there cutting quite a swath with his dancing, and even Grant was inveigled into the lancers at one big dance, to cut a sorry figure.1 Just a little while before he had cut a sorrier figure when he had gone to the Boston Jubilee as the guest of Jim Fisk and Jay Gould, men deep in speculation, and one with a malodorous reputation. Never two men so different in so many ways as these. Gould, slight, almost shy, soft-spoken, retiring, with all the domestic virtues and singularly free from the familiar vices of his sex; Fisk, flamboyant, vociferous, vicious in morals, gaudy in peacock feathers, given to a defiant flaunting of his faults - men of clashing temperaments with but one common instinct, that of acquisition. In the pursuit of gain, one was no more scrupulous than the other, and neither had any scruples at all. New York was buzzing with the stories of their management of the Erie Railroad, and their speculations on Wall Street. Rumor was bruiting it abroad that in official circles they gained their ends through bribery. And yet, one June afternoon, Gould had called at the home of Abel E. Corbin, the brother-in-law of Grant, to escort the President to the steamer Providence, of the Fall River Line, gayly bedecked with fluttering flags, and with Fisk, the owner, gorgeous in the gold braid and brass buttons of an Admiral, at the gangway to welcome the distinguished guest. Dodsworth's Band had been engaged for the trip, and other distinguished gentlemen had been invited to keep Grant company. That night, at nine o'clock, the party had descended to the dining-room, where an epicurean feast had been spread, with an abundance of the choicest wines and liquors. There Grant had sat in silence mostly, chewing at his black cigar, as Gould and Fisk expatiated on the patriotic need of keeping up the price of gold, that the crops might be moved with profit. It was a drama in which Grant was playing a rôle without his knowledge. From Boston, Gould, with other fish to fry, had hurried back to New York, but the dashing, gaudily bedecked Fisk lingered with the presidential party, moving with real gallantry through the ceremonies, overshadowing the modest, plain-bearded man he was attending; and so back to New York, where at night, in the 1 New York World, July 19, 20, 23, 24, 28, 1869. brilliant glare of the Fifth Avenue Theater, Grant, with his wife and daughter, sat in a proscenium box in familiar converse with the Corbins, Fisk, and Gould. And the spectators had looked on and marveled and spread the news of the intimacy of notorious speculators with the head of the Nation. Grant was on the stage that night — without suspecting it. And he was playing in a tragedy shot through with the elements of farce. II No one, perhaps, was shocked or greatly astonished, for it was a decade of none too much sensibility, when strong men with the instincts and daring of pirates and buccaneers were amassing fortunes by hook or crook, to the admiring applause of the multitude. Out in Ohio, young John D. Rockefeller, with vision and audacity amounting to genius, was laying the foundations of a mighty fortune through relentless and dubious methods; the coal industry was being built up through means as heartless; railroads were being constructed on graft, milked and wrecked; and even from the cathedral quiet of the castle of Jay Cooke, with its retinue of clerics hovering about, went forth strange messages concerning public men and governmental grants to the Northern Pacific. Though not then known, Oakes Ames had already been busy distributing alms to statesmen of distinction in the interest of the Crédit Mobilier. The North had gone money-mad, and glory be to him who had the gold, and no questions asked. Men with oldfashioned notions of morality, like Jonathan Worth, looked upon the scene following the election of 1868 with pessimism. 'Money has become the goddess of the country,' he wrote, 'and otherwise good men are almost compelled to worship at her shrine. "The proof was manifest in the fact that legislators, State and National, 'are bribed by money or controlled by corrupt rings.'1 The Capitol in Washington fairly teemed with lobbyists who were received on terms of familiarity by legislators and given the privilege of the floor. Even the conservative William M. Evarts was impressed with 'the decline of public morality which presages revolution,' and Godkin, of "The Nation,' was sure that in New York it had 1 To William Clark, Worth, II, 1259. 2 Hoar, Autobiography, 1, 307. 3 'confessedly never been so low.' He was losing faith even in the 'loyal men' of the South, and was sure that 'at the bottom of all these confiscation schemes there are rascals.' Boss Tweed was busy at Albany with his bi-partisan corruptionists, and the charge had been publicly made, without a libel suit, that Governor Fenton had been bribed by Gould to sign the Erie Bill. There had been a little wagging of tongues in Washington, whither Fenton had been promoted by a grateful people to the Senate, but no one suggested an investigation because 'too many Radicals in place here are tarred by this or a similar stick.' 2 The Washington correspondent of the 'Cincinnati Enquirer' was commenting pointedly on the number of statesmen building fine houses in the capital and regretting that 'we have sunk so low in our political system that the question of three-story brick and stone fronts must enter largely into a discussion of the merits of public men.' Even the 'Chicago Tribune' was speaking bluntly. 'Why do we say these things?' it asked. 'In the first place they are already known - everybody is talking about them, in the streets, on horse cars, in the railroad trains, in the clubrooms, around euchre tables everywhere except in the Executive Mansion.' That summer, the meticulously honest Julian, suffering physical torment, was dragging his ailing body through the Far-Western country, and more than verifying his conviction that the public domain was being stolen with impunity. Fraud everywhere! "The saddest part is that the public officials, both State and Federal, are in league with the capitalists in making the rich richer, and the poor poorer.' But Julian was beginning to lose caste with the Radicals, and had made the fatal blunder of attacking the railroad lobby as corrupt the previous winter. He was already marked for slaughter. The clear-thinking Matthew Carpenter was convinced a year before that the new slavery power was 'the combinations of capital, the consolidations of monopolies.' 7 4 And meanwhile, the voice of Andrew Johnson was heard in the 1 Godkin, to Norton, 1, 301. 2 New York World, March 27, 1869. 3 Quoted, New York World, December 11, 1869. MS. Diary, August 11, 1869. 4 Ibid., April 30, 1869. • Congressional Globe, February 5, 1869. 7 Speech at Madison on 'The Growth of Monopoly,' Life of Carpenter, 145. land, hammering away at the moral standards of the time. It was annoying to hear that familiar voice crying from the balcony of the St. Cloud Hotel, in Nashville: 'I feel prouder in my retirement than imperial Cæsar with such a corrupt Congress at his heels, for... when degeneracy and corruption seem to control Departments of Government; when "vice prevails and impious men bear sway, the post of honor is a private station." When I accepted the Presidency... I accepted it as a high trust.... I did not accept it as a donation, or as a grand gift establishment; I did not take it as a horn of plenty, with sugar plums to be handed out here and there. Thank God, I can stand before the people of my State and lift up both hands and say in the language of Samuel, "Whose ox have I taken, or whose ass have I taken? At whose hands have I received bribes and had my eyes blinded? If there be any, let him answer.' And there was no answer. 999 It was soon afterward that the news flashed over Washington that Johnson was in town and at the Metropolitan, and that night a great crowd marched on him in a serenade, and when he appeared on the balcony the welkin rang. It was an unmannerly speech, perhaps, for he denounced Congress as 'tyrants standing with the heel of power on the necks of the freedmen, endeavoring to blot out the lines separating the States, and to wipe out the coördinate branches of the Government,' and he satirized Grant as 'the second Washington,' while the crowd laughed and cheered.1 The capital was still a lively place, fond of its cup and gossip and cards, and when a little scandal broke, it fairly rocked with glee. A young diplomat attached to one of the legations had taken the Radical philosophy of racial equality seriously, and had shocked the staid matrons of society by proudly escorting a beautiful mulatto to a party, and his chief, the Minister, was most abject in his apologies.2 And then there was Senator Sprague, husband of Kate Chase Sprague, the Mrs. Bingham of her time he was both puzzling and amusing the country that spring and summer, too. 1 New York World, July 2, 1869. 2 Ibid., October 23, 1869. III Senator Sprague has been neglected by history, albeit he was an idol in war days as the dashing and efficient young War Governor of Rhode Island. Elected to the Senate, he had speedily fallen under the spell of Kate Chase's seductive beauty and suffered the eclipse that befalls men who mate with their superiors. Even so, his was the fortune that defrayed the cost of the elaborate entertainments and dinners given in the fine old house at Sixth and E Streets, where the Spragues lived with Chase - a roomy old house with wide hall and ample apartments richly, elegantly, tastefully furnished. Prone to dissipation, he seemed older than his age in 1869. With small head and features, his eyes were large and lustrous, and he wore his hair long with an affected careless ness. In April, he had created a sensation in the Senate in a speech warning that money was becoming predominant in government and was threatening the economic liberties of the people. Attacking his colleague, Senator Anthony, as the tool of 'Brown and Ivers,' business rivals of the Spragues in Rhode Island, in attempting to destroy his credit, he charged corruption in the Senate, and baldly declared that Senators had taken employment with great corporations seeking government favor.1 It took the Senate two weeks to prepare its defense; but two weeks later, numerous Senators attacked Sprague, who responded by reading thirty pages of commendatory letters into the 'Globe.' The replies, read to-day in the light of what we now know, are flimsy enough; for, ignoring the major charges, the Senators, replying, seized on an incidental reflection on the military record of General Burnside and flayed Sprague on that alone. On the afternoon of the night the workingmen of Washington serenaded him in approval of his philippic, Sprague sat in his library before the fireplace at a table with many wonderfully carved paper-knives and odd-looking inkwells, with books piled on top of Bohemian vases, and with an enormous pile of letters before him, talking with the correspondent of the 'New York Herald.' He was in jubilant mood was going to New York to arrange for the printing of sixty thousand copies of his speech 1 Congressional Globe, April 8, 1869. 2 Ibid., April 22, 1869. |