the kind that seeks to float on the current instead of directing its course. The one did most to render our American journals great vehicles of news, the other to make them controlling organs of opinion. Their survivors in the profession have much to learn from both.--_New York World_.

Knight of the ready pen, Soldier without a sword, Such eyes hadst thou for other men, So true and grand a word!

As Caesar led his legions Triumphant over Gaul, And through still wilder, darker regions, So thou didst lead us all!

Until we saw the chains Which bound our brothers' lives, And heard the groans and felt the pains, Which come from wearing gyves.

To brave heroic men The false no more was true; And what the Nation needed then Could any soldier do.