A^ ^ .S \^# /i^lf/V", %^4 ^^^.. * ') N \V ^ ^ - ^- '»' 8 I V ■" -•<► ^ 7- (^ C> « ^ .^ /^ \ i?°^. John N. Edwards BIOGRAPHY, MEMOIRS, REMINISCENCES AND RECOLLECTIONS HIS BRILLIANT CAREER AS SOLDIER, AUTHOR, AND JOURNALIST CHOICE COLLECTION OF HIS MOST NOTABLE AND INTERESTING NEWSPAPER ARTICLES, TOGETHER WITH SOME UNPUB- LISHED POEMS AND MANY PRIVATE LETTERS. ALSO A REPRINT OF SHELBY'S EXPEDITION TO MEXICO AN UNWRITTEN LEAF OF THE WAR COMPILED BY HIS WIFE JENNIE EDWARDS Kansas City, Mo. : JENNIE EDWARDS, PUBLISHER iSSq h COPYRIGHTED JENNIE EDWARDS 1889 DONOHUE & HENNEBERRY, FRINTSRS AND BINDEBS, CHICAGO. DEDICATION. TO THE FRIENDS OF MY DEAD HUSBAND, SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS, CONFEDERATES AND FEDERALS, DEMOCRATS AND REPUB- LICANS, I INTRUST THIS WORK JENNIE EDWARDS. CONTENTS PAGE. Dedication. By Jennie Edwards 3 Biographical Sketch. By Rev. Geo. Plattenburg 9 Twenty Years of Friendship. By Morrison Munford. ... 37 Miscellaneous Writings of John N. Edwards: Poor Carlota 65 A Stranger in a Strange Land 66 Pilot, What op the Ship ? 68 quantrell 69 Thomas Buchanan Read 70 James Gordon Bennett 71 Fenimore C ooper 73 Schuyler Colfax 74 Bon Voyage, Miss Nellie 75 Little Nelson W. Daley , . . 76 Henry Clay Dean 77 Henry Ward Beecher 78 General Albert Sidney Johnston 80 Katkofp 82 A Fish Story ' 84 Prohibition 85 On Democracy 88 Not Men Entirely 89 Every Tub on Its Own Bottom 91 Bourbon Democracy 92 A Very Plain Remedy 93 M. Taine on Napoleon 95 The Statue to Calhoun 97 Charles Stewart Parnell 98 The Battle of the Flags 99 General Gordon 100 Victor Hugo 102 Henry M. Stanley 104 Death from Starvation 105 In a Foreign Land 107 Always a Woman 108 More Literary Mutiliation 110 Christmas Rejoicings Ill 5 Vi CONTENTS. PAQB. Poor Valentine Baker 114 roscoe conkling 116 On Southern Poets 118 As to King David 119 Dr. JosEni M. Wood 121 War Quaker Fashion 123 Will-O'-The-Wisp 124 Wolesley on McClellan and Lee 126 Cleveland Retires to Private Life 128 Washington's Birthday 130 Time Makes all Things Even 132 James N. Burnes 134 Death of the Prince Imperial 137 Bazaine 138 The Ney Myth 140 Don Carlos and Mexico 142 Poor France 143 Edmund O'Donovan 146 The Revised Np:w Testament 148 The German Succession 149 A New Revision op the Bible 150 The Revised Bible 150 Marriage op Captain Collins 152 The Great American Novel 152 OuiDA AND Zola 154 Is Death All? , 155 The New Y ear 156 Whose Fault is It? 157 Gone Down at Sea 158 Better War By Land than Sea 160 A Close Call 161 The KiLLmo of Jesse James 163 Veteran Sam 165 Address Accepting a Flag 167 Carrier's Address of The Missouri Expositor .... 168 Murder Done; or, The Gypsy's Story 171 The Bivouac of the Dead 174 The Marriage of Pere Hyacinths 176 Napoleon and His Detractors 178 The Best One Hundred Books 180 Personal Tributes 181 Newspaper Tributes 196 Shelby's Expedition to Mexico. An Unwritten Lbaf OF THE War 229 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. BY REV. GEO. PLATTENBURG, DOVER, MO. The subject of this brief sketch, John Newman Edwards, was born in Warren County, Va. , January 4, 1839. Whilst a mere boy he learned tpye-setting at the town of Front Eoyal, a place now of great and heroic mem- ories, in the Gazette office, a paper at this writing called the Sentinel. Even at that time he was regarded as a boy of extraordinary powers, having, at the immature age of fourteen years, as testifies a contemporary, written a story that gave him '^ wide celebrity. '' While yet a boy, through the influence of his relation, Thomas J. Yerby, of Lexing- ton, now of Marshall, Mo., he was induced to come to the State of Missouri in 1854 or 1855. Arriving in Lexington, he soon thereafter entered upon his avocation of printer in the office of the Expositor, by whom conducted I do not now recall. Here, really, began the education of this singularly gifted boy, wjiose manhood was to be so rich in strange adventures and romance. Of schools Major Edwards knew but little, his advantages of this kind were limited and poor in character. As a boy, he loved soli- tude — this peculiarity in manhood made him shy to the verge of girlish timidity. He loved the fields, sweet with ''^the breath of kine " and the new-mown hay. He lingered in the dim vistas of the woods, and from out their slumberous shadows, dreamily watched the ceaseless swirl of the great river. This love of nature and its communion, 9 10 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. made him fond of the hunt and the pastime of gentle Izaak Walton. His life during these years, in and about Lexington, was of the ordinary uneventful character, belonging to extreme youth and peaceful times. But the storm was brewing. The distant and sullen muttering of a great political upheaval was breaking ominously upon the nation^s ears. Great questions lying radically at the very base of the two antagonistic conceptions of the American system of gov- ernment, were loudly and hotly contested by the sections of the country. The slavery question was not the cause, but the occasion of the threatened rupture. Whatever men may say, or however much they may deplore sectional controversy, there were, as there are, but two great drifts of thought as to the true theory of our institutions, the one, denominated, ^' State Eights," the other, the steady trend toward centralization. Leaving the truth or falsity of these contested theories out of the question, the fact remains that out of them came one of the mightiest struggles known to the annals of the race. The rupture came. The '^golden bowl was broken," the ^''silver cord was loosened," and there came an era of hate and blood that all good men ought gladly to wish to be forgotten. HIS CAREER AS A SOLDIER. It is at this juncture that Major Edwards began his active career. In the year 1862, Gen. Jo. 0. Shelby organized a regiment near Waverly, Lafayette County, Mo. Of this regiment Frank Gordon was Lieutenant- Colonel. Colonels Shanks and Beal G. Jeans, Avith Capt. Ben Elliott in command of a battalion, joined and united with Shelby at this point. This command moved on the day of the Lone Jack fight with a view of forming a junc- tion with Cockrell and Coffee. The forces of Shanks, Jeans, and Elliott, with his own regiment, constituted the original force under Shelby. Of this command, after the expiration of several months, upon the retirement of BIOGKAPHICAL SKETCH. 11 Captain Arthur, John N. Edwards received the appoint- ment of Brigade- Adjutant, with the rank of Major. This occurred in the month of September, 1863. When finally Shelby was promoted to the command of a division, Edwards shared the fortune of his generous and chival- rous leader and became the Adjutant of the division, I think with the rank of Colonel, though of this I have no positive evidence at hand. In this positionhe continued until the disbanding of the whole command after Lee's surrender. Shelby's force, as we have seen, left Waverly to form a junction with Cockrell and Coffee, but on reaching Columbus in Johnson County, he heard of the Lone Jack battle, and was compelled to revise his plans. He began to work his way south, invironed by almost indescribable difficulties, and never at any time were the experiences and dangers of this illustrious body of men greater or graver. Care, prudence and courage of the highest order were manifested in successfully making this junction, with the men that fought at Lone Jack, an accomplished fact. This was done at or near Newtonia, from which point the united force fell back to McKissock's Springs, in Arkansas. Of this force, as Senior Colonel, Shelby took command, Lieut. -Col. Frank Gordon being at the head of the old regiment. From McKissock's they fell back to Cane Hill, a place made memorable years before by one of those tragedies so incident to frontier life of almost indescribable horror. Here they rested. Hind- man at that time having his headquarters at Van Buren. To Shelby was given the arduous and dangerous duty of watching and contesting, step by step, the Federal advance from Fayetteville. It was necessarily Shelby's additional duty to cover Hindman's movements at Van Buren, Blount performing a like service for Curtiss. During this period the splendid soldierly qualities of this whole command were daily exhibited. The soldier alone knows the hardships, and the demand for an almost superhuman endurance in this form of military service, of such varied fortune of defeat and victory. During the whole period immediately 12 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. prior to the battle of Prairie Grove, Shelby held the posi- tion in front of Hindman^s advance, and finally, on a frosty December morning, he opened the hard contested fight of Prairie Grove. The sad December night before the battle is thus described by Major Edwards himself, and as he alone could do it: '^The moon this night had been eclipsed, too, and upon many of the soldiers the weird, mysterious appearance of the sky, the pale, ghost-like phantom of a cloud across its crimson disc, had much of superstitious influence. At first, when the glowing camp fires had burned low and comfortable a great flood of radiance was pouring over the mountains and silvering even the hoary white beard of the moss clustering about the blank, bare faces of the precipices. The shadows con- tracted finally. The moon seemed on fire, and burned itself to ashes. The gigantic buckler of the heavens, studded all over with star-diamonds, had for its boss a gloomy, yellowish, struggling moon. Like a wounded King, it seemed to bleed royally over the nearest cloud, then wrapt its dark mantle about its face, even as Csesar did, and sink gradually into extinction. There was a hollow grief of the winds among the trees, and the snowy phantasm of the frost crinkled and rustled its gauze robes under foot. The men talked in subdued voices around their camp-fires, and were anxious to draw from the eclipse some happy augury. Eelief exhibited itself on every face when the moon at least shone out broad and good, and the dark shadows were again lit up with tremu- lous rays of light.'' And e'er the great sun's white splendors kissed the rime- robed earth, Shelby's voice, clear as a bugle's note, came to gallant Shanks, ^'Forward, Major!" And since the day that men first learned war, they never rode with more splendid courage into battle; not one of all these men but deserved the golden spurs of chivalrous knighthood. From this field, stained with such precious blood on this chill December day, Shelby again occupied the post of honor and danger, covering Hindman's retreat. Falling back slowly, on reaching Van Buren he found that General BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 13 Hindman had abandoned his position at Van Buren, and had fallen back to Little Rock. Shelby finally went into camp at Lewisburg, on the Arkansas River, and became virtually an outpost of Hindman's command at Little Rock. Shelby in all this service acted independ- ently, although shortly prior to the Prairie Grove battle Shelby^s and Marmaduke's Brigades had been united, form- ing Marmaduke's Division; the latter becoming Division Commander by virtue of a Brigadier^s commission at that time in his possession. At this camp was organized an expedition into Missouri, the leading event of which was the capture of Springfield, January 8, 1863. But being unable to hold the position won, they moved on in an easterly direction to the town of Hartsville, where a dis- astrous defeat was sustained. From this point a retreat was effected, and the force went finally into camp at Bates- ville, on the White River in Arkansas. Here, probably in the month of April, subsequent to the events described, was organized what is known as the '^ Cape Girardeau Expedition,'' as the attack upon this town was the leading event of the campaign, where the subject of this sketch was wounded and taken prisoner. Some time prior to that measureless blunder of a most pitiful senility, the disastrous assault upon Helena, Arkansas, Major Edwards was exchanged and had rejoined his command, taking part in the fateful scenes of that dark day when so many gallant and fearless men were slaughtered upon the altar of a boundless stupidity. Shelby was wounded in this battle. His command then moved to Jackson Port, where he remained until the Federal advance under that humane soldier. General Frederick Steele, was made on Little Rock. Shelby was commanded to take position on Bayou Metoe, to watch Steele's advance from points on the White River. Price's whole force was then occupying an intrenched position on the Arkansas River immediately opposite Little Rock. Colonel Frank Gordon's regiment was occu- pying a position on the extremity of a spur of Big Rock, in full view of the city. In all the scenes before Little Rock Shelby's division was a very large part, and finally 14 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. covered Price's retreat from the city. At Arkadelphia another expedition into Missouri was organized, at the earnest solicitation of General Shelby, and so the raid of 1863 was inaugurated. He gained permission to select a number of men from each regiment of his division, to the number of 800. After a single day's march they came within the enemy's territory. Marching day and night, engaged in countless skirmishes, they reached and captured Boonville ; from thence they came to Marshall, where they were surrounded by not less than 5,000 men under Ev/ing, Crittenden and Pleasonton. The two formed in front, the latter in the rear. After three or four hours' fighting, Shelby determined to cut his way out, and an order to this effect was borne to Colonel Shanks by Major Edwards. The plan was successfully accomjilished despite the mighty odds against them. The inequality of the forces gave especial glory to the deed. But it is not possible in a brief sketch like this to fol- low the fortunes of this band of noble soldiers under so dashing and fearless a leader, in a long war. Of the scenes so tragic of this vast conflict each soldier might say with Aeneas as he recounted the miseries and the fall of Troy, to Dido and her Tyrians, until the sinking stars invited to repose '' Magna Pars Fui." Of the great con- test and its strangely varied fortunes they were a great part. It was at this point in the history of this great internecine struggle that Major Edwards began to receive that military prominence he so richly deserved. As a soldier, he was not only brave and fearless, and wise in council, but gentle, tender, courteous to the humblest soldier beneath him. As he was whole-hearted in the cause he espoused, so dealt he kindly with the men that shared his convictions and the fortunes of a common cause. I here employ the beautiful tribute of Major J. F. Stonestreet, who shared with him the vicissitudes of a long and bitter struggle. It is better said than I could say it : A COMRADE'S TRIBUTE. The achievements of Shelby and his men are matters of histoid . Of them all Major Edwards was the hero. The individual instances of his bravery in battle, his BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 15 wisdom in council, his tender solicitude for his men, his self-sacrificing spirit, would fill a volume. Major J. F. Stonestreet, of this city, who was with him until he crossed the Rio Grande into Mexico, tells well the story of his part in the great struggle. ** I cannot speak of John Edwards without emotion," he said. ^^He was the noblest man of the many noble men who took part in the great struggle in the West. I can not begin to tell of all the instances of his valor in battle, his kindness in camp, his care for his comrades, his noble self-sacrifice, his great brain and noble heart. No one but those who were with him in those dark hours can appreciate his magnificent spirit. He was only a boy when he joined Gordon^s regiment, but he soon became the hero of Shelby's old brigade. It was a grand sight to see him in battle. He was always where the fight was thickest. He was absolutely devoid of fear. The men had the con- fidence in him that they would have had, had he been a God. Their trust in him was sublime. He had a genius for war. While he was as brave as a lion, his courage was not of the rash, impetuous sort that led him into foolhardy under- takings. His wisdom was as great as his bravery. No one appreciates more the character and achievmentsof General Shelby than I; but when the dark days came, it was John Edwards who, more than anybody else, inspired hope in the hearts of the men, cheered and encouraged them, and spurred them on to renewed exertions. ^*This self-sacrifice was noble. I have seen him dis- mount and give his horse away to a tired trooper. In the hospital once I saw him take off his shirt and tear it up for bandages for the wounded, not knowing when or how he was to get another one. I have seen him take off his coat and give it to a soldier who, he thought, was more in need of it. His spirit was so gentle that it hurt him more to see others suffer than to sufferhimself. What heroism he displayed in that awful retreat from Westport ! Small- pox broke out among the men. John Edwards feared it as little as he did the bullets of the enemy. He would take a soldier with the small-pox in his arms, carry him to the most comfortable place that could be secured, and nurse him with the care of a woman. He would brave any- thing to secure a delicacy for a sick soldier. When we were eating horseflesh on that awful march, and the men were starving, naked and ready to give up, it was he who cheered and encouraged them and held them together. His heart was so big that he thought of every- body before himself. 16 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. ''In battle he was a very Mars; in camp he was as gentle as a woman. The men loved him, and little wonder. He could never do enough for them. Brave men, all of them, they recognized him as the bravest and the brainiest. 'Follow me, boys,"* I have heard him cr,%'and I will take you where the bullets are the thickest atd the sabers the sharpest,' and then, his sword flashed in his hand, he would be off to where the fight was the hottest. And the men would be after him with a confidence and devotion that insured victory. He was the bravest man in war and the gentlest in peace that I ever saw. He was the soul of honor. He was one man in a million. He was the Chevalier Bayard of Missouri." Notwithstanding his intrepid bravery. Major Stone- street says he was badly wounded but once. That was in Marmaduke's raid on Springfield, when he was shot and taken prisoner in the fight near Hartsville. He was after- ward exchanged and rejoined his regiment at Jackson- ville, Ark. He especially distinguished himself for bravery and strategy in the 4th of July fight at Helena, which was in progress when Vicksburg surrendered. It was said of him that he had more horses shot from under him, and gave more horses away to those whom he thought needed them more than himself, than any man in Shelby's brigade. So testifies one who knew John Edwards through all the trying scenes of a contest all too bitter, and who loved him well. John Edwards was a born soldier. The genius of war and the genius of poetry alike presided at his birth. The courage of the Knight and the poesy of the Troubadour were alike his. He crowned the brow of war with golden nimbus of the poet. For his deft fingers the brand of the grizzled grenadier and the minstrel's lute were alike fashioned. He brought the chivalry and song of the thirteenth into the Titanic struggles of the nine- teenth century. An officer once bore a report of General Shelby's to Gen- eral Holmes, who on reading it exclaimed with an impious expletive: "Why, Shelby is a poet as well as a fighter!" "No, replied the officer, but his Adjutant is a born poet." It was this remarkable combination of elements in Major Edwards that made him as brave and fearless as he was tender and gentle. It also accounts for the strong. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 17 religious sentiment of his nature mentioned in a brief speech at his grave. Belief in the supernatural elements of religion and poesy go hand in hand. Goethe stated a very large and a very fundamental truth when he wrote, ^'Der Aberglauhe ist die Poesie cles Lele^is" — the ''over- faith, the supernatural, is the ground. of lifers highest political forms. IN MEXICO-MARRIAGE, ETC. After the close of the war Major Edwaras followed the fortunes of his old leader with others of his fellow- soldiers into Mexico, where he spent two years, a deeply interested spectator of the affairs of Maximilian's Empire. With this amiable, but unfortunate Prince, and with his wife the '^Poor Carlotta," he became a favorite, and through him was negotiated and obtained the grant which enabled Shelby^ and perhaps fifty others, to estab- lish the Cordova Colony of Carlotta. He and Governor Allen, of Louisiana, a man of beautiful spirit and richly stored mind, established a newspaper, The Mexican Times, devoted to the restoration of an era of peace, prosperity and good government for this sadly distracted people. Whilst here, the material of one of his books, ''An Un- written Leaf of the War,'^ was produced and gathered, which appears in this present volume. What a strangely romantic period these two years must have been to the dreamy, poetic soldier of the North. The rich, tropical foliage, the skies luminously blue, the warm airs, the voluptuous climate, the romantic people inheriting the glorious traditions of Old Spain, the memories of the Cid, songs of Calderon and Lope de Vega, chanted in the sweet the Castilian tongue must have been things of ceaseless charm to the imaginative temperament so strongly marked, in Major Edwards. It was a period of romantic adventure, and from time to time he has related to me singular episodes that occurred during his association with Governor Allen, but brevity denies indulgence to the reminiscent mood. 18 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. In the year 18G7, liaviDg returned from Mexico, Major Edwards went on the Rejntblican as a reporter, then under the editorial control of Col. William Hyde, a noble gentleman and an able writer, whose contributions to that great paper have rarely been equaled in western journalism. In the year 1808, in connection with the brilliant and versatile Col. John C. Moore, now of the Pueblo Dis- patch, he inaugurated the Kansas City Times, with the financial support of R. B. Drury & Co. It was at this time that he was married. This marriage took place on March 28, 1871, to Mary Virginia Plattenburg, of Dover, Lafayette County, Missouri. A woman scarce less bril- liant than himself, of liigh impulses, poetic sentiment and of an uncommon literary faculty, she was a fit companion for this molder of " fiery and delectable shapes." They were married at the residence of Gen. John 0. Shelby, near Aullville, in Lafayette County. This marriage took place away from the home of the bride because of an inter- posed objection on the part of the parents, grounded solely upon the near family relationship of the parties. The fruit of this marriage is two boys and one girl. The boys are John aged seventeen and James fourteen years, the»girl Laura eight. THE DUEL WITH COLONEL FOSTER. Major Edwards remained on the Times until 1873, two years after it passed into its present management, and greatly aided in building it up into its present command- ing position as director of western thought and enterprise. In this same year, he went upon the St. Louis Despatcli, owned and controlled by Mr. Sti'ison Ilutcbins, whom he followed into the St. Louis Times. It was while at Avork on the Times that his duel with Col. Emory S. Foster took place. The difficulty grew out of certain questions incident to the great civil struggle whose memories were yet fresh in the minds of all, and its passions still unallayed. These matters were discussed with great acerbity of temper and sharpness of expression. The acrimony engen- BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 19 dered by a long, bitter contest, was still more or less domi- nant in the minds of men in all sections. It can serve no good purpose here to dwell on the questions themselves or their mode of treatment; they belong to the dead past, and there let them remain. I know that the acrimony so rife at the time of this occurrence with Major Edwards, in common with the better class of men in both sections, was a thing to be deplored and forgotten. The friends and admirers of Major Edwards are of all parties. There are no more tender or appreciative tributes to his memory than those written by the men in blue. Mrs. Edwards informs me that she has received as many expressions of sympathjs and admiration from Federal as from Confeder- ate soldiers. The perpetuation of the rancor of the war is left to the camp-follower and coward. I shall here enter on no defense of Major Edwards' ideas on the duello. With his education, and sensitive perception of the worth of personal honor, it is easily accounted for. Omitting the offensive paragraphs we give this statement from a morning paper the day after the rencounter: Beloit, Wis., Sept. 4, 1875. A duel was fought at five o'clock this afternoon, six miles north of Rockford, in Winnebago County, Illinois, between Maj. John JST. Edwards, of the St. Louis Times and Despatch, and Col. E. S. Foster, of the St. Louis Journal. The origin of the affair grew out of the recent invitation to Jefferson Davis to address the Winnebago Fair. The St. Louis Times of August the 25th contained an article written by Major Edwards, commenting upon the treatment of Mr. Davis, and reflecting upon the intol- erant spirit manifested. To this the Jour Jial replied that the writer of the Times article had lied, and knew he lied, when he wrote it. Major Edwards took exception to this and demanded a retraction of the offensive language. Colonel Foster, the editor of the Journal, disavowed any personal allusion to Major Edwards, but declined to retract the language. A lengthy correspondence ensued. Col. H. B. Branch acting as the friend of Major Edwards, and Col. W. D. W. Barnard as the friend of Colonel Foster, the result of which is embodied in the last letters of the principals, which show the difference between them : 20 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. St. Louis, Mo., Aug. 30, 1875. ''Col. Emory S. Foster: ^'Sir: In reply to your letter of this date I have to state that your reply to the reasonable request I made of you, to-wit, to withdraw and to disavow all language in your editorial of the 25th inst., personally offensive to myself, is evasive and not responsive to my request. In my letter to you I referred solely to what was directly personal to myself, without inquiring whether my editorial, or yours in answer to it, exceeded the usages of the press in discuss- ing a subject generally or referring to bodies of persons. I can not admit your right to introduce these questions into this controversy which refer solely to your allusion to the writer of the Times editorial. '' The disclaimer in the first four paragraphs of your letter would be satisfactory had you followed it^ up by a withdrawal of the offensive terms of your editorial, so far as they referred to me personally. But as you decline to do so I must, therefore, construe your letter of this date, and its spirit, as a refusal on your part to do me an act of common justice, and so regarding it, I deem it my duty to ask of you that satisfaction which one gentleman has a right to ask of another. ''My friend, Col. H. B. Branch, who will deliver this, is authorized to arrange with any friend you may select, the details of further arrangements connected with the subject. Very respectfully, your obedient servant, J. N. Edwards.^\ St. Louis, Aug. 31, 1875. " Col. John N. Edwards: 'USir: Yours of the 30th inst. was handed to my friend, W. D. AY. Barnard, Esq., at 11 o'clock this A. M., by your friend. Col. H. B. Branch, and is now before me. In reply, I have to state that I emphatically disclaimed in my note of yesterday any intention of referring to you, or in any way offering to you, a personal offense in the mat- ter in which you have raised the issue. "My friend Mr. Barnard will have charge of my honor in the premises. I am, very respectfully, your obedient servant, Emory S. Foster.'' It being found impossible, as appears from the above correspondence, to accomplish a reconciliation between the parties by a withdrawal of the offensive language, the matter passed into the hands of the seconds, Col. H. B. Branch, on the part of Major Edwards, and W. I). W. Barnard on the part of Colonel Foster. BIOGKAPHICAL SKETCH. 21 They were to meet on the 4th day of September, 1875, between the hours of 6 and 7 A. m., or as soon thereafter as the parties could reach the grounds, in the county of Winnebago, State of Illinois. The weapons. Coitus navy revolvers calibre 38, the distance twenty paces. Each party entitled to one shot, unless both demanded a second. The firing was to be at the words, thus': '^ Are you ready; one, two, three '^ — the firing to occur after the word ^'two^^ and not after the word *^^three/^ The seconds were to be similarly armed, and any violation of the rules agreed upon entitled the second of the one to shoot down the offending second of the other. Upon arriving at Rockford both parties drove to the Holland House and partook of dinner. About 3 o'clock the seconds completed their arrange- ments. It was decided to drive five miles north on the Beloit road, and have the meeting in some secluded spot. Both principals agreed, and Col. Edwards^ party started off in a hack at half -past three, the understanding being for them to await the other party for half an hour after arriving as far out as designated. If the challenged party did not arrive on time it was to be regarded as an evidence of cowardice. The Foster party caught up with the other party just as they were halting at an estimated distance from the city of five miles. ■ The spot where the halt was called was a shaded valley, with a winding stream called Turtle Creek, running through it. The seconds held another consultation, and^ the site suiting them, they went in search of a place sufii- ciently far from the Beloit road to be safe from intrusion. After an absence of five minutes they were successful in their search, and on their return the whole party left the carriages. The hackmen, who were wondering what was in the wind, but had not the enterprise to gratify their curiosity, were told to wait in the neighborhood for a few minutes, which instructions they filled to the very letter. The names of the parties who went on the.field were: Col. John N. Edwards, the challenging principal; Col. H. B. Branch, second; Dr. Montgomery, surgeon; Dr. Munford, of the Kansas City Tmes, friend; Major Foster, principal; W. D. W. Barnard, second; Dr. P. S. O'Reilly, surgeon, and the representative of the Tribune, friend. The spot selected was a couple of hundred yards to the west of the road, a beautifully shaded valley in which horses and cattle were grazing. The seconds took up position near a tree and commenced to examine the 23 JOHN NEWMAN EDWAllDS. weaj^ons. The principals were a few yards apart, Foster reclining on a bank, coolly smoking a cigar, Edwards resting with his back against a tree and conversing with Dr. Munford, with whom he served in the Confederate army. The surgeons took their cases of instruments to the hill-side, where they sat watching the preparations for the encounter. Some time was occupied in the examina- tion and loading of the pistols, and while the necessary part of the work was in progress, the principals each divested himself of his watch and other articles which might turn off a bullet. The next procedure was to measure the ground, a matter which was gone through with business-like dispatch and coolness. Twenty paces was the distance. The positions were north and south, and were marked by a short stake driven into the ground. Branches of trees were cleared out of the way to prevent injury from falls, and other details attended to which might render things comfortable for the parties imme- diately interested. The next important step was to toss up for position and the call. Branch, Edwards's second, won the choice of position, and Barnard the call. This fact was communicated to the principals, who expressed themselves satisfied with the result. The principals and seconds then walked up the ground. Edwards asked Foster^s opinion as to position, but the latter said he had no choice. They both received their weapons from the seconds and Edwards chose the south end of the ground. Before the final arrangements were completed, the friends were requested to relieve themselves of their pistols, a precaution against a general skirmish should either party feel aggrieved. Dr. Munford was the only one who had a pistol on his person, and he at once 2:)laced it in his valise. The conditions of the fight were then read. Edwards requested Barnard to articulate the words, "Are you ready? one, two, three," in a distinct manner, so as to prevent unpleasant haste. Both men at this point displayed mar- velous nerve, Foster smoking his cigar in an unconcerned way. Positions were then taken up, the the seconds shak- ing hands with their principals, and receiving instructions in case they should fall. At length all was ready. The seconds had pistols in their hands ready to revenge any infringements of the code. There was an ominous pause. At exactly 5 o'clock the men faced each other and took men- tal aim; then came the words, "Are you ready? " in clear, distinct tones: "one, two.'^ Before the word three the duel- ists fired almost simultaneously. The surgeons anxiously looked each to his man, expecting him to fall, but neither nTCGIlAPIIICAL SKETCH. 23 was woniuler. . ''A little high ! '' exclaimed Foster, as soon as Lehad tiitn^. Edwards demanded another fire, in an excited tone. 11 LS second asked if lie would adhere to that resolution. ^'Yes/'herep!ied,"itisjustas I told you before we came on the field. I will go on if it takes a thousand fires; ''and with this remark he sat down on the grass. Foster declined another fire. He was the challenged party, and felt no bitterness against his antagonist. Therefore he was not anxious for blood. His honor had been sustained as the challenged party. Shots had been exchanged, and that was all ihat was necessary. Barnard went to talk with Edwards, who was heard to say: '' I have adm^itted as much as I can do — have received no satisfaction to take with me.'' After the interchange of a few words, Edwards concluded to make the thing up. He approached Foster and shook hands. There was mutual congratulation all round, and it was interesting to see the brotherly love dis- played by the men, who two minutes before, had faced each other with death in their eyes. The genial Boui^on was produced, and the agreeable termination to the altair toasted. A short time was spent on the grass m mutual explanation, and everything was forgotten and forgiven. The parties then returned to their hacks, one shaping toward Beloit and the other to Rockford, which place they left in the evening, but for what point the reporter failed to ascertain. Apprehending a possible fatal result, Major Edwards wrote the following note to his friend. Dr. Morrison Mun- ford, who was present. It was written at the Tremont House, Chicago, and bears no date, and written in pencil on" a leaf torn from a note-book which he carried in his pocket. The note needs no comment— it carries ^ts own : Dear Morry: A little farewell I want to speak to you. I have but three thoughts: my wife, my two children. When you can help my wife in her pride— help her. it aint much— only it is so much to me. Your fi-iend, J. N. Edwards. This note is a revelation of the character of the rela- tions between these two men, and shows how implicity he relied upon the loyalty and steadfastness of Dr. Munford's friendship— the one man of all others upon whom he called in his supposed extremity. John Edwards knew the man he calls '^ Dear Morry " as perhaps no other man did, and 24 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. he trusted him. And now, the "little ftireweir^ has been spoken, and the memory of a brave soul is left to men. JOLRNALIST AND AUTHOR. After his withdrawal from the St. Louis Times he started to Santa Fe, to engage in sheep-raising, but visiting Dover to malie his farewells, he was dissuaded from the undertaking, and remained at the home of his wife's father. Judge J. S. Plattenburg, and wrote the "Noted Guer- rillas,"' a wonderful record of the border warfare. Subse- quently he went to Sedalia, taking editorial charge of the Democrat. Eetiring from this paper he started the Des- patch, which had a brief, but singularly brilliant career. He was then called to the editorial management of ihe St. Joseph Gazette, by the late Col. J. N. Burnes, the owner of the paper. Again, in 1887, he was recalled to the edit- orial chair of the Kansas City Times , which place he held at the time of his death. One needs but to read the numerous press tributes to know how exceedingly brilliant his editorial career has been. His style, bright and full of poetic forms, was forceful, vigorous and convincing; as flashing and as keen as the scimiter of Saladdin. Many of the passages in this book bear critical comparison with the most beautiful passages of classic English. The exuber- ance of expression and prodigality of beautiful words in the compositions of Major Edwards have occasionally led men to overlook or underestimate the more solid aspects of his mind. His historical and general knowledge was very great; his familiarity with the best specimens of Classic English in both prose and poetry was something wonderful in both accuracy and comprehensiveness. The opportuni- ties of a student's life were never within his reach, and yet he knew vastly more of books than most men who had been patient toilers over their pages through continuous years. To the ordinary mind it was wholly inexplicable, how or when he obtained such stores of rich and varied knowl- edge. His work was a remarkable blending of fact and BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 25 fancy, of cogent reasoning and vivid poetic expression. A rare combination of powers. There are many grad- grinds, but few poets to clothe the hard facts of life in the aureole of imperishable beauty. The words necessary to describe fitly the dauntless courage, the greatness of soul, the tenderness surpassing that of woman, characterizing the life of John Edwards, would, to those who little knew him, seem fulsome and extravagant. But not so to his friends who knew him. Some of the virtues of Major Ed- wards were so intense in their expression as to seem almost weaknesses. He never talked of himself. There was not a single shred of the braggart in his nature. He was reticent of his own deeds to the verge of eccentricity. He seemed to be wholly unambitious, free, even from a suspicion of egotism. A strongly marked instance of this is shown in the fact in three books of which he is the real hero, not once is illusion made to himself. I fully agree with his devoted friend. Dr. Munford, that such a repression of self, under such circumstances, is simply without a parallel. I have known but one other man well, in Missouri, who even nearly equaled the modesty,* the unselfish self-forgetfulness of John Edwards. That man was the prince of orators, whose soldiery skill wrote his name beside that of Xenophon, viz. : Gen. A. W. Doniphan. For all meretricious methods, for every form of pretense, for merely dramatic effect, John Edwards entertained the harshest scorn. Sham and cant that sniveled, stirred his gentle nature into holiest and hottest wrath, and he wove around its victim the network of scathing lampoon that burned like the shirt of Ness us. Trickery, deceit and cowardice alone made him pitiless. That he was unselfish is clearly manifested in this fact, that his great influence) and surely no single man in all the State had so large a personal following whose devotion was a passion, was never employed to advance his own financial interest or to win place for himself. His influence was always for his friends. The witnesses are everywhere, in every walk of life. Men in high places, and low alike, bear testimony to his unselfish work for every comer. He showed me once 26 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARD.^ a letter from a poor Irishman, asking liis assistance to pro- cure a position on the police force of St. Louis, and it was granted as readily as to a seeker ol the highest place and power. Of his carelessness of self-advancement and his unceasing thought of other people, this circumstance is recalled. He, the writer, and an old soldier, grim and gray, in stature a very son of Anak, stood together. These two men had ridden into battle as joyously as the groom seeks his bride. And now in the days of peace, the griz- zled soldier asks: '^ John, wouldn't you make a good gov- ernor?" Promptly the answer came: ^^ No, but I know who would." The swart grenadier asks: ''Who?'' It is not needful to give the party named, beyond this: that he represented his district in Congress, and wore for years stainlessly the judicial ermine of his State. I reconsider, and give the name of Elijah Norton, the able jurist, the distinguished publicist and reproachless gentleman. HIS DEATH. Major Edwards was ill as early as the Wednesday prior to his death, but his demise at last was sudden and unex- pected by his friends. The immediate cause of his death was inanition of the cardiac nerves. In the morning early he read part of a late paper. No one witnessed his death, but Thomas, a colored servant, and his little daughter Laura, aged eight 3''ears. His sons were at St. Mary's Col- lege, Kansas, and Mrs. Edwards, worn out from loss of rest, had retired to another room. He seemed to have some premonition that the end was near, as three different times he asked Thomas to call Mrs. Edwards. The boy not realizing the Major's condition, said, ''no let Mrs. Edwards rest." The child was playing with a bubble-pipe, and about ten minutes before death he blew a bubble, and said ''Laura, always remember that papa bought you that pipe" evidently from this he knew the end had come. The little girl stood by the bedside wiping the chill death dew from her father's brow, as his soul took its mysterious BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 27 flight to that ''bourne whence no traveler returns." Mrs. Edwards and Major Bittinger entered the room together, just as life's bound was reached. Soon it was noised abroad, and produced a profound sensation in all parts of the city. Says one: The news soon spread throughout the city, and there was universal expression of profound sorrow. Major Edwards had been a frequent visitor to the capital, attend- ing all the sessions of the Legislature for the past eighteen years, and all Democratic conventions held during that time. He was known to a majority of the members of the General Assembly, to the State officials and to the people generally. As soon as his death was announced, groups of men could be seen on the principal streets, discussing the sad event, and at the capitol half of the members of the Sen- ate and House at once left their seats and gathered in the lobby and adjoining rooms. Republicans and Democrats alike expressed the deepest sorrow for his sudden and untimely death, and the highest sympathy for his bereaved family. During the recess at noon nothing else was talked about among the crowds at the various hotels but the death of the brilliant journalist. RESOLUTIONS OF KESPECT. At the afternoon session of the Senate, Senator McGrath, of St. Louis, offered the following resolution: Whereas, The Senate of Missouri, with profound regret, have learned of the death of one of Missouri's greatest and most distin- guished citizens, Major John N. Edwards; therefore, he it Resolved, That in respect to his memory the Senate now adjourn. x\fter a few appropriate remarks by Senator Moran, of St. Joseph, the resolution was unanimously adopted and the Senate adjourned. In the House, Hon. Lysander A. Thompson, of Macon, offered a similar resolution, which was unanimously adopted and the House adjourned. This evening a great number of the members of the Senate and House visited the McCarty House to take a last look at the features of the dead journalist. In addition to the action of the Senate and House of Representatives as a mark of respect to the memory of the dead journalist, the local newspaper men and newspaper correspondents met at the THMme office this afternoon. 28 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. Mild a committee consisting of Walter M. Monroe, of the Tipton TimeSy W. A. Edwards, of the St. Joseph Gazette^ and C. 13. Oldham, of the Jefferson City Tribune, were appointed to draft suitable memorial resolutions to the memory of the deceased journalist. The committee reported the following: Maj. John N. Edwards was born in Virginia about fifty-one years ago. His parents moved to Lexington, Mo", when he was of tender age. He received a common school education and afterward learned the printing trade in an office at Lexington. At the commencement of the Civil War he enlisted in the Confederate army and belonged to Gen. Jo. 0. Shelby^s command. He was promoted time and again for skill and personal bravery, and won his military titles in the most honorable manner possible. He was engaged in more than fifty battles and skirmishes, and was severely wounded on more than one occasion. As the war drew to a close he followed Shelby and Price to Texas, and about the time peace was declared a small frag- ment of Shelby's command, known as the ^' Iron Brigade," sank the flag — the blood-stained flag which they had car- ried through the war — in the Rio Grande River, crossed the line into Mexico, and for thirteen months served in the French army. Later, Major Edwards returned to Missouri and published several books, one relating to the border warfare in Missouri, Texas and Arkansas, another entitled '* Shelby and his Men."' He soon after engaged in news- paper editorial work, first in St. Louis, next in Sedalia, then in St. Joseph and Kansas City, respectively. He was for a time editor of the Despatch and Times in St. Louis, edited the Sedalia Democrat and Despatch, later the St. Joseph Gazette, and at the time of his death was editor of the Kansas City Times. No writer in the West was better known than Major Edwards. He followed no man. Every idea he advanced was original, and every thought he expressed in print was copied far and wide. He had no superior in the neivspaper field and but few peers. He was honest and fearless, and never published a line in pub- lic prints which he did not believe to be the truth, and for which he would not answer personally at all times. We, representatives of the western press, recognize in his death an irreparable loss. He was brave and generous in war, and fearless and honest in civil life, and liberal to a fault — an affectionate husband and a kind father. We believe that his death has left a vacancy in Missouri jour- nalism that can never be filled. His death is a calamity to the press of the State. As an original writer and BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 29 conscientious literary man, he never had a superior. He was brave and magnanimous in health, and fearless and resigned when the final summons came. Kesolutions can not express our opinion of his ability and fearlessness. He lived the life of a patriotic American, and died the death of a brave, conscientious newspaper man. Augustine Gallagher, Kansas City Journal, president. W. A. Edwards, St. Joseph Gazette, secretary. C. B. Oldham, Tribune, chairman committee. Walt M. Monroe, Tipton Times. Walter Sander, WestMche Post. John Meagher, St. Louis Globe-Bemocrat, A. C. Lemmon, Post-Des^atcli.. W. M. Smith, St. Louis Republic. W. N. Graham, Sedalia Gazette. J. H. Edwards, Tribune. W. A. Curry, Kansas City Times. W. J. Cambliss, Higginsville Advance. John W. Jacks, Montgomery Standard. A. A. Lesueur, Lexington Intelligencer. Walter Williams, Boonville Advertiser. Immediately on the announcement of Major Edwartls' death. Col. A. C. Dawes telegraphed General Manager Clark of the Missouri Pacific, and received a reply that he would place his special car at his disposal to convey the remains of the dead journalist and his family to Dover, Lafayette County, where it had been decided he should be buried. The pall-bearers are: ex-Governor Charles P. Johnson, Dr. Morrison Munford, Maj. J. L. Bittinger, Darwin W. Marmaduke, J. F. Merryman and Col. Thomas P. Hoy. Captain Lesueur, Secretary of State, gives the follow- ing account of the journey from Jefferson City to Dover: THE FUNERAL JOURNEY. The death of Maj John N. Edwards, from heart dis- ease, took place at the McCarty House, in Jefferson City, at 9:40 A. M., Saturday, May 4th. It is not too much to say that it created a profound sensation throughout the city. No man in Missouri was so well known as he to its public men. In Jefferson City he was known by every- 30 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. body, and his friends were numbered by the limit of his acquaintance. Republicans as well as Democrats were his warm admirers, and the humblest negro that knew him loved him. It is safe to say that no funeral that has occurred at Dover for many years has created a more profound impres- sion upon the public mind than did that of Major Ed- wards. There he learned to know his beloved commander. Gen. Joseph 0. Shelby, and many of the brave and daring soldier boys whose firmness in battle and endur- ance on the march gained for the old brigade that renown which he afterward immortalized in most poetic prose. There, too, he wooed and won his bride, a fair, gray-eyed Southern lassie, as full of impulse and romance as himself, a woman of ideals and poesy perhaps, but a brave and true-hearted woman who stood by him always, in weal and in woe, in joy and affliction, and was ever his ministering angel, his comfort and his solace. 0, yes, Dover had many ties upon the heart of Major Edwards, and to the good people of the vicinity, a steady, God-fear- ing people, but a people of leisure, who read and preserve a touch of the romance of the days of Coeur de Lion, of Bruce and of McGregor, John Ed wards was the embodiment of all that was chivalric and poetic. They ever followed from journal to journal his gifted pen, and he was nearer and dearer to them than he was to many with whom he came in daily contact outsin the busy, active world. And they were there to put all that was mortal of him away in its last resting place with their own loving hands. Their wives and daughters were there, too, to add their tears to those of the stricken wife and children. As the numerous assemblage encircled the grave, grief and sorrow written upon every face, thescene was one to immortalize the painter who could have seized it and put it on canvas. There was the evidence of an unusual depth of feeling and regret even for such an occasion. From the moment of his death until his remains were taken from the train, there was a constant stream of sad and sorrowing friends passing in and out of the corridor, all intent upon hearing the particulars of his dying hours, upon looking just once more at his familiar features, upon expressing grief at his loss and of sympathy with his be- reaved wife and children. At 12:30 on Sunday the funeral procession formed at the hotel to go to the depot, where the train was waiting. First, came a long line of gentlemen on foot, led by Governor Francis, and com- posed of senators, members of the house of representa- BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 31 tives, and many others. By the side of the hearse were the pall-bearers — Dr. Morrison Munford, Col. D. W. Mar- maduke, Hon. J. Frank Merriman, Maj. John L. Bit- tinger, Col. T. P. Hoy and Capt. A. A. Lesueur ; after them came the family and other friends in carriages. At Tipton a special train furnished by the courtesy of S. H. Clark, Esq., at the request of Col. A. C. Dawes, awaited the funeral party, which was composed of Mrs. Edwards, Miss Ella McCarty, her near friend, all of the pall- bearers (except Col. Marmaduke), Rev. Peter Trone, and Messrs. George and Walter Plattenburg. At Boonville they were joined by Hon. Thomas Cranmer, and at Mar- shall by Elder George Plattenburg and Mr. Yerbey. The train reached the Dover depot at about 6:30 p. m., where it was met by a number of the citizens of the place, and by the following named gentlemen, who acl^d as actual pall-bearers : John Allen Harwood, E. S. Van Anglen, Dr. E. R. Meng, R. T. Koontz, James F.Winn and George B. Gordon. Tlie casket was deposited at the Plattenburg mansion, Mrs. Edwards^ girlhood home, until 10 o^clock the next morning, when the burial took place in the vil- lage cemetery. The whole country-side had turned out. The train arrived as above, at Dover, 6:40 p. m. Sun- day, May 5th. The following day, May 6th, he was borne to his last resting place. The burial is thus described by the Kansas City Times, the paper he started, and at whose helm he gallantly and dauntlessly stood through many a storm: THE LAST SLEEP. [Special to the Kansas City Times.'] HiGGiNSViLLE, Mo., May 6th. — In the old cemetery, just at the outskirts of the little town of Dover, ten miles from here, the body of John N. Edwards was buried this morning. It is a quiet, secluded spot, where the rumble of wagon wheels in the road near by are the only sounds, save the singing of birds, heard from one year's end to the other— just the place where one with Mafor Edwards' love of nature and the beautiful would desire to lie in his last long sleep. And it was his wish, frequently expressed, that he should be buried there. It is within easy view from the old Plattenburg homestead, where his wife spent Iut girlhood and he wooed and. won her, and from which his body was carried to its last resting place this moring. Froia 32 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. the windows the tombstones which mark the graves of the former residents of Dover are plainly visible. The whole scene is a pretty rural one, the scattering houses of Dover giving it just enough of an urban aspect to soften its out- lines without destrojdng its primitive beauty. It was no wonder that one with the poetic temiierament and chival- rous ideals of Major Edwards should choose the old Dover cemetery as his burial place, even if his early days had not endeared it to him. The special train — which was kindly furnished by the Missouri Pacific — bearing the body, the wife and little daughter of Major Edwards, the pa'll-bearers and friends, arrived at Dover from Jefferson City, Sunday night at 6:40. The pall-bearers were Maj. John L. Bittinger of St. Joseph; Dr. Morrison Munford, Hon. J. F. Merryman, Rev. Peter Trone bf Clinton; Col. T. P. Hoy and Secretary of State A. A. Lesueur. Miss Ella McCarty of Jefferson City; Messrs. George and Walter Plattenburg of Kansas City; brothers of Mrs. Edwards, and Mr. Thomas Cranmer, sheriff of Cooper County, were among the party that came from Jefferson City. The body was at once taken from the station to the residence of Mrs. L. C. Plattenburg, Mrs. Edward's mother. THE LAST SAD LOOli. At 8:30 this morning the casket was opened, and the citizens of Dover and the people from the country for miles around, filed in to take a last 'look at the face which was loved throughout the length and breadth of Lafayette County, where he passed his early life, and from which ho went to make a name that was honored and loved where- ever it was known. Moist eyes of strong men gave evi- dence of the sincere affection with which the dead soldier and journalist had been regarded. Many of the men who passed had seen him go out to battle in the pride of his youthful strength, and they said that after many years the face was not changed as much as might have been expected. The features were^ life-like and the expression peaceful. ^' He looks as if he were sleeping," many remarked. The greater part of the five or six hundred people who viewed the cor2")se came from Lexington, Higginsville, Cor- der and the neighboring towns. There had been a mis- understanding as to the time the funeral would take place, and many persons from IHgginsville, Corder and other BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 33 places had driven over Sunday. This and the comparative inaccessibility of Dover kept many persons away who had desired to be present. Nevertheless the little town could not have accommodated many more strangers. There were no services at the house. At 10 o'clock the casket was closed. In addition to the pall-bearers who had accompanied the body from Jefferson City, Mr. John Allen Harwood, E. S. Van Anglen, E. R. Meng, 11. I. Koontz, James F. Winn, and George B. Gordon of Dover, had been selected. The}" carried the casket to the liearse, which had been sent from Lexington. Besides" Mrs. Edwards and her two sons and daughter, the mem- bers of the family who were present were J. Q. Platten- burg, H. W. Plattenburg, H. Y. Plattenburg, George Plattenburg, and W. L. Plattenburg, brothers of Mrs. Edwards ; Mrs. L. 0. Plattenburg, her mother and Miss Eula Plattenburg, her sister. Mrs. Thomas Yerby, with whom Major Edwards lived when he was a boy, and learned to set type, also followed the body to the grave. Mr. Wiley 0. Cox, of Kansas City, was in one of the carriages. The procession was a long one, but the distance from the house to the cemetery was short. THE PREACHER'S TRIBUTE. The services at the grave were simple, as Major Edwards had wished them to be. They were conducted bv Rev. George Plattenburg, a cousin of Mrs Edwards. Jle spoke feelingly and every word was listened to intently. His address was substantially as follows : Twenty-eight years ago, when General Shelby was the captain of a single company, composed largely of the flower of the youth of this immediate vicinity. Major Edwards came to my home in Little Rock, Arkansas, accompanied by Yandell Blackwell, a soldier and gentle- man from spur to plum.e. From that day to this my intercourse with Major Edwards has been of a most inti- mate character. I have never met a more rarely gifted or nobler man. His knowledge of men and books was sim- ply wonderful. When and how he gained this great and varied knowledge was to me, a close student of books for more than forty years, still more wonderful, engaged as he was continuously in great active interests, and involved in the stress of vast political contests. A great journal of yesterday morning spoke of him as only a poet. If by this 34 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. was meant that he was only a maker of rhythmic phrases, or the f ramer of melodious sentences, the statement was se-arcely just. Ilis was the wonderful and acute insight of the true j^oetic faculty into the great problems of human life and action and destiny — the faculty that intuitively })enetrates the reason of things. In this sense he was a poet. These tilings lie clotlied in the poet^s glowing words, in striking and ofttimes surprisingly beautiful forms of speech. In his best moods he threw off passages of rare charm, not surpassed, if equaled, anywhere in the vast field of American journalism. It was not the splendor of his intellect, the marvelous grace of his diction, or the uncqualed mastery of scintil- lant and forceful words, that bound John Edwards to his friends, but his greatness of heart, his sweet, gentle and unselfish nature. In a long intercourse with men of all ranks and conditions, professions and trades, I have met no man so free from all ignoble and selfish impulses. His wide influence was never used for his own gain or personal advancement, but always for that of others. Those debtor to John Edwards in this regard may be counted by hun- dreds. A journalist, and now a 'State official said to me years ago/Mie asks for himself, never; for others, alM^ays/' A great, loyal, loving and unselfish heart was his. God rarely makes a man like him. Fitly might the Recording Angel write of him, Abou Ben Adhem's prayer, *' write me as one that loves his fellow men."' Whatever the infirmities of gentle and gifted John Edwards, there was in him a strong religious sentiment. I do not mean religious as defined by books, or asformulated in creeds, but in the acceptance and reverent holding of those great truths that lie behind all formulated systems and of which organized religions are the product. That Infinite Being, forming the primary religious concept of primitive peoples, the Jehovah of the Hebrew records, the '^Heaven-Father '" of the Vedic hymns, which Max Mul- ler says formed humanity's first poem and first artic- ulate prayer, and as exalted by the great Master in that universal praj^er : ''Our Father who art in Heaven,'' he recognized and looked up to with the trust of a child. In addition to this as a necessary sequence, he accepted unfal- teringly the doctrine of the soul's immortality as the sole basis of a hope that can gladden and sweeten the labor of stricken men. Once as I sat by his bedside at the McCarty House, late in the night, turning suddenly to me after a lull in our talk, he asked : '' Do you ever go down to the great river that flows near your home, and sitting beneath BIOGKAPHICAL SKETCH. 35 the midnight stars listen to the solemn swish of the on- sweeping mysterious stream, and think of the vast things that lie beyond the river and beyond the stars?'' From this we drifted into a discussion of the largest problems with which the soul has to do ; the questions of action and destiny. Then, more than ever before or ^fter, John Edwards revealed to me the secrets of his immost life. He felt as the Laureate sings : My own dim-life should teach me this. That life shall live forever more, Else earth is darkness at the core. And dust and ashes ail that is. This round of green, this orb of flame, Fantastic beauty, such as lurks In some wild poet as he works Without a conscience or an aim. To-day, from every part of the great Southwest, the scarred veterans of the '^'^lost cause/' will turn with tearful eyes to this village graveyard, where we reverently and lovingly lay their old companion in arms, so brilliant in intellect, so noble in heart, so gentle and generous, so pure and chivalrous in every impulse. May the smile of God rest upon this village grave as a perpetual benedic- tion. In the quiet, quaint little village of Dover, whose people removed, *^ Far from the maddening crowd's ignoble strife," pursue the even tenor of their way, on a gentle declivity leaning to the kiss of southern suns, a sheltered, sequestered spot, fit place of rest after life's ^^ fitful fever," lies the village graveyard. Here: " The sacred calm that reigns around. Bids every fierce tumultuous passion cease; In still small accents whispering from the ground A grateful earnest of eternal peace." In this retired spot reverent hands laid all that remained of gifted John Edwards. The voice, that oft within the '^ battle's red rim," shouted, " Steady, Men," is hushed. The eye that flashed with steely glitter, as it saw the set- ting and onset of squadrons, but so gently limpid in repose, is closed forever. The blare of bugles, the cannon's roar, the rush of armed fleet and the voice of love are now alike 36 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. unheard. The fearless soldier, the brilliant journalist, the loyal friend, the dreamer of sweet dreams, by his own request lies quietly among the village dead, apart from the stress of enterprise and the coldness of greed. Above the narrow, dreamless abode of the great heart now pulseless, the leaves shimmer in soft light, the fragrance of flowers lingers above the turf lovingly, and the sweet May stars distill their dews to keep the grasses green. In his own words, written of *' Prince ^^ John B. Magruder's lone Texas grave, we may say, '^ If roses are the tear drops of angels as the beautiful Arab belief puts forth in poetry, then is this lowly mound a hallowed spot, and needs not the sculptured stone, the fretted column and the obelisk. " Few men have been so admired, or so mourned. At his grave, old, scarred soldiers, unused to tears wept like girls. Friends, kindred, his children grieved, but a larger grief was hers, whom he wooed and won with knightly devotion in the summer days long ago. She, sitting within the mysterious shadow of the ^' Spheral Change, by men called death,'^ can only sing with Dante Eossetti, in mournful questioning: " O nearest, furthest! Can there be At length some hard-earned, heart-won home, Where exile changed for sanctuary. Our lot may fill indeed its sum, And you may wait and I may come." TWENTY YEARS OF FRIENDSHIP, BV MORRISON MUNFORD. In September, 1868, 1 came over from Seneca, Kansas, where I had been sojourning on business,f or a visit to Kansas City, the then questionable metropolis of the Missouri Valley. I stopped at the Sheridan Hotel, the first-class hostelry of the town. After supper I went by devious ways without sidewalks to the Times office. I v/as in search of Col. John C. Moore, a cousin, and the only man I knew within the city limits. I found him in his den, the auto- cratic editor of the Times, on the second story of what is now 813 Main street, opposite the present Times office. He welcomed me as one disfranchised Confederate would another in those days, and during the evening introduced me to some of his associates and visitors. Among the latter I recollect Major Wholegan, Colonel Grafton and Colonel Branch. Later on he made me acquainted with a man apparently of about my own age, who came in with some matter which he submitted, and who was mentioned to me as Major Edwards, of Shelby's command, and associate editor of the Times. It happened that his work was about over for the night, and an hour's conversation was the result of our introduction. That hour's talk with John Edwards that night made an indelible impression upon my mind. It was in the midst of the Seymour and Blair campaign, and politics was at fever heat. I had come down from intolerant Kansas, where an ex-Confederate soldier barely had the right of existence. I wanted consolation and comfort, and I got both from John Edwards that Septem- ber night in 1868. This was our first acquaintance, which was renewed, 37 38 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. from time to time, until my removal to Kansas City in May, 18G9, soon after which we became room-mates, and so continued until we sought other partners for life. The memory of my bachelor days twenty years ago, with John Edwards as my chum, lingers as a sweet unction. I was then in a business that required no night work, but nearly every night would find me seeking the Times office, and together, after the paper had gone to press, we v/ould wander homeward to our bachelor quarters. The communings w^e then had, the confidences we mutually bestowed, the castles in the air we then built are all, all a glorious recollection. The friendship then established between us continued unbroken to the day of his death. In 1871 I became manager of the Times, with John N. Edwards as editor. This relation lasted for some three years, and never was one more congenial and satisfactory. Then, against my positive judgment and advice he went to St Louis on the Tiines with Stilson Hutchins, who aspired to be the dictator of Missouri politics. The golden promises held out to John Edwards turned to worse than ashes, and his consecutive drifting from point to point in new ventures in Missouri journalism was the consequence. During these many years I had personally, and by letters, advised and entreated him to return to his first love, telling him there was always a place for him on the Times stall. In the fall of 1886 he wrote me from St. Joseph that he would come, and in January, 1887, he came. His contributions since then to the Times need no men- tion at my hands. Treating every topic, political, social, scientific, historical, literary, whatever he touched bore evidence of his splendid genius. What he did in these last years of his life as it appears on the surface — in his writings — is known to the world, but how much of effort and endeavor, of strife and contention he had to endure, and the fierce contest he waged against his only enemy day and night, no one can know, except those who knew him as I intimately knew him during these later TWENTY YEARS OF FRIENDSHIP. 39 years, and who had so much to do with the efforts made to disenthrall him. And I have thought that perhaps I could do no more just, kind or brotherly act to his memory than to give to the world in his own words — extracts firom his letters to me — an insight into this phase of his character. They show, it is true, his weakness and irresolution but they also show his noble impulses and his heroic struggles to overthrow his enemy — ^^the monster of drink. '^ Soon after his arrival he wrote me as follows : Kan-sas City, January 2C, 1887. I have agreed upon a house, and I want to bring what I have into it instantly. 1 want to get to work and buckle down to business instantly. Work now is my salvation. I do not care how hard it is, but I want not only to paralyze the tiger but also to kill him. What I want to do is for you to put me upon my honor, and deal with me in a business way. Our personal friend- ship is another matter. You can trust me in all the future about drinking. My honor is pledged to your nobleness of character. The return of Major Edwards to Kansas City to take a permanent position on the Times was soon made the occasion for a matter of social rejoicing and convivialities, by unwise and indiscreet '' friends," the result of which left him in a deplorable condition, from which he barely escaped with life, and his enemy soon seemed to have a spell upon him that no ordinary methods could break. After trying in vain the unavailing efforts of the good sisters of the hospital, and the influences and restraints of my own house for several months, I concluded, with the written sanction of his wife, to try a more heroic remedy, to put him under treatment of Dr. Keeley and his celebrated Gold Cure, at D wight. 111. The Major had always expressed the utmost abhorrence against going to an inebriate asylum, or even a sanitarium where there was physical restraint, but as this v/as nothing of the kind I thought it the best place I knew of for the experiment, both from hearsay and also from a letter of inquiry to which the following was a reply: 40 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. DwiGHT, March 17, 1887. Dear Sir: I do not know that I can tell you anything about our cure for the liquor habit that you do not know, but for the benefit of the gentleman, I will say, that a patient here is put upon our Gold-graded treatment, a plan much after that of Pasteur, for hydrophobia (with- out the inoculation). His bottles are numbered from one to six, and are taken in their order. There is no shock or pain in the transition period, from the effects of a spree to comj)lete sobriety. From three to nine days after com- mencing the remedy all want and desire for alcoholic stimulants of any kind will be entirely eradicated — the words, *^want and desire,^' in their broadest and most intensive sense. I do not deny the patient liquor while under treatment. It was concluded to try the experiment and so after many comical as well as sorrowful experiences on the trip, we arrived at Dwight on the morning of March 21, 1887, and he was duly installed for treatment. I left him that night, going on to Chicago, from which place I wrote him the most powerful and appealing, yet at the same time firm and admonishing letter, that a friendship such as ours could inspire. On my return home I received an eight- page letter, which in his agate or pearl manuscript would make about double that number of ordinary writing. Al- ready the gold cure had begun to have its first effects, and his mind seemed to be clearing rapidly. He wrote con- cerning a dozen matters, but I eliminate in this article all from this and subsequent letters excej)t the portions pertaining to his struggle against ^Hhe monster of drink" and our efforts to save him. EXTRACTS FROM MAJOR EDWARDS' LETTERS. Dwight, March 25, 1887. My Dear Morry : I have received your letter from Chicago. It is very true in many things. Very strange in some others. Very unnecessary in a few. That I was a fool on the trip here — oh, such a fool — I will admit. Do you think I have not suffered for my madness? That I still do not suffer? That, if by way of expiation I could recall the shame and mortifica- TWENTY YEARS OF FIIIENDSHIP. 41 tion I caused your wife, I would joyfully put my right hand in the flames until "It grew fiery red Like Cramner's at the stake." What a transformation she must have witnessed in me ! You know that when I have been sober and traveled with you no man ever sat in a car more modest, circum- spect and dignified. And then to see that other beast of last Sunday and Monday! * * * The picture you draw of the sufferings of my wife and children is as true as God is true. It is the knowledge of this fact that has put me in a living hell for the past five years, for during this -time my drinking has been deeper, longer and deadlier than ever before. How I have yearned to break with the monster of drink, fam- ishing days and horrible midnights, if they would but speak, would all too truly tell you. Days with a con- science that was as a human appetite, feeding, as it were, upon a living soul, if this could speak it also would all too truly tell you. Separated from whisky, if there is a truer, kinder, tenderer husband and father, I do not know him. Then why do I drink? Omniscience knows. It is not for a want of physical courage, for no one has ever doubted that. Not for a want of moral courage, for once at the side of a friend, I could defy public opinion with an infinite scorn, and go with him into utter darkness. Ah! one day Ave shall know it all. Yes, one day we shall know it all ! Now, a few words Just here in regard to yourself and our relationships together. Have you ever doubted for a moment that I did not understand why you loved me, and why you have stood by me through drunkenness, neglect of duty, and, at times, absolute desertion? Have I not told you, and said to you, and written to you over and over again that I was no more necessary to the life of the Times, or to its future growth, position, or prosperity, than the man in the moon? No man has ever dared yet to tell me that your friendship was merely mercenary, or that you only wanted me because I might be utilized in some bare pecuniary sense. I knew that we ought to get together again. That, as it were, we supplemented one another. That I had some qualities which you did not possess, and you many that I did not. That we were so congenial in so many things, and knew so well how to do so many things in common. That allied, we could con- quer fate; that Joined with you, and being guided by 43 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. you, and going with 3'ou hand in hand, you could put me beyond want in my old days, and some other day take me out of the shafts of a dray horse. This is what I knew, and this is what I have always proclaimed from the house- tops. Suppose silly lies have been told as to our relation- ships and the reasons given by some malignant devils, who hate us both, why you have taken me drunk from hotels, paid my bills, sent me to hospitals to save me, and stood by me almost to a funeral ? Isn't God's blessed sunshine in our hearts for each other, and God's blessed sunshine all about us to make glorious and luminous in our lives those phxces made perfect forever where our devotion began and lingered at, and dwelt upon these twenty years and more ? Doesn't my wife know it ? Haven't we talked it all over a thousand times ? Let us dispose of this thing now and forever. Whatever else happens in this world — and if the time ever does come when we have to take our ways apart, we will go away with not as much shadow of a cloud betwixt us as would fleck even the grasses or the flowers upon a baby's grave. * * * As to my situation here, it is about this : Keeley has been very kind. I have taken his medicine as prescribed. I have no more desire to drink than if whisky were prussic acid. There is a bottle now before me sent here by him he says especially to tempt me. Since Tues- day night last I have abhorred liquor in every shape. I do not understand it at all. He has invited me to drink several times, and keeps a very fine article always in his office. I pulled the cork out of the bottle in my room and smelt the whisky. It was positively loathsome. I shall send forward after to-day bushels of editorial. * * * Please send word to my wife that I am all right. I have not had the heart to write to her since being here. There are times when even I will not commit sacrilege. Your friend as ever. ^< ^(j CcC^vo^^- I give some other extracts by date which tell their own story without comment: DwiCxilT, March 30, 1887. * * * A week ago yesterday, Tuesday, I took my last drink. There is a bottle now standing upon a table in the room. I hate it. It has been standing there since yesterday TWENTY YEARS OF FRIENDSHIP. 43 week. I see it the first thing in the morning and the last thing at night. I do not understand anything about it. All I know is that the very thought of liquor makes me sick. I am as well as I ever was in my life. I walk about five miles a day, eat everything, and pour editorials in on you by every mail. I have done some good' writing, if I do say it myself. DwiGHT, March 30, 1887. Since I wrote to you this morning I have received your very kind and welcome letter. It did me a power of good. Have no fear of me. I will stick to a funeral. If it is three weeks, then it is three weeks. I was never better, physically in all my life, and, as I told you this morning, I hate even the smell of liquor. I feel and believe that 1 am saved. In fact I hnoiu it. DwiGHT, April 1, 1887. I am as well as I ever was in my life, and hate liquor more and more every day. I could take the medicine just as well at home as here, but if it is three weeks then it is three weeks. Don^t rely on a word I say, but write to Keeley. I find him an exceedingly strong man in his profession, and possessed of a vast erudition. I can not fathom his medicine, however, nor do I know one thing about its therapeutic effect. I only know that it kills whisky like a ferret kills a rat. DwiGHT, April 2, 1887. I received your letter of the 31st this morning. I am in spleiidid health, still hate liquor, and feel that I shall never touch it again. That is all I know about it. I just know that I hate the very smell of it. I will stay the twenty-one days gladly, although I believe fully that the appetite is broken up, root and branch. DwiGHT, April 4, 1887. A week from to-day I will have been here twenty-one days. Then I shall start back. Still the same feeling in regard to whisky. I have no more desire for it than for prussic acid. More than that, I do not even think of it. The bottle is still on the table in my room, uncorked and unnoticed. Not for ten years have I been free from a constant desire for alcohol in some shape until I came here. Of late years that desire had become almost second nature, the appetite becoming stronger and stronger with each spree. Now it is totally eradicated. How it passed away I can not say. There was no effort on my part, no struggle of any kind. The usual horrible depression was 44 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. totally absent. Dr. Keeley offered me liquor over and over again — indeed, he really tried to tempt me to drink, but the very thought of drinking made me sick. I do not explain anything. I can not explain anything con- nected with the medicine any more than I can explain the immortality of the soul. In a physical sense. I only know that I do not want to drink. , D WIGHT, April 5, 1887. I inclose you a statement of my account, up to next Monday, the 11th, at half past three o'clock, p. m. when 1 take the Denver train for Kansas City, as, I believe, a thoroughly cured man. You will see that I bring four bottles of the medicine with me. If I am cured, which mean life and everything to me, I will owe it solely to you. I see things more clearly to-day than I have seen them in ten years. If there is one trait in my character stronger than another, it is that of gratitude. If you were to ask me to stand by your side when the chances were a thou- sand to one that we would both be killed, I would stand as joyfully as I ever went forth to play or hunt as a boy. This is the physical part of my love for you. The other part is to show you that I am worthy of your devotion to me, which has been shown under circumstances that would have driven away from me a million of so-called friends and even relations. DwiGHT, April 6, 1887. I have talked with Dr. Keeley fully, freely and frankly. I have obeyed him in everything, and he is clearly of the opinion that 21 days is enough to stay here. He is satisfied perfectly as to the cure, and I bring four bottles with me. He wrote you fully to-day. If nothing happens I will be at home next Tuesday morning, the 1 2th. I am awful tired, but I am free. What a glorious thing is freedom. I still hate liquor with an abiding hatred. DwiGHT, April 7, 1887. I am still as I was the second day of my arrival here. I have not the least desire for whisky. Keeley shovrs me letters from all over the United States bearing testimony to the efficacy of his cure for both liquor and opium. It is astonishing. DwiGHT, April 9, 1887. I have just received your kind letter with inclosures. Well, next Tuesday morning "In other guise than forth he rode, Will return Lord Marmion." TWENTY YEARS OF FRIENDSHIP. 45 I will get off at Grand avenue. I never felt better, and never felt freer from all desire to drink. I am on my fifth bottle of gold cure. Dr. Keeley gpoke of having also received a letter from you to-day. He did not show it to me. Way late in the night, while I have been communing with the moon and the stars; I have in my walks run across here and there one of the Doctor's opium patients. They are a curious race of human beings. I go to them, hunt them up, and try to draw them out. One had a face like what I imagine a vampire ought to have. His eyes were scintillant. He was in an old field sitting on a stump. His pallor was the pallor of a corpse that had been three days dead. Under some sort of an occult mesmerism that I did not understand, I went out to him and commenced to talk. He raved like a madman, and fairly shrieked for me to go away. I went. I swear to you that I have seen that vampire face every night for a week since. DR. KEELEY'S CONFIDENCE. As corroborative of the confidence the Major felt I give some extracts from letters of Dr. Keeley: ' DwiGHT, April 6, 1887. ^ • Your truly kind letter of the 3d inst. came in this morning and I hasten to answer it. I am glad to be able to tell you that I think the good Major entirely cured. He tells me that he has absolutely no thought of liquor, consequently no crave, and further that he has had none since the evening of the second day after coming. He has still in his room the last four ounces that I bought for him that evening, and intends to take it hoine to you as ^^ an earnest"' of ^^ the miracle God hath wrought " in his case. I shall be very sorry indeed when the dear Major leaves us, he is so companionable, or as our '' janitress" says, so ''knowledgable." He has made friends with everybody with whom he has come in contact here, and many will share my regret in his leaving. He has been one of the most patient and obedient gentlemen whom I have had to treat, and has taken as much pains to make his treatment a success as his friends could wish. I agree with you now, that the dear gentleman is bet- ter worth saving than two-thirds of the patients who have come here. You remember you told me I would think so 46 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. before he left. May God keep and protect him in all the future. DwiGHT, April 11, 1887. Our good Major left us this afternoon, and will reach yon before this letter. AVe are all sorry to lose him, and none more so than myself. May the dear Christ go with him, keep him and preserve him, is the wish of his many friends here. I think you will find a wonderful change in him, and I am almost persuaded that it is a permanent one for good. Dr. Keeley suggested to me when I left the Major at D wight that it would be a good idea to have some of his friends write him kind and encouraging letters to ^^ brace him up,^^ and I accordingly v/rote to Colonel Burnes, among others, which led to the passage of several letters between us. His letters cover the situation so fully and analytically and at the same time are so tender and full of friendship that I am tempted to give some extracts: COLONEL BURNES' HOPES AND FEARS. St. Joseph, March 26, 1887. Dear Dr. Munford: I am just in receipt of your pro- foundly interesting favor written in Chicago, and beg to say that with all my heart and soul I am truly grateful for the confidence you give me, also for the genuine spirit of kindness so plainly manifest. It is upon such confidences and kindnesses that the friendship ^* which sticketh closer than a brother " is safely founded, and they alone lend enchantment and encouragement to the daily struggles of life which, at best, are of brief and valueless results to us all. » Poor, dear John ! A thousand times I have realized that the course you have now taken was the only one that remained. Everything else has been tried, over and over again, in vain. Your whole course toward him, and this last action, more supremely than all your varied goodness and kindness to him for years before, conclusively evi- dences an interest in and a love for him that is God-like. Let us hope — but so many bitter disappointments in the past make me tremble at the use of the word — that this present step will result in his permanent restoration ; but as it is our last hope, let us be firm in making his stay long and thorough. I need scarcely add, that I will most fully comply with your wishes and instructions, and do TWENTY YEARS OF FRIENDSHIP. 47 everything in my power to aid and second your efforts. If I can see him to any advantage, I will visit D wight for the purpose, and whenever you think it best I will write him, with earnest exhortation, to aid by constant resolu- tion and effort your noble purpose to save him for the benefit of his family, his friends and mankind. He knows full well that my love for him is as strong as life, and has always appeared to yield something to my judgment. On the one accursed subject — his lamentable failing — no one can control him by any ordinary methods. His is a dis- ease beyond all question, and should be eradicated, root and branch. All we can now do is to soothe and nurse him as an infant. St. Joseph, April 7, 1887. Your valued and deeply interesting favor of the 3d gives me profound hope and joy. At the same time dis- appointment has so often followed a similar creation — bitter and cruel disappointment — that I venture to suggest: Be in no haste to recall the cherished object of our most affectionate solicitude from his safe and pleasant retreat. According to the authority in charge he has a disease. I have, for a long time, regarded it as a disease. It is of all diseases the most hypocritical. It is a disease with limitless cunning and all the qualities of the opossum. In its consequences or results are to be found there its triumphs. Its victim — John himself — is deceived and betrayed by it. It lulls him, by a vain sense of security, into a belief that he is capable — strong enough — to win a fight with it. Deceived himself, his infinite variety of influence, his unparalleled power over his attendants and friends, whose stern judgment surrendei's too soon to a lovable sympathy, make them easy victims of this our confidence and coi'diality. I need not — perhaps ought not to say this to you — for you have much more of the iron in your blood than I — without less of womanly tenderness ; but the resources of John's enemy are so infinite that it takes us all, as well as himself, to win even a partial victory. How nobly he writes to you! How nobly he writes, and feels and thinks ! He believes he can never fall again. He is amazed at his past folly. His intellectual perceptions are now complete and perfect, but is he free from his disease? God knows I hope so with all my heart; but after a brief treatment, even a treatment so faith- inspiring, do I believe as a matter of experience or judgment that he can now stand? Alas! do I ? Will it not take time — long time — time to kill, and then to 48 • JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. eradicate, purge away the last vestige of the invidious, treacherous monsters that have pursued and tormented him so long ! St. Joseph, April 14, 1887. Your esteemed favor of the 10th just received. I am very thankful for your great kindness in thus advising me of the good news. An hundred times I have said I can never, alas, have any more hope, and yet I confess, now, it is strong again. I do again believe and trust. Surely we will no more suffer disappointment. You have done the work; it is noble and God-like. If I could envy such a friend and such a gentleman, as yourself, the glory and satisfaction fairly won, I would wish that I had been the savior of John Edwards as you are. But fortunately my happiness in the result is too perfect and complete to :.dmit of any base alloy. , I met the Major at the depot that Tuesday morning, April 12th, on his return from Dwight. I was there ahead of time, and I wondered, half in doubt, in what manner he would appear. The train drew up and soon I saw him coming along, and truly — "In other guise than forth he rode." His hearty handshake; his joyous, half silent laugh which always reminded me of '' Pathfinders,*'' as described by Cooper; his appearance, his gait, all were an occular demonstration of the wonderful change effected in three weeks. There was much rejoicing in several households, and among all his true friends that day, and for some weeks thereafter. But alas! the foreboding and misgiv- ing of Colonel Burnes proved only too true. The disease was not eradicated, and in less than a month the ^' mon- ster of drink " had full control again. A second experi- ment at Dwight was tried with substantially the same results as the first one. Later on, during the past year the virtues of Excelsior Springs were tested on two occa- sions with satisfactory results, which, however, did not prove lasting. The additional extracts below are from letters written while there, and also others from time to time until his death, all pertaining to this subject: TWENTY YEARS OF FllIENDSniP. 49 MORE OF MAJOR EDWARDS' LETTERS. Excelsior Springs, June 20, 1888. Well, we got here Saturday night safe and sound. Saturday morning I began on the water. In an hour I was so sick that it seemed to me as if I could hear the first ten notes of the final trumpet. All day Saturday and Sunday night, all day Monday and Monday night I could not lift my head scarcely from the pillow. Tuesday morning I managed to crawl to a bath house; like Napo- leon at St. Helena, I managed to stay in one, off and on, for four hours. This Wednesday morning I went to work. I send forward four articles. Of course every hour here is a purgatory, with no priest in a thousand miles to help pray me out. All that it is possible for these waters to do in the way of curing alcoholism — all that it has ever been claimed that they would do — is to break the drinking gait, bring a man back to a realization of his sense of duty, and leave the balance in his own hands. Still, I will stay as long as you desire. Excelsior Springs, June 23, 1888. As this is the first clear day for one solid week, I have lived out of doors as one of the captured Apaches might live if suddenly from the Dry Tortugas he were carried to his own Madre Mountains and there set free with God and immensity. As five hours out of the twenty-four are all that I can ever sleep, whisky or no whisky, I wait for the darkness to do my thinking. For hours and hours, and far into the night, I sit by an open window and think. Here, I have gone over the entire political field from Washington City to Jefferson City. * * * And yet you would put me to writing ^' literary arti- cles."' No, no, Morry, I can not dance attendance upon — "Sweet Miss Fanny, of Trafalgar Square," While outside the bugles are singing, " All the Blue Bonnets are over the border." You also say : '' This is a sad ending to all our hopes and expectations."" Say, rather, their resurrection, Morry. There comes a time to every one of my disposition when he regains his second youth, or rather, second manhood. That period was very near to me. I had come at last to look my condition full in the face. I saw just what had to be done. I was surely providing for every friend to whom I owed a dollar. I was getting further and further away from whisky. I was getting nearer and nearer to a condi- tion of independence, and I saw clearer and clearer per- 50 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. severance in mining matters was nearly equal to gold. But no matter all this. This will belong to some business talks we will have before we separate for a period which neither of us can now reckon accurately upon. How true a friend you have been to me, I will not here narrate. How splendidly I would have stood at your side through any storm, crisis, or disaster, it does not become me now to declare. AVherever you are I will always be glad to hear the story of your happiness and progress — of some triumph grateful in a })ersonal way, some victory won over the Pharisees and Philistines. I had better come home next Friday, I reckon. My pass ends next Saturday, the 30th. Further expense here is unnecessary. All the good the water can do has been done. I am free from all desire, in perfect health, can eat anything, digest anything, but I do not sleep. JN'or have I more than five hours a night for years. The fight from this on I must make myself, and, God willing, I intend to make it. Excelsior Sprin'gs, June 26, 1888. I am coming back with a renewed youth, and a deter- mination to show you that all your kindness to me, and friendship for me, and devotion to me have not been in vain. Morry, I will be a sober man. Our last days shall be our best. I see the town this morning, and the fog above it, and a great cloud bank against the sun, but, " My heart is far away, Saihng the Vesuvian bay." Good-bye. As the Spanish say: Astahieago — until we meet again. Kansas City, June 28, 1888. ^ The trip to the Springs enabled me to break my gait. Having fully resolved to change my whole life as far as whisky drinking is concerned, I only ask an opportunity to show you what is in me. Kansas City, July 20, 1888. God of Israel! If for two weeks I have not suli'ertd the tortures of the damned, then, as Sheridan said, one might just as well rent out hell and live in Texas. I have crawled from my bed, bent double with pain, and tried to work. The spirit was willing but the llesh was weak. '^^ Acute inflammation of the duodenum''^ was diagnosed, whatever that may be, and yet I was drunk, when a quart of v/hisky would have killed me. TWENTY YEARS OF FRIENDSHIP. 51 But no matter. One can not always eat his cake and have it too. Kan-sas City, August 27, 1888. I am at home working like a gopher, and taking gold cure within an inch of my life. This time I will anchor the old shi|) or wreck her. I have Keeley's later process. Kansas City, August 29, 1888. * * * In my own behalf I have not a single word to say. If I knew a million I would not utter one. 1 knew ifc had to come, sooner or later, and why not now ? And yet I should have triumphed. Just think of that; I should have triumphed. Of course I might get sick enough to die, and all who knew me might declare that I was on a spree. Such was not the case when I saw you last. Such has not been the case these two weeks. This information, however, is mere words. I sincerely wanted you to know the truth, so that when some snake- in-the-grass goes to gloating over my drunkenness, you can give him the lie. * * H: J c^Ya a political writer. It is only when I feel depressed or cast down, or it is dark all around, that I write something sad, or of pitiful episodes, or of men or women who sing low in the twilight: "By the shore of life and the gate of breath. There are more things waiting for men than death." Kansas City, January 8, 1889. Last Friday, January 4th, was my birthday — fifty-one years old. I feel like twenty-five. I went to my priest, laid my hand upon the crucifix, and swore to the God who made us all, never again to touch liquor. You laugh. Very well — you have good cause. Watch and wait. Kansas City, January 11, 1889. Since the cloud of liquor has been lifted, work is all my consolation. To save my life I can^t lie in bed over five hours. Often and often I get up at three in the morning and go to work. I can eat anything, digest anything, stand any amount of fatigue and exposure, but I can't sleep. Perhaps all this will regulate itself. Have you anything else for me to do by way of occu- pation — literature, reminiscences with all individuality left out, anything? I wan't more load to carry — more ground to plow. Kansas City, February 2, 1889. Merry, I am a curious man. So, also, are you. I swear to you that when I looked upon his face (Col. Burnes) in 52 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. the coffin there, I said this to myself, '^'^Who will be next? Will Munford look upon the face of Edwards, or will Edwards look upon the face of Munford?^" Kansas City, March 19, 1889. I have nothing on earth to reproach you with. You have done for me what but few brothers would have done. I recognize the situation as fully as I recognized the over- throw of the Confederacy. I shall make one more effort. If I fail I will come to you — loyally, frankly and honestly, and say: *^Itis fin- ished. Choose some one else to do what you had a right to expect me to do." These words of John Edwards during the last two years of his life, from March 25, 1887, to March 19, 1889, contain a more graphic and pathetic account of his unavailing struggle against his only enemy, '^the monster of drink," than any other pen could depict. They are at times disconnected and scattered over long periods, but the extracts given are verbatim from his letters. I doubt not I have mislaid or failed to preserve many others written during this period, which might perhaps fill up the gaps, but these are not necessary, the skeleton is shown, and it requires little imagination to fill up the interstices and round out the details. With such a framework, a genius like his could weave such a sad and pathetic story as would surpass in vividness DeQuincey^s ^^Confessions." In the many letters I have of Major Edwards — among them those from which the foregoing extracts are taken — hundreds of topics of a different character and on different subjects are mentioned in a manner that only he could touch them. Much of this is of a semi-personal nature, growing out of his relations toward me and his connection with the Times. Much relates to State and National politics, to individuals and events as they were presented at the time. All are interesting — private and not written for publication — therefore the more interesting to the public. Much contained in those letters can f^ot yet be published, as the comments on politicians and public men would be premature. In the extracts subjoined I have intended to include nothing that would offend any living TWENTY YEARS OF FRIENDSHIP 53 person — certainly no one in Missouri. Among the follow- ing will be found in full the last letter I ever received from him : LETTERS ON DIFFERENT TOPICS. Kaksas City, August 18, 1887. I saw — briefly, but had no talk. He was looking everywhere for you. That's a Black Prince for you. I had rather have him on the skirmish line alone than ten of Shelby's picked body guard — picked for a personal daring that never had an equal. , as a scout, is everything. Cool, quiet, dumb as a dead man when you need wariness; noisy as a brass band when you want fun, or frolic, or boisterousness; pensive as a quaker, yet laughing to himself at the incongruous things of a day's travel; impenetrable, seeing all things, hearing all things, knowing all things. Lord, what a line of priesthood this Tennessee Melchizedek might have created. Kansas City, August 19, 1887. Now, Morry, I have given you my candid opinion of . You could even put him on guard at the great gate of Jerusalem while Titus was thundering away on the outside. I am in no need to tell you about him, only this: In view of my almost immediate depart- ure from Kansas City, and to a country that is not blessed with quite so many railroads as we have, it would be a splendid act of political policy to put him on the paper. Indeed, he could do much better without me than I could do without him, were I back again. I know you hate politics, but you certainly ought to use your own paper to defend yourself. To fight your enemies with all modern weapons, and forage liberally upon the enemy, always. What matters how rich your newspaper is ? How fully it can be made to drift and drift, merely keeping its head to the wind. How ^^faultlessly nice, and icily dull " some of its features are — no matter all these things and more — I had rather anchor such a craft, broad-side on, and square up for a funeral against the whole fleet of the enemy, than to keep out of the fight in Missouri a single hour. There is the threat to drive you from the party. Your want of activity and aggressiveness will be miscon- strued. Men would call you coward who would not dare to face you. And so it would go. Without miners, with- out boring, and digging, and putting down dynamite, and making here a clean alliance; there a combination, and 54 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. everywhere scouts who report daily or weekly, a campaign would be like the bridal meal given by the high contract- ing parties, " And what do you think they had for dinner? Two little fish and one little minnow!" can save you from all this. As God is my jiidge. Morry, I would not have you simply wipe out the political prestige of your newspaper for all the money you possess, now or hereafter, so I have insisted upon and do insist upon . Do not quit the field at the first onset. I have told you fifty times that no man's life was necessary to the Times. It will go on just the same. And just think what a campaign it is going to be. Eevolution everywhere. Unrest everywhere. Threats, passion, eager defiance everywhere. Try it, anyhow. In no possible way can it lead up to your experiment with me. Excelsior Springs, June 23, 1888. Morry, so sure as we two live to see next November, we will see Cleveland a beaten man. His message killed him. You remember the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava. A French commander, General Bosquet, was looking on. Asked an aide : ''What do you think of that, General ?" "It is magnificent, but it is not war. '^ If Harrison is nominated, it will be a fight for life and death in Indiana, with the odds all against us, and if we do not carry Indiana, good-bye, Grover ! We have no more chance of carrying a single other Western State than a man has of life who has been bitten by a cobra de capello. Wisconsin ! Wisconsin devil. Michigan ! Michigan two devils. Whatever else you and I may be, do not let us be fools. And then Connecticut and New Jersey. They are tariff to the core, as you and I are Confeder- ates. Randall, by a still hunt never before surpassed in A^merican politics, carried them for Cleveland. And his reward ? An iceberg thrust down his back, and an avalanche poured over his head. His corpulency can also be an exhausted receiver upon occasion. For the lifted hand of Randall no latch-string hangs out at the White House door. Mr. Scott, of Pennsylvania, attended to that — a Cerberus with a single head. You know what the French say : "Nothing succeeds like ingratitude.'" Very well. We shall see. For Missouri now: I read Glover's interview in this morning's Times. As to Morehouse, he was never more mistaken in his life — Glover, I mean, when he intimates TV> SNTY YEARS OF FllIENDSHIP. 55 that he, Morehouse, does nor know his own strength. He does know it to within ten votes. So far, the race is squarely between Francis and Morehouse. Glover hasn^t the ghost of a chance. He isn't even in the fight. Mind you; he is a thoroughbred. As I began, so will I go for- ward. If it is die in the ditch, then let us die like grena- diers of the guard, but do not let us deceive ourselves. His only hope on earth is in an alliance with Morehouse. For heaven's sake ! do not think me a pessimist. I am writing to you like one brother would write to another, and just as I would talk to you by your own fireside, and under the sanctity of your own roof-tree. I see the race, however, as I now can plainly see the sky, with the blessed sun shining in it. Excelsior Sprii^'Gs, June 26, 1888. . Now what ! Harrison and Morton. Remember In- diana, and what I told you in my letter Saturday of the situation there. It is desperate for the Democracy. McDonald is sulking in his tent like Achilles. And no wonder, Cleveland put the knife into him in cold blood and turned it in the wound. Gray is a new comer. Still on his garments are the mud stains of first republicanism, and next mugwumpery, Kansas City, July 9, 1888. I think that I should at least stay with you until the fight is fought. I have been sick for a week — sicker than you believe, or any man believes. Such is my reputa- tion that I can not be sick without being drunk. I have had a most painful and weakening dysentery — so painful as to prevent both eating and sleeping. All put together I have not drank a quart of liquor. Then I got some good brandy with laudanum in it, prescribed by Dr. A. B. Sloan. I have touched nothing in four days except this, and there is a third of it left yet. I have lost a week. Strike it out. The end will very soon come in politics, after the August convention. Then let us close the books. Every word you wrote to me is true to the letter. Each went into my soul. Old Frederick the Great — when his fortunes were at their very worst, and when it was fellest and blackest — said to a soldier running away, *'How, now, comrade?" ^'^I am deserting old Fritz," was the answer. ''^Yon can neither feed me, clothe me, nor give me shoes nor shelter." '^ Hold on for one more battle, and if the tide does not turn, I promise to desert with you." We had better remain toa:ether for one more battle. I 56 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. believe that I can do you some good. If I did not think so, and if I did not want to finally show you that I have some gratitude, I would never enter the Times office again except to say to you, '''Hail and farewell. ^^ I know my un worthiness. Think you not that the iron has gone into my flesh, cruel and corroding? As for pay, if I had cared more for it I had surely done better. But all this in passing. I am at work to-day, and will send down several articles. Kan-sas City, August 17, 1888. Dick Collins was married this morning at eleven o'clock, by the Rev. Father Lillis, of St. Patrick's church. His witnesses were Col. John Longdon, my wife, and myself. I have written his epithalamium, or his obituary, I do not know which. His friendship has always been so true to you, his devotion always so undeviating for you, his courage always so steadfast for you, that I ask as a special favor that you have published in the morning the marriage notice I send you. Of course all these high qualities are now of no longer availment, but for all that upon some graves there should always be monuments. Kansas City, November 7, J 888. As old Job once said, or as good as said, " This is hell.'' Recall what I once wrote you from Excelsior Springs ! Kansas City, November 8, 1888. What an overthrow! Four Congressmen gone from Missouri, and scant 5,000 plurality in the State ! As Pyrr- hus said: '' Another such a victory and I am ruined." If you and I had been prophets and the sons of pro- phets we could not more surely have foretold the disaster. They see it now, poor fools — they who wanted to put us to death because we pleaded almost on our knees for the integrity of the party of our love, our religion and our idolatry. Tarsney's election is a great card for you. By con- trast it shows what power the Times has when it is either for or against. I wish much that I had your philosophy. The defeat of Cleveland actually made me sick. Your special Kansas train was a master piece of busi- ness. Lord ! but how Kansas is joined to heridols._ Let the mortgages go on. One day she will shrivel up in the folds of her eastern anacondas as some old garment in flames. TWENTY YEARS OF FRIENDSHIP. 57 For the next month I will show you some of the best writing I have ever yet done. The inspiration of defeat has lit all my lamps again. Kansas City, November, 14, 1888. I was never more surprised in my life than when I got your letter of yesterday, the 13th, this morning. I have at this hour, and had last night, not less than five columns of editorial matter on Mr. Grasty^s table. How you could have been mistaken in this, I am at an utter loss to understand. The articles you will say your- self, are to the point and such as you would have indorsed in every line. As for depending on me, I, too, have re-organized from top to bottom, from Alpha to Omega. You say articles ahead are not journalism. No, not political journalism ; but every newspaper on earth has more or less literary matter. These are the kind of articles which should con- stitute the reserve. Kansas City% November 20, 1888. Since this is the hour of reconstruction, let me say a word or two categorically: 1st. From this day I want you to order every Missouri exchange, except St. Louis, to my especial keeping. Have them tied up and put in your room. I will get them every evening myself. Then I will show you a State melange of which you will be proud. 2d. There appear to be some of my editorials which are not acceptable. Will you please read such, make a two or three line memorandum on the back as to their deficiency, and send them back to me. In many an instance it will save me much work. Especially where the tariff is concerned. By hook and by crook I have man- aged to get hold of about thirty valuable works on the tariif . To write one single half-a-column article I have sometimes to consult as many as fifteen. I have prided myself on my tariff articles because of their perfect accu- racy. Even as much of a night owl as you are, I am pour- ing over Adam Smith, Beasley, McAdam, Granier, What- sook, etc., when you are asleep. I think that all the tariff books which come to the office, pro or con, you should give to me. I honed after McCulloch^s book. If you really mean for 3^our newspaper to fight out this fight, you ought to supply my cartridge-box when it costs nothing. 3d. There is an editorial on Carter Harrison which you should permit to go in by all means. Morry, this miserable renegade's attack upon Cleveland was so unjust 58 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. and cowardly that even stones on streets would cry out against it. Kansas City^ February 2, 1889. Perhaps you will think that I know something about foreign affairs. I predicted Boulanger. Also, the hum- bnggery of Emin Bey; also Stanley's fanfaronade; also Gladstone's complete overthrow; also the impossibility of France fighting Italy over Tunis; also the impossibility of Italy making inroads into Abyssinia — and now, hear me as^ain: The Crown Prince of Austria committed suicide. He was pitiably married, he had epilepsy, a girl as beautiful as the dawn was torn away from him, he was a powerful drinker, he used opium to excess, he scarcely slept five hours out of twenty-four, and what else could come except that terrible word — Finis. If you will let me, I would like to write half a column on him. It is part of the curse that he should die. I have Hungarian history open before me — the blackest, the crudest, the most unspairing ever recorded — and I wonder at nothing that now comes to the Hapsburgs. HIS LAST LETTER. Jefferson City, April 15, 1889. My Dear Morry: Frank Grraham told me this morning that you had been quite seriously sick with your old trouble. I need not tell you how grieved I was and how unhappy it made me. If it had been John or Jim I could not have sorrowed more. If you should die I would feel like I was — "Alone, alone, all, all alone — Alone on a wide, wide sea." There are but few men in this world for whose sake I would be willing to die, if nothing else but death would avail. You are one, Jo. Shelby is another, there might be two or three more; but these would cover the category. For God's sake take care of yourself. You do not do this. You think that you do, but there are times when you for- get yourself and undergo ruinous exposure. That infer- nal steam heat in your room at the office would kill a Ganges crocodile. You go from it to the open air — that is to say from a temperature of about 80 degrees to one of 40. Victor Hugo wrote that no man could be suddenly transported from Senegal to Senegambia without losing his reason. I think the fight is won here. It has been hard. TWENTY YEARS OF FRIENDSHIP. 59 unceasing, and exhausting. Everything is being attacked — beef, hogs, liquor, telegraphs, telephones, express com- panies, stockyards, school text books — everything. The Democratic house is on fire from cellar to garret, and not a drop of water nearer than that apochryphal drop, which Abraham might have commanded, but didn^t, to cool the parched tongue of that otherwise apochryphal gentleman called Mr Dives. In about two years more, good-bye. Democracy. It has been a faithful old soul, God bless it ! Upon a time it strode across the land and giants sprang up. For a blessing it knelt at the feet of patriotism, and when it arose a long line of statesmen had been created. When the Civil War came it made all the lists of it jubilant with the clanking of its armor. And now what? Wolf scalps, imbecility, cowardice, demagogy, the chattering of monkeys, and the want of daily washing. I will be Morry, if a man can be a good Democrat unless he keeps his person clean. I am so tired. Just as soon as we can force the fight here to a final vote, I will come home. This is a glorious April day. Such days as these will soon make you as of old. Your friend as ever. ^< ^7 .1 c-cCt/vo^C^- And now the most difficult part of this sad labor of love is but just begun— to tell in proper terms and fitting IDhrases of the greatness and nobleness of this Paladin, whose untimely ending brought so much sorrow to so many hearts — as illustrated through an intimate friend- ship of over twenty years. Within three weeks after his last letter I stood by his open grave in the village graveyard at Dover, and mingled my tears with others that were fall- ing as the earth was fast hiding all that was mortal from our sight. There was no feigned emotion on that sad occa- sion. The bronzed and grizzled veterans who had fought with him more than twenty-five years ago, wept as freely and felt as bereaved as his own wife and children. Never has earth closed upon mortal man more truly and sincerely 60 JOHN NEWMAN EDWAllBS. mourned. Others as brilliant and gifted, have passed away and left a void intensified, it may be by their intel- lectual gifts, but no man of so rare and splendid genius ever died, at whose grave these gifts were so forgotten in sorrow for the nobleness of the man who was their possessor while alive. The two most distinguishing traits of character in John Edwards, as I knew him, were his absolute unselfishness and his genuine modesty. Coupled with these, of course, were undoubted courage and chivalry, devotedness and loyalty, an unvarying courtesy and cordiality, that wonderful memory of his which enabled him to never for- get a face or a name — all of which endeared him to old friends, and made new ones of those with whom he was brought in contact. But over and above, and greater far than all these, were his pure and unalloyed unselfishness and self-abnegation. Never once in our long and intimate acquaintance can I recall a single instance in which there was the shadow of a difference or variation when these phases of his character were called into action. No matter what the time or when the occasion, he was always ready to do and be done for his friends. Eegardless of money, of personal comfort or convenience, aye, of public opinion and the proprieties he would make any sacrifice to his own detriment, for a friend, it mattered not how poor, how humble, or even reviled, so John Edwards considered him a friend. This may be called devotion, and so it is, but its substratum is unselfishness. And it may be said that this might refer to notable instances of a public character in which there was much of glamour, and in which the mock-heroic could have been assumed for effect. 'I mean nothing of the kind. I am thinking and writing of the thousands of instances, in every day life, under all kinds of circumstances, when I have seen these traits so fully tested and so clearly exem- plified — of how I have seen him spend time, money, energy, brain power, influence, anything and everything, for some poor fellow who could not help himself, and whom John Edwards supposed he ought to help ; of how, in any cam- TWENTY YEARS OF FRIENDSHIP. 61 paign, undertaking or journey, his personality or conven- ience was never to be considered ; of how he always pre- ferred and looked to the comfort of others, whether patri- cians or plebians, the highest and most distinguished, or the lowest and most forsaken — in short, of how he seemed always to want to take the "^^ smallest half ^^ of everything, to think of everybody except himself, not humbly or ignobly, but naturally and with an unassumed grace, I have never seen in any other mortal man. Often I have said to myself: It was born in him, and he can not help it. If there was aught of self-pride or egotism in John Edwards, the world never knew it, nor did his most inti- mate friends. For twenty years he was recognized and acknowledged as the most gifted writer in the West. No matter on what newsjoaper he w^as engaged, his brilliant pen soon made for itself a place and an individuality that were known far and wide. Nearly all of this time he was one of the most prominent figures and potent factors in Missouri politics. He entered heart and soul into every campaign, first for his friends and always for his party. And yet during these twenty years, with the fierce light of political antagonism and professional rivalry shining upon him, no living man can point to one instance in which by word or deed John Edwards ever preferred or exalted him- self, or ever showed that he was conscious that he was the gifted son of genius, which everyone else knew except himself. Personal adulation and praise, especially of his writing, seemed always to be absolutely painful, and hun- dreds of times have I seen him adroitly turn the drift of such conversation into other channels. His relations with his newspaper associates seem to have been of the same kind as those with his army associates. All recognized his overshadowing ability but in no breast was there ever the tinge of envy. He was the equal, the friend, the helper of every man on the staff from reporter to proprietor, from private to general. And never once in army, in journalism, in politics, was he known to ask preferment or seek to be advanced. More than all this, he was an author — a writer of books. 63 JOHN NEWMAN EDWAilDS. Two of his volumes, '^'Shelby and his Men/' and ^'Shelby's Expedition to Mexico " relate entirely to events and occur- rences in which John Edwards was an only less prominent participant than the commander himself. He was General Shelby^s adjutant-general, and held the same relation to him that Eawlins did to General Grant. It is no detrac- tion from the established fame of General Shelby or of any officer who served under him to say that during all those days John Edwards was much more than his title implied, a mere adjutant-general — that in fact he was more to Shelby than any captain, any colonel, any brigadier-general — that he was always at the war councils, and that his judgment outweighed them all. These volumes of John Edwards were written to perpetuate the deeds and glory of Shelby's command during the war, and to tell of the romantic march of the five hundred indomitables to Mexico after its close. And yet in neither of these volumes, '' Shelby and his Men,'' and " Shelby's Expedition to Mexico," does the name of the author John N. Edwards, appear except on the title pages and in official orders! I challenge the rounds of history, biography, memoirs, recollections and what not, to instance a parallel! Privates, corporals, sergeants, lieutenants, captains, quartermasters, commissaries, colonels, generals, all — every one of them almost — are given a place in the only history that could perpetuate their names and their famiC. But the name of the author and the master spirit and what he did is never once intruded. I have asked myself time and again why does this man so abnegate himself, and I often tried to draw him out on the subject. His unvarying answer was that he had almost the horror of seeing his name in print as he would have of facing hydrophobia. His actions through- out years corroborated this statement. No journalist in Missouri ever received from his brethren of the press so many laudatory and eulogistic notices. But while inwardly he no doubt appreciated them, he never by word or deed or look gave evidence of that fact. He did not preserve them — he never kept a scrap book. Next to army experience, camping, marching, messmating, and fight- TWENTY YEARS OF FRIENDSHIP. 63 ing, there is no better crucible in which to test a man than in the active brain shop of a metropolitan newspaper. There obtains in the latter an esprit de co7ys that is surpassed nowhere except, perhaps, in a well organized and drilled military troop in active service. There can be no loafers or laggards in either corps. A man is soon ^'sized up'^ and rated for what he is worth. John Edwards has been '' sized up " in both of these professions. Ask any of his old army comrades — all of them — and there is but one reply : '' He was the truest, the bravest among the brave, and withal the most modest and unselfish." So, also, would be the verdict of his newspaper friends, and especially those with whom he was last associated ; he was true always to his convictions, whether right or wrong — that he was brave goes without saying — that he was modest and unselfish, there is an avalanche of testimony. I shall add to these notes neither analysis nor pane- gyric which I leave to other but not more devoted friends. I have felt that no pen but his own could do full justice to such a character as that of John N. Edwards. To us who were for so many years his daily companions; who have experienced the loyalty of his friendship, the inef- fable charm of his personality, and the masterful force of his genius, the loss is a bitter one, and words die upon the lips as we look into this open grave. Thousands and tens of thousands share the bereavement who also shared his loving kindness and charity — his daily practice of the sentiment: ' In men whom men condemn as ill, I find so much of goodness still; In men whom men pronounce divine, I see so much of sin and blot, I hesitate to draw a line, Between the two where God has not." The life which closed with the death of John Edwards grows no less beautiful and admirable as we realize that he has gone from us. He has left imperishable memen- toes through which he will live wherever human hearts beat to generous emotions. But far the most cherished 64 JOHN NEWMAN EDWATIDS. recollections will be those of liis personal friends, those who knew how genuine were his qualities, how warm and tender and true he was back of the genius which flashed through his images. These lines from Pope might serve as a fitting epi- taph : — " — Friend to truth, of soul sincere, In action faithful, and in honor clear; Who broke no promise, served no private end. Who gained no title, and vv^ho lost no friend." Kan'SAS City, June 8, 1889. WRITINGS OF JOHN N. EDWARDS. " POOR CARLOTTA." [From tlie Kansas City Times, May 29, 1870.] Dispatches from Europe say that the malady is at its worst, and that the youug widow of Maximilian is near her death hour. Ah ! when the grim king does come, he will bring to her a blessing and a benediction. The beautiful brown eyes have been lusterless these many months ; the tresses of her sunny hair have long ago been scorched with fever and pain , the beautiful and brave young Spartan, rich in energy, in love, in passionate devotion, knows no more the roses and lawns of Miramar ; the Mediterranean brings no more from, over perilous seas the silken pennon of her fair-haired royal sailor lover. It is quiet about Lacken, where the Empress lays a-dyiog ; but Time will never see such another woman die until the whole world dies. It is not much to die in one's own bed, peaceful of conscience and weary of child-bearing. The naked age is crowded thick with little loves, and rose-water"lines, and the pink and the white of the bridal toilettes. Here is a queen now in extremity, who reigned in the tropics, and whose fate has over it the lurid grandeur of a vol- cano. A sweet Catholic school-girl she was when the Austrian came a-wooing, with a ship of the line for chariot. She played musical instruments ; she had painted rare pictures of Helen, and Oinphale in the arms of Hercules, and Jeanne d'Arc with the yel- low hair, and the pensive Roland — her of the Norncan face — over whose black doom there still flits a ruddy fervor, streaks of bright Southern tint, not wholly swallowed up of death. Yes ! it was a love-match, rare in king-craft and court cunning. Old Leopold's daughter married with the flags of three nations waving over her, ami(i the roar of artillery andthe broadsides of battle-ships. The sea gave its sapphire bloom and the skies their benison. Afar off French eagles were seen, alas! to shadow all the life of the bride with the blood of the husband. The nineteenth century witnessed the heroic epic which darkened to such a tragedy. She came to Mexico, bringing in her gentle hands two milk-white doves, as it were. Charity and Religion. Pure as all women; stainless as an angel-guarded child; proud as Edith of the swan's neck; beautiful; a queen of all hearts where honor dwelt; mistress of the realms of music; rare in the embroid- ery she wove; having time for literature and letters; sensuous only in the melody of her voice: never a mother — it was as though God had sent an angel of light to redeem a barbaric race and sanctify a degraded people. How she tried and how she suffered, let the fever which is burning her up alive give answer. It is not often that the world looks upon such a death -bed. Yet in the rosy and radiant toils of the honeymoon, a bride came to govern an empire where 65 66 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. armies did her bidding, and French Marshals, scarred at Inkermann and Solferino, kissed with loyal lips her jeweled hand and mur- mured through their gray moustaches words of soldierly truth and valor. Slie sate herself down in the palace of the Montezumas and looked out amid the old elms where Cortez's swart cavaliers had made love in the moonlight, their blades not dry with blood of the morning's buttle; upon (Jhepultepec, that had seen the cold glitter of American steel and the gleam of defiant battle flags; upon the Alemada where Alvarado look the Indian maiden to kiss, who drove the steel straight for his heart, and missed, and found a surer lodgment in her own. All these were bridal gifts to the Austrian's bride — the brown- eyed, beautiful Carlota. Noble white vision in a land of red har- lots, with soft, pitying, queenly face ; hair flowing down to the girdle, and as true a heart as ever beat in woman's bosom. As a Grecian statue, serenely complete, she shines out in that black wreck of things a star. It c ime suddenly, that death of her lover and her husband. It dared not draw near when the French eagles flew, but afterward what a fate for one so royal and so brave. God shielded the tried heart from the blow of his last words, for they were so tender as to carry a sorrow they could not heal. "Poor Carlota!" Youth, health, reason, crown, throne, empire, armies, husband, all gone. Why should the fates be so pitiless and so unsparing? Somewherein eternity within some golden palace walls, where old imperial banners float, and Launcelots keep guard, and Arthurs reign, and all the patriot heroes dwell, her Maximilian is waiting for his bride. Long ago that spotless soul has been there. Let death come quickly and take the body, and end its misery and subdue its pain. All that is immortal of Carlota is with her husband. The tragedy is nearly over. In an age of iron and steam and armies and a world at peace, it remained for a woman to teach nations how an empress loves and dies. Who shall dare to say hereafter there is nothing in blood or birth ? What gentle sister, in the struggle and turmoil of life, will look away from that death-bed in Lacken Castle, and not bless God for being a woman and of the sex of her who is dying for her king and her empire? Sleep! the angels have no need of sleep. Nothing suffices love. Having happiness, one wishes for Paradise; having Paradise, one wishes for Heaven. There is a starry transfiguration mingled with her crucifixion. The crown is almost hers, and in the beautiful garden of souls she will find once more the monarch of her youth. A STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND. [Kansas City Times, April 2Q, 1873.] It seems so strange that the hands of poetry should be laid upon perishable things. Heir of immortality itself, its offspring also should be immortal, having no stain of earth, no link that rusts, no flower that fades, no stream that runs dry, no passion that con- sumes, no sun that is obscured, no morning without its dawn, and no sky without its rainbow and its twilight. The picture that it calls into life, the book that it makes beautiful, the idea that it etherializes, the field that it decorates, the warrior that it ennobles, the woman that it makes angelic — all, all should live only in the atmosphere that surrounded their creation, in the memories the poem made impervious to time or the rough current of real and practical MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS. 67 tilings. Fancy has its own imperial caste, and surrenders but too sorrowfully its precious and adored deceits. There are too many lattice bars against which its wings beat in vain, and too many false and luring lights in the windows'of its hope's first afhuence — in the color and charm of its day-dreams and its visions. It can do no good — however sternly inexorable the logic of to-day may be — to make the Cleopatra of our youth forty-two and cross- eyed when Anthony lost Actuim for her own sweet sake. It can do no good to doubt the story of the asp, and deny the half-human, half -panther instinct which, cruel to the last, forgave not the losing of the battle, nor the deep sword-thrust that was sterner proof of Raman love than the starkest blow ever struck by legionary or Egyptian. Why deny that when the long, voluptuous dance was done — a dance dreamily danced in the odor of frankincense and the balm of myrrh — that the full, pouting lips of the beautiful Hero- dias made no pleading prayer for an august head laureled with God's benediction ? It brings no peace to any dreamer'^ dream to know that the deft fingers which wove the web of long deceit and broken promise were gaunt and wrinkled, and that the good king, in the ceaseless clatter of Penelope's shrewish tongue, longed for the blue sweep of the seas running shoreward, for the wines of the nymphs — the Bacchanal court, and the sweet, long loves of the Queen Calypso. And now the once fair " Maid of Athens " lies a-dying, old, withered, abandoned of the world and forgotten altogether. The wife of an English consul in Greece, Byron met her, loved her for a month and a day, sung of her, and sailed away. The song did not die — will not die. It was passionate and beautiful. Many re- member it; many remember some voice that has lingered over it — some night when it dwelt in the memory as a star lives in the sky — some intonation that had a meaning as sweet as it was hidden. "Maid of Athens, ere we part, Give, oh ! g'ive me back my heart." She was beautiful then. The black hair was long and lustrous; her eyes that unfathomable hue born of a moment's pleasure or pas- sion; her form the lithe, superb motion Byron's heroines always had, her voice softly musical and tuned to the old Italian airs he loved so dearly. The fancy pleased him passing well, but no sin came of it all, and over against his name — when the inexorable angel has made up the records of the world — there will be written naught of a folly that could darken the frown even on the unforgiving face of his uncharitable and unsympathetic wife. And to-day the Maid of Athens, forgotten of the world, lies old, withered, helpless, waiting for death in sight of the blue waves that went out with her life's firstromance and'her poet lover. It is well, perhaps, that time kneels at no shrine and passes no heads by untinged of gray and unshorn of laurels. He would linger, else, too long for hearts that are breaking and weariness that would be at rest. The grave alone is sacred ground. Its confines mark the limit of finite beauty and bloom, and no matter how sweet the song that pours its fragrance out, nor how adored the idol lifted up in the placid past of youth and joyous retrospect, it were better that time shrouded and shattered all, than, like the wisest and best of human- ity, it knelt at the feet of some alluring fancy — worshiped beneath the rays of some imperial beauty that had even Byron for votary or voluptuary. And death should come quickly to her whose face is a picture 68 ^ JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. yet in the pensive glow and glory of its Norman setting — come in with the tide bearing swift ships from her native England — bearing voices that sing the sweet songs of him who knew and loved the Maid of Athens a long half century ago. PILOT, WHAT OF THE SHIP? [Kansas City Times, April 26, 1872]. In the ceaseless drift and change of things, not many eyes have watched and not many hearts have listened for tidings from the good ship Polaris, going on grandly into the night of an unknown ocean. From out the gloom and the silence of the frozen wilder- ness no words have come back of good cheer or safet}^, and it may be that tbe hearts which beat bravest when the vessel sailed, and the voices that were blithest and gayest, will beat never more and sing never again till the waters of the world have passed away for- ever. Yet the ocean loves its offspring — loves with a love beyond the land; those who tempt perilous things and live heroic lives, face to face with the fates of the storm and ihe harpies of the lee shore and the wreck. And who knows how much of this strange pity may go to color the web of Hall's deathless adventure, and weave into its warp and woof stray streaks of arctic sunshine, not wholly swallowed up of the midnight and the glacier. It was summer when the Polaris sailed, the scent of many flowers in the land breeze and the voices of many birds in the trees. All nature held out pleading hands — a mute protest of odor, and bloom, and the singing of happy waters, and the glad and green- growing things on the upland and meadow. Autumn came, and winter, and now the spring again, with blessing of blossom and promise of fruit, and soon \vith the summer once more a year will have gone. One year, and not a word from this American vessel, with her American crew, bearing American hearts that have prom- ised to find the Open Sea, or perish. The nation has not forgotten them. There maybe some, per- haps, too manv, who have only a sneer for the brave endeavor, •■ u\ onlya faith inlts folly and failure, but the great sympathetic un . r- current of the land is with the mariners, praying right on thjit ihe Northern Ocean may give up its secrets— that favoring winds may bear them back safely to their own again. How speeds the ship and how fares the crew, the waves hnve not told, nor any voice yet heard in the homes of the absent. What form death took in clam- bering over the bulw^arks, if death came at all, and what rites were said in the face of the wondering midnight, not any messenger has yet returned bearing aught of record or tidings. Perhaps all is w^ell. Terror and night and the unknown are all in league with the spirits who sentinel the Open Sea— grim watchers at the uttermost gates of the world— but even now the mists may have been rolled back from before the longing eyes, letting in visions of waves that sleep in a tranquil summer sunshine— visions of islands green with palms and fringed in scented and odorous things. Who knows? So Franklin believed and died. So Kane prophesied and passed away. And so Hall did write but one short year ago, when he gave his fate to the ocean and his family to science and his country. MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS. 69 (^UANTRELL. [Kansas City Times, May 13, 1873.] As the glorification of living and dead guerrillas seems now to be the order of the day, a few words as to the character of this, the king of guerrillas, may not be amiss. Since Mosby's recent inter- view with General Grant, the Radical papers declare that his sins, though as scarlet, shall be made white as snow. No good reason, therefore, exists why the truth shall not be told of one who, brave and steadfast to the end, died as he had lived, a fearless Ishmaelite. Richardson, whom McFcirland killed, wrote once in a letter from Denver city to the New York Tribune, of Billy West, a noted border man, as "the swarthy Adonis of the Plains." Carrying forward the simile, Quantreirmight be likened unto a blonde Apollo of the prairies. His eyes w^ere very blue, soft and winning. Peculiar they were in this, that they never were in rest. Looking at the face, one might say there is the face of a student. It was calm, serene, going oftener to pallor than to laughter. It may be that he liked to hear the birds sing, for hours and hours he would linger in the woods alone. His'hands were small and perfectly molded. Who could tell in looking at them that they were the most deadly hands with a revolver in all the border. Perhaps no man ever had more complete mastery over a horse than Quantrell, and whether at a furious gallop or under the simple swing of the route step, he could lean from the saddle and snatch a pebble from the ground. Anderson was a tiger let loose ; Quantrell was a tiger too, that had the innocence of a lamb. Nature loves to group the gro- tesque. Hence all the smiles his features had on when his pitiless lips, pronounced the death sentence. Todd mingled no melody with his murders ; Quantrell was heard to sing little snatches of song as the gray smoke rolled away from his pistol. ^ Mosby delighted in surprises and disguises ; Quantrell published his name broadcast when the mood was on him, and blazed it along the route of his travels as if it were a cloud to cover him. He was unlike them all, just as he was greater than them all. It is instructive sometimes to'study the pictures the war painted. No nation furnishes a counterpart for guerrillas such as ours, except Spain. France had a few, but women tempted them and they were trapped and slain. These Missourians loved women, but the love lasted not be3^ond the bivouac. In the morning each heart was all iron. What instructs one in the contemplation of such characters, is their intense individuality. Horrified at their ferocity, one yet delights to analyze their organization. If there is a race born with- out fear, Quantrell belonged to it. He loved life, and yet he did not value it. Perhaps this is why it was so hard to lose it. In his war- life, which was one long, long, mercilevss crusade, he exhibited all the qualities of cunning, skill, nerve, daring, physical endurance, remorseless cruelty, abounding humor, insatiable revenge, a cour- age that was sometimes cautious to excess and sometimes desperate to temerity. In the midst of a band who knew no law but the re- volver, his slightest wish was anticipated and obeyed. Hence his power to command was unquestioned. Recognizing no flag but the black flag, he sat as quietly down in the midst of a hostile country as the foes who were on his track ; and having shaken hands with death, he thought no more of the word surrender. If he believed in God, he denied the special providences of heaven, and stabled 70 JOHN NEWMAN EDWAEDS. his horses in a church as well as in a stall. Without knowing the ghastly irony of it, perhaps, he was often heard to oifcr up a prayer for a victim. It is useless to declare that these kind of characters do not attract. All Paris came to see Cartouche hung, and yet Cartouche was only a robber. But then his little child was suspended on the same scaffold. In the arsenal at Jefferson City is a picture of Bill Anderson, taken after death. The ciear-cut face is ghastly pale. A white, mute, appealing look is on the tense, drawn features. Dead leaves and sand are in the long yellow hair and tawn}^ beard. For hours women gather about this picture and babble of balls and revels and dances and battles, and ever and ever come back to the white, set face and the wan, mute features. ISo visitor goes away without seeing it, and thinking of it for many a day thereafter. No nation equals in individuality the American. Her people possess all the elements to make the finest soldiers on earth. Keen, desperate, enduring, insatiate for the excitement of active conflict, and readily hardened into reckless butchers, they make conscience subsidiary to slaughter, and accept the fortunes of a struggle with a fatalism that is Oriental. As a perfect type of this, Quantrell will live as a model. Sooner or later he knew death would come, and so he forgot him. Meanwhile his killing went on, and his exploits filled a historic page of the gigantic contest. This California paper is too far away to know the truth of his last battle's ending. The curious can find his grave if they will look for it in Kentucky, deep enough to keep him till the judgment day. Bloodier and crueller than Mosby, he died as he had lived, wor- shiped by a few, loved by many, and abhorred of half the nation. THOMAS BUCHANAN READ. [Kansas City Times, May 13, 18T2.] The dead poet and painter — American and therefore sectional — has gone to his grave before it was yet springtime on all the ways and the woods of his lordly west. The bloom of the lilacs had faded, and the white tentsof the dogwoods had been pitched beyond the green of the swelling uplands, but there was something the May days wanted — some fullness of sap in the maple-trees, some softer music in the hush that lingered by the edges of the running water, some rarer radiance in the hues that made the gold and crimson of the sunset skies. And if he could have waited yet a little while — waited until the gentler spring and the softer summer took hands in the laughing weather — their blended lives having only the roses as a stream betv/een them — heaven might have seemed nearer, and fairer and closer to the reach of the hands that will never touch pencil or pen again this side eternity. He was not a great poet, nor will America ever produce one until all sectional lines are broken down and all sectional passions obliterated. The realms of poetry are nature's own, bounded by the blue skies, the fields, the flowers, the lessons that humanity teaches, the songs thatryhthm make musical, the pictures that art adorns, the yearnings that fancy interprets, the mortality that imagination glorifies and redeems. Wars send abroad over tlie land stern battle lyrics that bear in their ringing cadence the sound of sudden sword- blades, and the dim, nebulous swing of burnished bayonets, but they are foreign wars, waged when a nation's life it at hazard or a nation's honor at stake, ' Read sang of a soldier whose morning MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS. 71 was clouded by doubtful fame, and whose evening had over it the baleful light of rapine and slaughter. No matter, he came to laurel Sheridan and he did it, in that desolate valley by Winchester town, after the conflict was done and the glory awarded. History, how- ever, rejecting the sonorous swell of the picturesque ride, lays its inexorable tribute at the feet of Wright, unsung and unknown though he be in the numbers of the poet. Truth, the terrible logi- cian, halts never a moment for a smiJe from the " sweetest lips that ever were kissed " — for a verse from the sweetest song that ever was sung. In the mills of the critics where the grinding is done, that which is false is crushed with its rhetoric, and that which is true is redeemed with its glory and its gold. No matter again, he believed in his hero, and faith with a poet is religion. Somewhere in the islands of the blest — somewhere be- yond the sunset shore he will find the old, glad days of his Italian weather again. There must be an Italy in heaven, or the world would send thither none like Byron, nor Shelley, nor Keats, nor De Musset, nor Scott, nor the boy Chatterton, nor the woman Brown- ing, sweet in royal singer fashion, the purest, fairest, saddest Eng- lish Bird of Paradise who ever, swan-like, sang and died. JAMES GORDON BENNETT. [Kansas City Times, June 8, 1872.1 The telegraph brings the news that this aged and war-worn editor is near his death hour — that even now he may have passed over the river to rest under the shade of the trees. About the death of any Paladin there is always something of solemn import, something that attracts, even while it terrifies. No matter how the life had been, no matter whether the prowess that lifted him up a giant among his fellows was the prowess that the pirate has, that the Free Lance boasts who fights for gold or for beauty, that the Christian owns who dares the Syrian night winds — it is the last, last act alone of the tragedy called existence which fascinates those who gaze in upon the struggle. There is the standard lifted up on some perilous day, torn now and bloody; there is the good sword too heavy for the weak hands that will never use steel again ; there are the hau- berk and shield, dinted by many a blow and cleft by many a battle- stroke ; and there, too, it may be, faded and soiled, is what the world knew not, a little glove or bunch of ribbon, telling the old, old story of how, in the stern, unpitying heart there was a memory that all the desolating work of rapine and slaughter could not banish or obliterate. James Gordon Bennett came to America a rugged Scotch boy, to whom the world owed a living. Alone, friendless, penniless, who can doubt how the beginning went, and how the struggle began. Pinched in pocket, oftentimes hungry, made sullen by disappoint- ment, and vindictive from Ihe utter isolation of his life, he hated society because he believed society hated him. Hence all that long, fierce warfare upon it, which brought him curses, insults, blows, prosecutions, fines, and once an imprisonment. Even in the gutter the old Scotch desperation writhed up against the foot that_ was trampling him down, that it might deal a blow as stark as him of Colonsay at Bannockburn. Much self communing makes men sav- ages or dwarfs; solitude either gives veneration or cruelty. Bennett was a savage of the streets; his cruelty dealt with character and rep- , utation— blasting and blighting them as a hoar-frost would the sura- 72 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. mer plants. It was a terrible warfare, this of his in poverty and gloom. He stood upon the streets with a pencil for a pistol — this freebooter of the alleys, crying out to the proud and the rich: Stand and deliver. Want assailed him, and the law, and the bravoes of that society, whom he hated and defied. But the Scotch blood and bitterness were there, and he fought like a wolf at bay. His pen was dipped in poison. Scandal, stripped to the waist, made an elab- orate toilet before all New York in waiting, and fast men and women clapped their hands and applauded. Amid it all, however, he had a wife who was beautiful and whom he idolized. Strange union, this man and that woman — one hating the cMffonieres and the offal of his hateful life, and the other turning to him as an angel of goodness, when the deep loathing and disgust was uppermost, and tying a rose- bud in his button-hole. He struggled also for notoriety, and gained it — such notoriety as Lafitte and Murrell had. His paper was read by all, sought for by ail, bought by all, and then the tide turned. One day he came forth a new man, faultlesslydressed, having gloves upon his hands, and boots upon his feet. He lifted an elegant beaver to the world, and bowed to it as one who meant to treat the world civilly. This soldier of fortune had become to be a Marshal of the Empire ; this Dugald Dalghetty was no longer a Free Lance, but a Baron with armorial crest and quarterings. The two lives kept pace together — the newspaper's life and the editor's life. Where he poisoned before, he stimulated; where he pulled down before, he builtup; wherehe lac- erated before, he soothed and gratified ; and where he administered vit- riol before, he gave opiates and rosewater. The shadow of the Herald fell upon a continent, and men rested under it and found it grateful. The immense enterprise and brain-power of the man were turned into legitmate channels. Never sincere, however, never reliable, never a partisan in politics, those whom he supported longest and truest felt that behind the mask there was a grim, sardonic smile which toler- ated them while it despised them. Not all the old clansman's blood was entirely eradicated. The love of the sudden and the grotesque would ever and anon breakout, and for a grand sensation men knew he would sacrifice a President or immolate a senator. And he did, roaming over the political field as an incarnate executioner, cutting off heads that were sometimes the wisest and the most august. In a revolution, he would have been Camille Desmoulins ; in the Chamber, Barriere; at the barricades, St. Just, who turned pale and wept, giving as a reason : "I am too young and too poor to die." The country grew, and grew, and changed until the country of Bennett's youth and Bennett's maturity were as two countries, the years a rolling stream between. But he filled the new country with his fame as he had the old. The HeralcTs empire remained without a rival, and to day, while he lies a-dying or dead, he knows, if that curious, gnarled, rugged nature knows aught of earth, that behind him as a monument is left the greatest newspaper the new world has ever known or seen. His ways to make it such were his own ways, dark and crooked though they were at times, yet he had that great- est of all merit — success — the only standard by which a soldier of fortune can be judged this side the court where human reason and human intellect are no longer lamps to light and guide us in the paths of duty. MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS. 73 FENIMORE COOPER. [Kansas City Times, October 16, 1878.] In the Indian summer, that honeymoon of the year, one loves to recall the names of those who made nature a great white throne where men might kneel, or dream, or worship. It is good for all of us, no matter, when or how, to get away alone in the dim woods, and those authors are dearest to us who lead on to where the even- ing will fold its purple wings about the trees, or where, in the white hush of the morning, the kisses of the breeze will awaken the sleep of the flowers. Isolation comes often as an anodyne softer than night, or dreams in the night. The forest has a voice which, thrill- ing, articulate, mighty, speaks to the inmost soul of the glory of God and of the wonderful powers of His Omnipotence. There is no tree which gathers to its grateful branches the dew and the sunshine; no unseen brook that babbles of the lowlands and the summer's sea; no trailing vine that lifts its soft lips up to the bearded lips of the oak; no swaying nest, vocal with life and love; no flower that feeds its bee; no spring that slakes some creature's thirst; no bird that sits and sings for joy; no glad or growing or happy thing in all the woods that has no voice to tell something good or true — of something to make life brighter and braver, and better for all of us. Cooper is the novelist of the woods. The spirit of nature has entered into his genius and inspired it. As Byron loved the ocean; as Shelley the placid lakes, where the blue of the waves and the blue of the sky were deep together; as Poe the midnight and the waning moon, so Cooper loved the mighty woods, no matter whether spring had peopled all its waiting places with bud and blossom, or summer with wealth and teeming life, or autumn with crimson and gold, or winter with its vanguard of snow, which could be seen creeping stealthily through the pines, until the melodies of the streams were mute, and a glaze as of death had swept over all their dimples. Cold actuality has discarded his Indian pictures, and bereft many a hamlet and stream of the delightful romance of his genius, but who wishes to analyze a novel? What difl'erence does it make if the champagne which intoxicates is a mixture of prussic acid, Jersey cider, and beet leaves? None want to look beneath the sparkle and foam for the dark sediment that has headache in it, and heartache as well. Cooper fascinates. Through five books he carries a single character — that of Natty Bumppo — and the light that shines upon him is always the light which eomes from some tree, some stream, some desolate trail, some hushed and thrilling ambushment, some river that runs to the sea, some little clearing where a cabin stands, the blue smoke going up to the blue skies as a prayer to the^ good God who guards alike the trapper in the wilderness and the king in the midst of his capital. ; "We do not believe that the fame of the great American novelist is dying out, no matter what some Eastern critics have lately said and written. Who is there to take his place? What hand anywhere yet lifted up can weave the web of romanceas he has woven it about all the great lakes, and all the great tribes gone or decimated? It is true that the pathway of progress lies over the graves of the Indians, and that the vices of civilization have made the remnant of the race a cruel, beggarly, degraded few; but we seek only for our gratifica- tion among the ideal creations of his fancy, and not where the 74 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. sfiualid Diggers live on grasslioppers, and the vindictive Apaches murder all alike — the old and the young, the women and the chil- dren. It is nature we want as revealed by one who worshiped at her shrine, and who felt her beauty and her glory enter him as a divine love, purifying his imagination and giving to his prose the music and tremor of a hymn. God grant that the mantle of this great man, so long unknown, may yet lind a resting-place upon some new American Cooper, as wonderful in his creations as the great original. SCHUYLER COLFAX. [Kansas City Timet\ February IS, 1873.] There is a momentary pity in the hearts of most men for any ani- mal huuied hard and brought at last to bay. No matter how trapped, or sought, or slain, some commiseration will mingle with the death stiuggle when the yearnings of the chase are over, and not a little of weariness and disgust because for the skill of the hunter there could only be the conquest that destroyed without re- storing again. But if anywhere in all this broad land there is one who begrudged the Credit Mobilier its righteous and unmerciful work upon Schuyler Colfax, there is no record made by either press or pulpit. An unctuous, smiling, psalm-singing, cold-water hypocrite, he must have knelt down when he took his bribe just to sIidw God how fervent he was. He must have laughed, too, in the face of his soul and promised it a camp-meeting holiday, with a feast of hymns and a revel of prayer, wherein conscience, a beautiful angel no longer, transformed its body into railroad stock and its wings into cou- pons—a dividend for the harp within its hand and the crown upon its head. The creature and the pet of the w^ar, it swallowed him as a mighty whale a gigantic Jonah. Strange food for such a stomach. Strange taste for the appetite that had devoured citits sacked and pillaged, provinces laid waste, and living armies arrayed as growing corn, fresh with the beams of the morning of life abd ripe for the scythe of the harvester Death. One day he w^as cast forth again, and the faithful places knew him a miracle by the white of his sanc- tified vest, the cut of his orthodox coat, the zeal of his loyal prayers, and the penetrating sweetness of a seraphic smile that made all the tough missionaries easier of digestion, and all the Christian Association stockholders in the radical party. Babies were named for him, and he kissed and blessed them, and dabbkd among their diapers for votes. Temperance societies invoked his inspiration, and he drank their soda water and their chamomile tea. Sewing circles worshiped at his shrine, and offered up a sister a day as a sacrifice. Sunday-schools patented little pious proverbs and pinned them to the name of Colfax. Prayer-meetings wrestled with the Lord for Schuyler's promotion, and eliminated from their cate- chisms the story of Ananias and Sapphira. For others there were glory, fame, records made noble in battle, manhood, triumphs, deeds donedaringly for man and for humanity; but for Schuyler the sole irrevocable and eternal smile. He laughed in the faces of the corpses that the waves of the w^ar threw out upon the ghastly beaches of society; at the feet that had waded in the valleys of the strife and came away crimson to the instep; at maimed and furloughed veterans, homeward bound and laureled; at fairs MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS. 75 and sanitary gatherings, and at all the crowds that 'met to tell of victorous tights by land or sea. One day the men who frowned and fought were mustered out, and Schuyler got well ahead in the jackal race that knew no goal but loyalty and plunder. But alas! alas ! for Schuyler. Another day and a fisherman came who cast his net into the sacred places of the House and Senate and snared such lordly and loyal lish as Patterson and Dawes, Harlan and Kelley, Mr. Speaker Blaine and Mr. President Colfax. Even through the meshes of the trap there shone on the bland face of Schuyler the same old smile. They dragged him forth in the light of the Credit Mobilier conflagration, so that the world might see what manner of a fish he was. There was the same immaculate vest, the same coat, and brass buttons, and cold-water countenance, and beaming and benignant face. Brother Newman recognized him and blessed him. The Young Men's Christian Association of Boston drew a draft in favor of his integrity and demanded that the Great God should cash it; South Bend thrilled through all the limestone veins of its tem- perance societies and drowned its virtuous grief in soothing ginger- pop. Too late! Not Lazarus at the rich man's gate was ever more an object of contempt — ever a more polluted, tainted and accursed thing. To bribery there had been added perjury, to hypocriscy the crime of detection. Even the smile that had cheated the devil through all the years of hatred and persecution and annual baby- shows, and Good Templar funeral services, fled from the mouth that had sworn to a lie, and hovered like a dove, it is supposed, until taken into a laminated steel-spring hoop-skirt factory at South Bend, Indiana. Men who hold bribes in cosmopolitan hands can wash them and get well again; but for the Puritan who all his life fingered only the prayers of the Pharisee, there is only leprosy and death. He could not rend his garments and be forgiven if he would. For the lion , snared or shot, there is human pity and regret, ; for the soft-pawed, slinking jackal, only the hayings of the watch- dogs and the broom-sticks of the washerwomen. Away with the corpse to the Potter's Field. Is there any need of epitaph? No. Yet, lest loyalty should seek some nobler grave to find its perjured priest, a monument uplifted there might bear for record the simple words — Uriah Heep. BON VOYAGE, MISS NELLIE. [St, Louis Evening DisiMtcli, May 32, 1874,] The young, innocent thing just married to a stranger and borne to a stranger's home, will carry with her the blessings and good wishes of the American people. No matter the pomp of the cere- mony, the preciousness of the bridal gifts, the magnificent display that waited upon the marriage of the president's daughter, there was something supremely sad in that almost regal heart plighting, where the fairer and the weaker was so soon to say good-bye, and so soon to sail away from parents and kindred and native land, the passionate yearning for which is never known until forsaken. In the spring time afiluence of her first love, and bravely loyal and womanly patient, she will bear herself proudly up and sing and sigh not through the beautiful English summer weather; but when it is autumn on all the woods, and the night comes, and the talk of home and friends beyond the sea, tears will gather in the calm brown eyes, and pensive longings that whisper and cling about the heart until, as a bird set free, the sweet young bride, so homesick and so hungry for 76 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. the land of her birth, will return again for a mother's tender kiss and a father's gentle greeting. Not as the daughter of a president, nor yet as one born to the memories of a name and fame great in the somber glories of a civil war, do the Americans send benisons and blessings after the sweet young bride. For her womanhood alone do they honor her, and for the rare fragrance of a sinless and stainless life. A Christian mother reared her a Christian child, and she carries to the old world from the new a character made strong with the precepts of duty and a proud consciousness that the true domain where she can rule by right divine is home — the subjects whose loyalty is most impor- tant, the children that God will give her— the works most necessary for her to study, their little hearts— and the treasure best worth seeking, her husband's love. LITTLE NELSON W. DALBT. [Sedalia Dcmocrat.l Sang a poet once: •' God's lightning spares the laureled head." But why not that other one, laureled with six summers of curls and six summers of sunshine? Don't you see he was taken the day before the Mayday, when all the birds could have sung for him, and all the buds burst into bloom for him, and all the grasses grow so green for him, and all the odorous, blossomy, glorious weather put surely for him the red in his cheeks and the south wind in his hair? You see he was also so young. Every little garment he left con- tained a legacy of grief. He did not walk without taking the hand of his mother or father. He never knew a night outside the parent nest. He clung so. If he had only been a soldier and fallen in bat- tle, his face to the foe and the flag of his faith above him ; if he had only been a man, scarred by life's combat and scorched by life's fever ; if he could only have worn harness and put a war plume in his helmet's crest ; but you see he was only a little blue-eyed, fair- faced, timid, shrinking boy, laying his head in hismother's lap when he wanted to sleep, and saying his prayers by his mother's knee when he wanted to be put to bed. Peace after such a sacrifice ! Never any more this side the river called the River of Death. There is the little grave, lying out in the dawn and the dew, awaiting the resurrection. There are the garments he wore. There are broken toys, "And pieces of rings, And f ragements of songs which nobody sings, A lute unswept. and a harp without strings, And part of an infant's prayer." There are words before the cooing had given place to the lisping, and the lisping had lapsed into the thrill and the vibration of the yet untutored voice. There is the vacant chair. There is above these and over and beyond all these, the cry of the finite soul trying to pierce the infinite : What of the future, oh! merciful God, is it annihilation — is it the dark ? What can be said to make the utter agony an hour less in pain ? Nothing. There is no need to try. Even love is stronger than time, than change of scene, than efforts at forgetfulness, and here was adoration. My boy ! my boy ! not my angel, that is the cry from every human lip that ever cursed the daylight because death MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS. 77 had made it hideous, or clung to an idol's lips, in one passionate caress, lips pale, and pinched, and wan, and drawn forever, "The Lord gives and the Lord takes away." Hush ! put nothing upon the Lord that makes Him merciless, or monstrous, or the slayer of the lambs in his own sheep-fold. The lord loves little children. He had once a son, whose death, though in the full prime of his heav- enly manhood, shook the earth as though hell had risen upon it and mastered it, and every accursed murderer upon it was to be given back unto the night and chaos. The boy's fate came out of the unknown swiftly, and that was all. It is best to believe this, for' woe be to the land when its mothers — groping in the dark for their children, blind, gasping, crying aloud for help, come face to face with a creed which tells them that God took them away. As little Nelson Dalby was in the flesh — tender, confiding, beautiful — so let him be remembered by his parents and adored until the unfathomed gives back its dead to those who seek them there, or utter and eternal night its surcease of sorrow and forgetfulness. Keep everything his little hands ever touched, and everything that ever — as toy or trinket — made his wondering eyes to shine, or the red in his cheeks to deepen like a scarlet japonica bud. Never mind the future. On this earth are the thorns, the parched high- way, the covering up of those faces which give to the heart a hor- rible drought. Make of his memory a shrine and worship there as flesh worships flesh which is its own. Grief has its luxury. Some- thing that is exquisite may be even given to despair. The darling is gone and he is not gone. Imagination perpetually renews his walk, his talk, his infinite confidences and his good-night kiss that will be forever and forever a benediction. HENRY CLAY DEAN. [Kansas City Times, February 13, 1887.] This many-sided intellectual giant — and we refer solely to his intellect and his heart in any analysis that may be made of his char- acter—has suddenly passed away. He was a strange man in many respects, yet one of the most genial and lovable men, when once thoroughly understood and appreciated, ever known in Missouri. Beneath an exterior which could not always be easily penetrated, he carried the conscience of a Christian and the heart of a child. If the expression may be permitted he had two natures, that of the warrior and that of the priest. The hand that smote upon occasion so relentlessly and so remorselessly was no less prompt to soothe, to heal and to make whole again. A tale of sorrow moved him to instant response. Those who had no friends always found him a friend in need. His good deeds were innumerable, and his charities, for his means were larger by far than any one supposed; but he neither boasted of the first nor claimed for the last any sort of recog- nition or approbation. Intellectually he was rarely gifted. He was preacher, lawyer, politician, public speaker, lecturer, farmer and author. Many qual ities went to make up his power before a crowd. He was mighty in invective, but it was the invective which came at an adversary with a club. Perhaps no man ever used to more advantage the rare exquisite gift of irony, and he did with it what few writers or speakers of this country have ever yet succeeded in doing— he joined with it an indescribable pathos. Hence his power before a jury when his intellectual and bis moraluature was aroused, Atothertimes 78 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. he dealt only in a ponderous kind of logic and ])uilt up liis speeches as some mighty triphammer might forge an iron mainmast for a man-of-war. His weakness in politics appeared to lie in his want of flexibility and plan of battle. He lacked in the capacity of mass- ing his forces and seizing instantly upon all the strong points of a disputed field. Too much precious time was often wasted upon skirmishes that his scouts might have looked after, or upon recon- noissances which his captains might have controlled. Gifted as he was, these gifts wei-e not at all times homogeneous. With a mind as vivid as a dream, rapid in its eucompassments as thought, of won- derful grasp, resource and fertility, it yet did not drive forward straight to the end, knowing neither variableness nor shadow of turning. A pleasant byway was lure enough to take him aside ; a rare look put him to dreaming. There were too many unresponsive fibers in his individual make-up ever to permit him to become a suc- cessful politician. The harness of the caucus so galled his withers that he would frequently stop short in the middle of the road, refus- ing thereafter to pull a single pound for either love or money. Of the stronger and more potent elements of leadership he did not pos- sess a single one. Not a few have been the magnificent structures he has erected, only to burn them down or blow them up in a moment of spleen, or disgust, or uncontrollable indignation. For a hot fight under a black flag, where for the wounded there was no surgeon and for the dead no sepulcher, he was incomparable. But if strategy were required solel}^, if the head alone and not the heart were to dom- inate the struggle, if only the cold logistics of mathematical maneu- vering were to be permitted to the combatants, he was not the man to lead; but what if he could not lead in such a crisis ? It is sometimes as vital to destroy as it is to build up. He wrote one book — the " Crimes of the Civil War" which was fierce, fragmentary, and not unfrequently viciously savage. He wrote another — the " Criminals of the Civil War" — which was, if anything, fiercer and more savage than the other, but it has never been printed. The manuscript was burned at the time his house was, some several years ago, together with a library that was unequaled in Missouri, and which, with nigh on to 10,000 volumes, he had been a lifetime in collecting. His reading was vast, his information almost superhuman, and if such a thing could be pos- sible, or even half-way possible, he had, as it were, the whole recorded history of the world stowed in his mind, and ready to be summoned for any purpose at his bidding. Some of his monologues were only surpassed by those of Napoleon at St. Helena. When the mood was on him he put spells upon people through the sheer force of an intellectual necromancy that forced them to listen even as the guest to the marriage feast was forced to listen by the ancient mariner. He loved much to talk of the hereafter. He speculated much as to what was beyond the grave. He sought in many ways to pen- etrate the future, and to get but one bare glimpse of something real and tangible that told of anotlier life. Upon this earth nothing was ever vouchsafed to him. Does he know it all now ? HENRY WARD BEECHER. [Kansas Cit3^ Time^, March 9, 1887.] The blow has fallen at last, and the wizard of the pulpit of Plymouth church can no longer conjure a congregation which MISCELLANEOUS WKITINGS. 79 adored him. That sleep came upon him which he had so often described, and when he awoke he had solved for himself the great problem of the hereafter. How he strove to do this while yet upon earth. How from under the dark shadow of restless intellectital doubts which come to all men who read and think, and reason, he, yearned for a faith that never wavered. How, when he imagined, in the fervor of an exalted vision, that he saw the porphyry domes, the jasper gates and the golden highways of the New Jerusalem, he looked again, but only on a mirage. How, step by step, he sought for the soul's immortality through every proof that God, or man, or science, or nature, or creed, or conscience, or revealment had fur- nished, he has best declared in a mountain of discourses as high as Plymouth's steeple. Did he find before death came to him that perfect peace which can only come from a perfect knowledge? What matters it? He lived the life that was in him, and better than that no man can do who was ever yet born of woman. With Beecher's final faith or belief, however, we have nothing to do. That was solely a matter between himself and his Creator. The reckoning ah'eady has been had, the score been paid, the re- cording angel's book closed for the present ; and somewhere out in the wide, white hush of eternity is a freed spirit waiting for the resurrection. As a preacher he is the most difficult man to analyze, in an intellectual way, in the United States. At times he had an almost indescribable pathos. Often his irony was superb, but it was the irony of a splendid spiritual digestion, and, therefore, as a balm it always carried with it a touch of amazing grace. Satire helped him upon occasion, but it was not the satire of Ihe scorner and the hater — it was rather that of one who was fond of a laugh and fond of a story. Born actor, his mobile face italicised, as it were, each emotion which he wished to make emphatic. Not unfrequently a quaint humor played along the edges of his sermons as a sunbeam along the edges of a storm cloud. Then the lightnings of some terrible denun- ciations would leap forth, and one saw only the darker and more somber aspect of the sky. In this he was dramatic, but what is in- tense realism at last if it is not vivid contrast, and the swift inter- mingling of sunshine and shadow? He surely loved nature as only a passionate lover could love her. He took into the pulpit images of fields where the green corn stood in serried ranks like lines of infan^ try formed for battle; of summer wheat fields, the south wind bending their bearded heads as though at the touch of its caressing fingers they had bowed as to a benediction; of twilight woods, where nest said good-bye to utst in the gloaming; of apple orchards white and pink with blossoins; of dewy lanes, where on either hand could be heard the weird laughter of the owls in the thickets; of bird and tree and bird and leaf and flower and all sorts of blessed things which filled the heart with reverenceand made man in spite of himself lift up his thoughts from nature to nature's God. In the stronger and terser senFC of epigram Mr. Beecher was notably lacking. Weak also in pictuiesqueness — that sort of pic- turesqueness which can make one hear the flapping of invisible wings and the swish or the flow of imaginary waters— he yet had what answered almost the same purpose — a quick, entertaining and corruscating fancy. Imagination was also wanting — that sort of imagination which could make one see a sinner being held up over the very mouth of hell and make one smell his very hair scorching. 30 JOHN NEWMAN EDWAIIDS. He could not soar. He never in all his long life, according to our estimate of him as a preacher, preached a really strong, terse, mass- ive, logical sermon. He could take hold of the heart and do with it pretty much what he pleased, but he almost always left the head where he found it. He was utterly incapable of building a massive edifice of thought, perfect in every arch, beam, door, floor, window and rafter — story upon story and stone upon stone ; but he could build a beautiful cottage, with lattice-work all about it, and put angels into it, and make honeysuckles form a bower for them in which to play their harps and wave their palms, and decorate it with all (sorts of little nooks aud crannies, and fill these with all sorts of quaint rugs and rare books and celestial brick-a-brac generally; but for a fortress that the very wiles of the devil himself could not prevail against through any force of sap, or siege, or stratagem, or cunning — well, some other hands than Mr. Beecher's would have to hew out the rock and rear the structure. What, then, was his power over his congregation, over his audiences, ard over all public bodies with whom became in contact or before whom he delivered not only sermons but various other kinds of addresses? It was the powerful individuality of the man to begin with, buttressed upon an immense vitality, electricity and personal magnetism. Then he had pathos, knowledge, dramatic capacity in no small degree, all sorts of resources to be summoned at a moment's notice for his apt aud apropos illustrations, a forgiv- ing charity for the errors and the frailties of poor human nature, an appositeness in putting things that, while it is not true eloquence, yet does much that real eloquence alone can do — more demagogy than appears at first sight, vividness, perspicacity, anecdote, every art of a finished actor, ease, grace, the poetry of motion, much elocution, and— above all, and beyond all for the purposes for which the gift was given— an almost supernatural acquaintance with human nature. There will be innumerable obituar}^ articles written on the death of this famous American pulpit preacher. He will be dis- cussed from every conceivable standpoint. He has had his share of harsh criticism and indiscriminate laudation. He has gone through some fiery ordeals, and as he himself has sometimes said in moments of unutterable sadness, the way has seemed to be so dreary and dark, and life's burdens so heavy ; but, whatever the final judgment may be that his coTmirymen shall pronounce upon him, both as a man and as a preacher, this should always precede the verdict: In men whom men condemn as ill I find so raxich of goodness still, In men whom men pronounce divine I find so much of sin and blot, I hesitate to draw the line, Where God has not. GENERAL ALBERT SIDNEY JOHNSTON. [Kansas City Times, April 10, 1887.] An equestrian statue, erected to the memor}^ of General Albert Sidney Johnston, has just been unveiled in New Orleans with heart- felt and appropriate ceremonies. Eandall Gibson, who commanded a Brigade under him at Shiloh, delivered the memorial address, and Jefferson Davis passed in review his life, his military services and his spotless character. Albert Sidney Johnston was a man whose ability as a com- MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS. 81 mander the soldiers of the Civil War will always love to study. They never tire of asking, one of another, the following questions: If he had lived, would he have driven Grant into the river? If he had lived, would he not have been made commander-in-chief of all thfe Confederate forces? If he had lived, would he not have finished the battle of Sliiloh during the first day's fighting? If he had lived, would he have fulfilled the promise of his earlier years, and would he finally have become the bulwark and the savior of the Southern Confederacy? These be hard questions to answer. As the Confederacy was organized, it is doubtful if even a Napoleon Bonaparte could have saved it. The politicians got hold of it almost before it had put its armor on. Nothing would do them but a constitution, a congress, a president, a cabinet and a civil administration. Not a single leader in the South, bold or otherwise, arose in his place to demand a dictator. Secession was a mere juggler's term. Some coiner of phrases or quibbler over abstractions invented it. Revolution was the word— stark, inexorable, unmistakable revolution. For this anything else but a dictator was a criminal absurdity. With a president, there would always be an administration and an anti- administration party; with a congress, the outs would be eternally striving to circumvent the ins : with a constitution, the strict con- structionists would do little else but fiddle and dance while Rome was burning; with a cabinet, red tape was bound to be a king. A general in the field, to get to his chief authority, would have to trav- erse as many avenues as there were rat-holes about a granary filled with corn. While armies were crying for arms, ammunition, food, clothing and medicine, cabinet officers would l3e indexing reports and pointing out how every requisition would have to go through the regular channels, you know. Johnston fought but one battle before he was killed, that of Shiloh, and he did not fight that to a finish. Up to the momeu when a minie-ball cut the femoral artery of his right leg he had everything his own way. His plans were working to perfection. The various subdivisions of his army had taken the ground pointed out to them, and when the designated hour came had entered promptly into the fight. It was not possible for any general to have held his forces better in hand. True, it had been his intention to begin the attack one day earlier than he actually did begin it. but he could not be everywhere at one and the same time, and so, at a most critical period, some of his subordinates failed him. But for this Buell could never have reached Pittsburg Landing in time to suc- cor Grant, no matter whether Johnston had lived or died, nor whether Beauregard had or had not called a halt to rearrange his lines of battle. That Johnston was a man of splendid administrative ability none have ever denied. That in a military point of view he showed skill of the very highest order in his operations in Kentucky, his Federal opponents have borne ample and generous testimony. He seems to have known war and to have had a better idea of the exi- gencies and the requirements of the struggle than any other com- mander who fought for the South. From his writings and from some sketches and memoranda of campaigns left behind him, there can be no mistake made about the grasp of his intellect, nor of the further fact that such was his prescience and his logical acumen from the standpoint simply of the soldier that he predicted future events with a vividness and directness that the aftertime was to prove more than prophetic. 82 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. As far as it was fought l)y J.)linston, Shiloli was the most perfect battle of the war aud tlie most glorious tor the arms aud the prowess of the Southern Confederacy. When he fell the contrast came in, and from this contrast much may be understood how immeasurably he towered above those who succeeded him in the command of the Army of the Tennessee. KATKOFF. [Kansas City Times, April 1, 1887.] If the report is true that M. Katkoff, editor of the Moscow Gazette, has fallen into deep disgrace with the Czar, then indeed has one stormy petrel been brought to the ground with ruflled plumage or broken wing. In his journalistic make-up he was part Tartar and part Greek, that is to say: He rode like a Cossack and glided like a snake. His newspaper wore always two masks. Behind the first one could invaribly hear the rattling of chains and the swishing of the knout — that was for Russia. Behind the second one could always hear an air from an opera or the voice of a woman — that was for Europe. Remove both, and there was the elegant man of the world — smiling, plausible, soft of speech, a rose in his buttonhole and a love knot in his hair. It was as one going into a coffin to find a corpse and find- ing Adonis. The Emperor Nicholas first discovered in the young Katkoff those elements of superb pliability and audacity which have made more tyrants and more revolutions than any other two elements which go to make up the sum of human character. Of course he had others, and shining ones, but these two constituted the pick-ax and spade with which he worked. The Emperor put him at Mos- cow, laying upon Iiim only one injunction: "Be always a ]\Ius- covite," that is to say, stand always by the old Russian party as against the new. And he has. Next to the Czar, himself, Katkoff had more to do with bringing on the Crimean War than any other man in Russia. He has said things which no other subject alive would ever have been permitted to say, and he has written and printed things which would have rewarded any other subject alive with Siberia. What- ever he has done, however, he has always wrote furiously, and ably as well, against Germany and Austria, and in favor of Russia's eternal adVance, if it is only one foot a day, toward Constantinople. He has had a spy at every capital, nvA surprised, over and over again, the most important secrets of half the croAvned heads in Europe. He was loved, petted, caressed and ennobled by the father of the present Czar, and for a time after Alexander 11. met with so horrible a fate, Katkoff was in high favor with his successor. If he is now indeed in disgrace it is a mystery, but then, so many mys- teries exist in Russia. The night of its despotism is sometimes im- penetrable. [August 7, 1887.] So Katkoff, the great Russian editor, is dead. When death stripped him of his harness and flung it furiously aside in the lists where they had struggled month after month for the mastery, it rang out no louder tiiMU the blow of a wooden sword-blade upon a wooden buckler. A brief paragraph was all that was vouchsafed him in the American newspapers by way of obituary, and save in MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS. 83 his own land and liis own city his passing away was but little more accounted of than the folding of the hands in sleep. When Mary died, the Mary whom the slanderous Froude called bloody, she said : "If you will examine my heart you will find the word Calais written thereon." And Nelson said: " For my epi taph put this — died from a want of frigates." And if Katkoff's heart could have been examined also that, too, might have had stamped upon it indelibly — Constantinople. For fifty years his one long, fiery interminable text was Con- stantinople. We can never become powerful as a nation, he has thundered out ten thousand times through the columns of his news- paper, until we get to the sunshine and the sea. Do not call the Black Sea a sea. For half the year it is a lake, frozen as hard as the solid earth — aye, as the rock which is crowned with the cannon of Gibraltar, It is the Mediterranean which will forever go to make up the warp and the wool of Russia's destiny. When Peter the Great was dying, sometimes delirous and some- times in a stupor, he would have brief intervals when the clouds would roll away from that strangely perturbed brain of his, and the shadows recede far enough to give him a glimpse of the light that still abode upon all the world. Then he would cry out to those about him : " Kever take your eyes from Constantinople. I com- mand you upon your loyalty, your honor and your love for Russia, to never take your eyes from Constantinople." Perhaps that word might also have been found written upon his heart, if, indeed, this savage Tartar — fisherman, shipbuilder, archi- tect, assassin, pope, czar and epileptic — ever had a heart. To that dying command of the wonderful barbarian Katkoff devoted his whole life. Since it was given, Russia has five separate and distinct times come within sight of the spires and the minarets of Constantinople, the domes of its mosques and the monuments to its heroes; but banded Europe, England at the head, threw itself in front of the conquering columns, and stayed the hand that had almost closed about the prize. Baffled, and made aged in his prime at each successive defeat, Katkoff would begin anew the preaching of another crusade. He must have been a statesman, because he was patient and knew how to wait. He must have been a politician, because the people's pulse to him was always as a barometer. He must have been a leader, because after he knelt at the feet of the iron-hearted Nicholas for a blessing, a pale faced, stoop-shouldered, shrinking, scarcely articu- late man, fresh from the academy, when he arose he was a giant. He must have been a poet as Beranger was, because in the white heat and torment of some of the fiercest charges at Plevna, the grenadiers of the guard went on singing one of his battle hymns set to music. Furthermore, and for the benefit of those superlatively superb patriots of our own Civil War who seem to have forgotten everything else connected with it except a doctor's certificate of disability and a pension, Katkoff wasone of the most devoted friends and elo- quent advocates the cause of the Union had. It was owing largely to his counsels that the Russian fleet broke out of the Black Sea and anchored in American waters, pending the settlement of the Mason- Slidell-Trent affair, when England showed so much passion and Mr. Seward so much common sense. The Moscow Gazette , Katkoff's newspaper, must have been a power in Russia. It was the idol of the old Muscovite party, which leaped full-statured and full-armored from the loins of Ivan the 84 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. Terrible. This party never stirred, nor lifted a hand, nor gave forth responses to a single appeal until Katkoff passed along its lines and tired them, as a torch passing along will tire a line of ready gaslights. We know of no newspaper which ever before had so much power and audacity, nor have we ever read of one. Perhaps none could exist outside of such a despotism as Russia's. When the savage hour was on Nicholas, none could get to him quicker than Katkolf, nor soothe him more completely. More than to any other man, save Alexander II., did the serfs owe their emancipation. As he hated black slavery, so he hated white, and so his voice was lifted up against the forms of it in his own country. We say the forms of it because the substance remains. There are still the dungeons, the knout and Siberia. France also has lost a devoted friend. _ Ever since the Crimean war he has demanded an alliance offensive and defensive with France, offering Egypt to France if France would help Russia to Constantinople. There can be little doubt that Russian counsels were back of Boulanger, and Russian army corps in readiness for materialization, Katkoff could not know that he was leaning on a reed, and that fine clothes and gold lace and a cocked hat and heroic words could never make a general. Perhaps the great editor died too soon. He might have lived to see the next European conflagration, to help on which and to lead up to which he has brought more tar, pitch and turpentine than any other one hundred men in all Europe. A FISH STORY. [Kansas City Times, March 17, 1887.] There are just nine hundred and ninety-nine chances out of one thousand that nobody attempted to kill the Ozar last Sunday; that nobody held a dynamite bomb in his hand ; that the whole story is bald and barren and bogus; that whatever there is to it at all was born of an Oriental imagination, qualified by that all-pervading blood mania which belongs to the absolute right of Russian despotism. Look for but just a moment how absurd and ridiculous the cable dispatches are. It was semi-oflQcially stated that an attempt might be made on the life of the Czar. That several persons were arrested near the palace with dynamite bombs in their hands. That no actual attempt was made to kill him. That a bomb attached to a cord was thrown in his direction, the intention being to tighten a string which was fastened to its mechanism, but before the said string could be tightened the would-be assassin, laboring under the disadvantages of holding a very loose string in his hand, was seized. That the bomb, still with this very loose string, was shaped like a book. That one of ,the students arrested in connection with the plot also had a bomb shaped like a book. That a woman with a bomb in her muff, probably not shaped like a book, was also arrested. That on Monday every suspicious person who had been arrested had been released except one. That this one was of short stature, and would not talk, and that the Czar himself, w^hen he came fully to understand what an escape he had made, cried bitterly— he the great big six-foot booby, a monarch, and a lineal descendent of Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible. What slush, what jargon and what absurdity! That the Czar has many a subject who would like to kill him — thousand upon thousands of them— no well-informed student of history doubts for MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS. 85 a momeDt; but death lias never yet been known to make itself ridic- ulous. Men, with dynamite bombs in their hands do not go gali- vautiug about the streets of St. Petersburg. It has never yet been recorded that women carried them about in muffs. Of course it is clearly understood that in many of the sad, subtle, and more merci- less tragedies of the past, wherever the weaving was the darkest or the most somber, its warp and its woof could be traced clearly to a woman's hand; but then they always sang a song or two like Circe before the}" slaughtered. Was not Delilah's lad a pillow for Samp- son, and her dusky hair above him like a canopy, before his own long locks were shred awaj^ and he was turned over, helpless and blinded, to his enemies? Finally, our faith is abiding that if the Czar comes no nearer to death than he was last Sunday, England will yet hear the Russian drums Beat at the gates of Candahar. PROHIBITION. [Kansas City Times, February 13, 1887], In voting to indefinitely postpone all prohibition legislation — . call it by the name of submission, if you please, that sleek, sly, slinking wolf, with the soft wool of the best of the flock yet thick in its teeth — the Missouri senate has done well. It took by the throat the most vicious and disastrous species of legislation ever introduced into a Democratic general assembly, and strangled it with as little compunction of conscience as if it had been a snake. In politics, as in inundations, what a blessed thing it is sometimes to have a breakwater. The high, full, serene courage of conviction is rare in the land, and is, perhaps, growing rarer. Demagogy — that accursed ulcer which has eaten the life out of more republics than Leonidas had Greeks to defend the pass of Thermopyla? — has as- sailed Missouri fiercely of late, and swept over too many of its fair and fertile political places. To every ism which came along too many sturdy old Democrats knelt and sought to turn away its wrath as if it had been a murdering giant. To a man upon his knees every attacking enemy is a giant. Wnat was greatly needed in the pres- ent prohibition crisis was simple to make the Democrats get up from an attitude which was cowardly, cringing and degrading. They knew that submission meant prohibition, and that prohibition would make out of the people of the State a people of liars, sneaks and hypocrites. They knew also further that prohibition did not prohibit. They knew also still further that if prohibition prevailed in Missouri — even though qualified, as in Kansas, by the obsequious probate judge and the all-accommodating and all-embracing drug store — the State would be torn from its Democratic moorings and given over rudderless and dismasted, to the pirates of the greedy and remorseless opposition. They saw women — whose babies at home were crying for the milk of maternal breasts, and whose dirty and unkept bodies pleaded for the work of maternal hands — haunting the lobbies of the Legislature, glib with their little hoard of Mayflower maxims, preaching down Missouri laws and habits and customs, and smiling the sweet, elephantine smile of the frowzy female reformer every time some old one-gallus Democrat would become thoroughly impregnated with the new religion, and yell for more prohibition straw about the mourner's bench as though he were in a Sam Jones' circus, with the sisters all a shouting, and 85 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. the new recruits beating their breasts and tearing their hair, as though the "hell serpents" had them already, even as they had old Parson Bullen when Sut Lovingood poked the lizards up the two legs of his breeches. They read a little pamphlet — scattered thicker than the vine leaves were ever scattered by the nymphs of Bacchus, when naked to the knees they trampled the grapes of the God-given vintage — a pampLilet wherein was retailed all the partisan slanders upon "poor old Missouri," and wherein also might be found the false and somewhat startling assertion that whatever of wealth, civilization and development might be contained in the full flow of a flood tide of emigration was all passing by "drunken and whisky Missouri" and finding a sure and contended lodgment in sober, pious and prohibition Iowa and Kansas. Too many Democrats, we say, saw all these things, and heard all these things, and read all these things, andyetthey never whim- pered; the unfortunates, they did worse ; they indorsed everything said to the detriment of Missouri, because they trailed at the bedrag- gled skirts of the women who had the slanders printed, and rocked and crooned over the cradle in a lullaby voice that might have made a panther dumb, wherein was jabbering that bastard and misbegot- ten infant called submission. But the Democratic Senate came to the rescue and tumbled about the cars of its builders and into a vast mass of rubbish all the sham, pretense, lying-in-wait, deceit, false- hood, and hypocrisy of a dozen accumulated years of snuffle and cant and wheeze. It only needed some such stroke as this^bold, umistakable and patriotic— to bring the timid and the wavering Democrats everywhere to their senses, to make them grope again through the darkness of their temporary betrayal until they find the old landmarks of the party ,to go again to the teachings of thefathers as to an altar, there to confess their sins, abjure the disreputable political associates of the new faith and plead to the august shade of him who wrote our Magna Charta for the peace that can only come from a perfect absolution. As for the Times, it stands to-day where it has alwaysstood, and where it stood in its declaration of principles years ago — utterly opposed to every form and species of prohibition. High license and local option is its platform at the present, just as it has been from the beginning. It believes in temperance as much as it believes in the laws which govern, regulate and protect human society. It believes that temperance should begin at the fireside; that parents should teach it to their children; that the preachers of the gospel should embody it in their sermons, and insist upon it in all their devout and holy ministrations; that local enactments should become its intelligent ally; that the saloon should not be driven from the street to the private residence; that alcohol drinking may be regu- lated, but never extirpated; that civilization brings Mith it certain evils or vices which have to be dealt with in a spirit of tolerant, not of violent, firmness or aggression, and that where history, illustra- tion, comparison and example all teach us that prohibition does not prohibit, it would be a species of folly but little better than a crime to attempt its introduction into a State, the large majority of whose people hate the very sources from which it sprang, and who are not yet prepared to swap the principles of a lifetime for smuggled beer and drug-store whisky. [May 16, 1887.] A valued correspondent writes to know what the chances are for the prohibitionists to carry Texas, and to ask if the support reu- MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS. 87 dered to them by Senator Reagan will not help them in a greater de.a^ree than could othewise have been expected. The prohibitionists never had any chances in Texas to begin with, and it is altogether useless to speculate upon them now. Never having existed, there is nothing to discuss. Texas is a peculiar State in many ways. It has three zones, three climates, three ter- ritorial empires, and three world staples — sugar, cotton and cattle. One would scarcely suppose so, but Texas is also an exceedingly cosmopolitan State ; made so by its very immensity. Tolerance is indigenous there because of that exalted idea of personal or individ- ual freedom which finds its highest type and its most exalted expression in range, latitude, boundlessness. Liberty exists there because of its immense cattle ranches and grazing grounds. To find prohibition in its perfect form and essence one must go where population is concentrated. Where the mases are dense enough to hunt for a master, as all dense masses do. Where dema- gogues swarm, forage and litter. Where familiarity breeds con- tempt and contempt expresses itself in upheaval. Where anything that is stable is hateful, and where the thing called progress is inter- preted to mean nobody's rights but yourow^n. Where civilization can neither advance nor retreat, and where, for the want of some sort of exercise to prevent social putridity, it is often found avail- able to resort to proscriptive politics. Prohibition thrives in Maine because its administrative life is dank, stagnant, finished , in Iowa, because its life is that of Plymouth rock — harsh, sterile, proselyting, greedy for strife ; in Kansas, because its life is of the Mayflower — canting, morose, insincere and brutal ; if each could not war on whisky it would be on something else. The race to which either belongs in all the world's history has been a race of bigotry, psalm- singing and spoils. Prohibition in Texas would be the same as aloes in sugar or cologne in a pig pen — an absurd anachronism. When a man in Texas goes to fooling with his neighbor's landmark, they put him to death. In Iowa they make him either a judge or a preacher. When a man in Texas begins to prescribe certain fixed metes and bounds wherein his neighbor shall walk and conduct himself, he is either lassoed or scalped. In Kansas, after runniug away with somebody else's wife, he would be sent to congress. Hence, our valued cor- respondent can readily see what sort of a show the average prohibi- tionist would have in Texas. And Senator Reagan? And Senator Reagan's influence? Neither the man nor his influence, in the sense that he could make one hair of the prohibition head in Texas either white or black, is worth the price of a mustasg pony. He is a good soul enough, but he labors under one disadvantage — that of not knowing that he does not amount to anything. He is one of Texas' fossils left over from the Southern Confederacy. Should he get drowned in the Brazos, his contiguous water course, his neighbors as a mass would look up stream for his bod}^ As a pre- Adamite he will do just about as well as the Alamo, with this difference in favor of the Alamo — it has a substantial fence around it. To size up Reagan in the light of his own self-appreciation and then fencehim round would require a county. Hence they just let him run at large, a powerful squealer, but quite harmless. 88 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. ON DEMOCRACY. [Kansas City Times, January 24, 1887.] TO BE KILLED AGAIN. Prophets of evil are abroad in the land: First a speck and then a vulture, Till the air is dark with pinions. Everywhere in the darkness there can be heard the flappiDgof invisible wings and the whetting of insatiable beaks. It is the Dem^ ocratic party which is to be slaughtered again and picked to the bones. And by whom? By what process? Through what sort of revolutionary uprising or upheaval? The new labor party, already as good as formed, is to be the butcher, a white apron above its paunch and its feet to the knees dabbled in great pools of blood. The republican orators have decreed it. The Republican newspapers have proclaimed it. All that servile crowd of camp followers, who find private benefit in public disorders and who prefer the favor of a master to the inex- orable equality of the law, are praying for it hourly. Blaine has declared it with something of the apocalyptic vision the pirate had when he saw in his dreams a Spanish galleon beating up from the Indies with a clear king's ransom in silver^and gold. Well, the old thing called the Democratic party has been con- siderably bruised and battered up in its day and generation. It has been proscribed, bedeviled, shot at, carpet-bagged, pro-consuled, hunted up one side of the country and down another; but when they came with a coffin to carry away the corpse the corpse was not forthcoming. All of its long and memorable life it has been always just on the eve of destruction. Federalism was to put it to death. ' Federalism was buried in the grave of the elder Adams. The Whig party — its pure, its true and its strongest opponent — came next to die with its mighty leader, Clay. Knownothingism came next, fighting under the black banner of religious intolerance, but Virginia, putting into the hands of Henry A. Wise her spotless Democratic banner, slew the monster at the very gates of liberty. Then the war came, and the very blackness of darknef^s swept over the fortunes of the Democracy. Out of the while heat and torment of that war the Republican party seized upon the Korth in the name of patriotism, and held it for the spoils of a savage partisan vengeance. The South had never a limb tbat did rot wear a shackle For twenty-four long, wearj^, hungry, discoESO- late years the Democratic party dragged its crippled body up to the defense of the Constitution, only to be beaten back or beaten down by the Republican organization, rioting in the excess of colossal strength, drilled like a regiment and despotic like an army. True, within the period named Mr. Tilden was elected president, but the victory was a hateful one, because it was torn from the hands of those who had won it without an effort at defense or even a suggestion of protest or resistance. Four years later Garfield — buttressed upon the money power, and the whole tremendous influence of the Federal patronage machine — defeated Hancock, and made the night darker and darker for the Democracy. It rallied, however. Patched as best it could its tattered old garments. Dressed as best it could its battered old ranks. Gathered as best it could about its rag;:ed old banner, and rushed once more to the MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS. 89 asasult upon Radicalism as though Jefferson had written its platform and Jackson were leading its columns to the fight. This time the hero was destimed to enjoy the victory and the martyr to wear the crown. Not a hand was lifted to stay the inauguration of Cleve- land. After renewing its youth the party was back again in the house of its father — serene, unconquerable, and healed of all of its grievous and manifold wounds, even as Lazarus was healed in the bosom of Abraham. While attempting to prove the indestructibility of the Demo- cratic party from the brief history we have given of the organiza- tions it has successfully encountered, the sacrifices it has made and the sufferings it has heroically endured, we have said nothing of the no less formidable enemies it has had to grapple within many of the States. Whatever sprang up in the shape of an ism, a craze, or a local uprising, there was the Democratic party, square in the breach, fighting the one long, eternal fight for the repose and the integrity of the national organization. It might be greenbacki&m, or tad- poleism, or prohibition, or whatever other name these emeutes went by, the party set its face against them like a flint, and sooner or later carted them ail away to the potter's field, many a time without even a shroud or a coffin. And now the cry is that organized labor is to kill the Democratic party. WUiat for, in the name of common sense and the simplest instincts of common self protection? If the Democratic party from the very first hour of its creation up to the present hour has not been the friend of the laboring man, then kill it. If it has not, both In and out of Congress, fought every kind and species of monopoly, kill it. If it has not stood as a wall against every land grant, grab or steal, and every extravagant appropriation, kill it. If it has not been a constitutional party in every bone and fiber, seeking to preserve home rule and States' rights in their very essence and purity, without which no republic can be long free, kill it. If, in short, it has not been the steadfast and unselfish friend of the oppressed, no matter by whom, or how, or in what fashion, kill it. But if, after having been all these things, there is a single honest workingman to-day in the country who would vote to destroy the Democratic party, that same workingman would murder his father. Parricide is parricide, whether political or social, and a party of parricides is as impossible in America as that an immacu- late soul, washed white in the blood of the Lamb, should not enter heaven. NOT MEN ENTIRELY. [Kansas City Times, March 8, 1887.] In adversity the attitude of the Democratic party was superb. In six desperate presidential campaigns did it drag its battered and crippled old limbs up to an assault upon the Republican party — that splendidly organized party born of the Civil War, the spoiled child of pillage and the sword, intrenched in the treasury, claiming to own the nation by the divine right of Appomattox Court House, hobnob- bing with God Almighty in its platforms, and calling Him boss, with the reconstruction tegis over it as a yellow flag over a hospital — six times, we say, did the Democracy rush to the fight, successful only in its last encounter with the giant of Radicalism. It was a gaunt and grizzled old thing, this Democratic party. It had hungered and thirsted for a long time. It had laid out of nights, and slept in corn shocks, and gone barefooted many times, and had cockleburrs in its hair, and needed quinine powerful bad for its "ager shake," and 90 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. spoke a strange gibberish about the Constitution, and wanted to know where its little Meenie, called States' rights, was ; but, God bless it ! it was the same old glorious Rip at heart who had gone up into the mountain, singing like a school boy and jocund like a reveler. And now what? Nothing, except that it has got fat again. In renewing its youth it has become somewhat obstreperous. The old house appears to be a little bit circumscribed. The old political family Bible appears to have been revised. Some of its chapters appear to have been interpolated with chapters on prohibition. The niche where once stood the radiant figure of the Constitution is filled with a gutta percha thing, chiseled by the hands of congressional jobbers, and made to cover every appropriation from a silk milch cow up to an ironclad which can not go to sea. As for States' rights, an overflowing public treasury put its velvet paw upon it, and ever since the contact it has purred at the feet of power as the little white mice purred and purred in the velvety hands of Count Fosco. Many saints have been persecuted and many martyrs stoned. In short, the Democratic party appears to be in a transition period — appears to be about changing front in presence of the enemy — some- tliing which Hannibal never attempted and which Bonaparte dared not do but thrice in his lifetime. This condition of things, however, is not calculated to encour- age the opposition so much as to make its own old guard lukewarm or indifferent. The old Democratic party regarded the individual as the unit of society, upon the integrity of which society depended wholly. The personal liberty of the citizen. Jefferson and his associates drove the Federal party out of power on this issue, which was fundamental in the struggle which gave us our free government, and which produced the Constitution. As was the citizen so was the State. The State began at the family. Children were taught at the fireside to love it, to fight for it, to obeys its laws, to revere its institutions and to preserve for it every right guaranteed by the con- stitution. Hence the doctrine of States' rights, which once made the Democracy so dear to the people. Which gave to it its magnifi- cent staying qualities, which enabled it to be grand in victory and august in defeat, and which, as contradistinguished from Federalism or centralization, made it essentially the party of the poor man and the pride of every true lover of liberty in the whole land. If it would still retain its hold upon the country it must come back to first principles. It must show that it is fit to reign by stamp- ing upon its administration the features of the great organic law under which it was created. To do this it must be economical in the handling of public money. It must get rid of the idea, as soon as possible, that this is a paternal government, and that whenever there is either a flood, a drouth, a, murrain among cattle, a splenetic fever, or a fever of any sort, the only cure is to open the treasury doors. It must extirpate mugwumpery in its own ranks by putting a Simon-pure Democrat in every Federal office in the United States. It must go oftener to the shrine of Andrew Jackson and less to the living presence of those independent fellows wdio strive a lifetime to take the backbone out of American politics and invent new names for party fealty, truth and devotion. There is yet plenty of time to do all those things, but theymust be done thoroughly and in perfect order. The place to begin is in the next Congress. The Democrats have a majority in the House, and upon the work of this majority much will depend that is not now believed in or even imagined. MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS. 91 EYERY TUB ON ITS OWN BOTTOM. [Kansas City Times, July 17, 1887.] It makes not one particle of difference whether the labor party- does or does not put a presidential ticket in the field. We take it for granted that it will. Or the Henry George party. We take it for granted that it will. Or the prohibition party. We take it for granted that it will; but it does make a wonderful sight of diiler ence what the Democratic party proposes to do in the premises. Let these various organizations do as they please. This is a free country, and the greater the multiplicity of parties, we suppose, tlie greater the magnitude of personal or political liberty. Parties are everything in a republic. In France there are some twenty odd, probably. However, all this, the Democratic party has only itself to depend upon primarily for success in 1888. !Some great overmas- tering principle must be enunciated by it, and so emphasized as to carry conviction home with it and make it also fragrant and allur- ing with the truth. Nothing that is f ast-and-loose, hot-or-cold , may- be-so-yes or may-be-so-no can live an hour in the winds and the storms of the next campaign. Questions have arisen which have got to be answered, and the Democratic party must give its answer in such a way as will make the dust of old Andrew Jackson quicken and stir in its last resting place. Platforms generally are milk and cider. They mean broadcloth or blue jeans. Big sunflowers or scarlet japonicabuds. Something that is soft, pliant and easy to handle. Something that suggests: "Let me tangle my hand in your hair, Jeane^te; It is soft as the tloss of the silk, my pet." But in the next national Democratic platform there must be two or three planks which need to be all iron. No metaphor. No lullaby rhetoric, singing a soft, low song at the cradle of interpreta- tion. No apple plucked and pitched into the committee on resolu- tions by Henry Watterson to be pared by Mr. Randall until it might be a peach, or a quince, or an ivory billiard ball. Our country at last has come face to face with the necessity of few words and many deeds. The prayers now put up must be like Sir Richard Waller's riding down to Naseby : "O, Lord ! Thou knowest how busy I naust be this day. If I forget Thee, do Thou not forget me. March on, boys." It is not necessary for the Democratic party to do aught else except to deal frankly and justly with the people. In many directions they seem somewhat bewildered. Beset by a multitude of recruiting officers for all sorts of organization, they simply need to be made able to lay hands upon Democracy. Therefore its organization must be perfect; its discipline of the old days; its platform the law and the gospel; its declarations patriotic but adamant, and its every movement that of something which is being led and guided by the Constitution. Three times in the history of this republic has the Democratic party prevented a change in its present form of government. As for labor it has given it everything it now possesses in the way of hearty recognition, liberal laws and strong safeguards to prevent the least encroachment. Since it was created it has been especially the party of the poor man and the stranger. It has nothing to fear from hon- est labor, although there may be fifty so-called labor tickets in the 92 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. iield, and all working against it. Let all things else go except a full and perfect reliance upon its own resources. Call back its old time energy and discipline, and the people will do the rest. BOURBON DEMOCRACY. [Kansas City Times, May 22, 1888.] One hears much of this term lately. It is as glib in the mouths of certain republican men and newspapers as the forked tongue in the mouth of a snake. And just as glibly does it dart in and out, by its rapidity something like a nerve that jumps and throbs under galvanism, and something like a cut-throat in ambush where the hedge is thickest, or the road the most lonely and God-forsaken, In their estimation Bourbon Democracy means to pull down ; burn school-houses; retrograde; have here and there a touch of the thumb-screw ; the rack also upon occasions ; proscription always ; guerrillas out in the underbrush; all the better if a few train robbers ride and raid; breaking into the strong places where the public money is kept; chaos; no more law and order; no more jails; the Rebels in the saddle; and no pitch hot in any available direction. The truth about Bourbonism in Missouri is just this: It got its name from the fact that it would not steal in the old days, nor disfranchise, nor break into meeting-houses to deprive other denominations of their property, nor confiscate railroads, nor run away with county funds, nor be generally unclean, despicable and dishonest. True, a Bourbon Democrat delighted in the past. He believed in the old-fashioned way of doing things. He lived in peace with his neighbors. He burnt neither their hay, their "wheat nor their straw stacks. Nor was one ever known to break into a smoke-house. He believed in the family, and taught his children to rely upon it as the basis of all society, the foundation upon which the State rested, the bulwark against which all the Cossacks in the world could not prevail when Ihey came to attack civil and religious liberty. He liked his dram and got the best that was going. No Puritanical processes invaded his sanctuary, preaching free love on the one hand and prohibition on the other. Virtue was a shrine at which all the brave Missourians worshiped. The seducer, before the lust had died out of his heart, died on his own dunghill. The Bourbon Democrat was also a pastoral American. He hunted, fished, plowed, loved the woods, laughed and sang at his work, indulged much in reverie, which is the parent of sadness, did not know how to lie, never knew the road to Canada with his stolen goods and chattels, would have put his wife or daughter to death before permitting either to work or vote at the polls, the one with the straddle or the waddle of an alligator on land, the other with the leer or the musky smell of the street walker. What a happy commonwealth, this great one of ours! Peace, plenty, prosperity, happiness, truth, manhood, courage, money^ in bank, thoroughbreds in pastures, the devil beyond the Alleghanies, and each man's fireside his altar and his citadel. One day the sky grew suddenly black as one of Pharoah's Egyptian midnights. In the darkness there were heard the footsteps of men in motion. The travail of civil war was at hand and por- tentious births came everywhere to the surface. The face of Mis- souri changed as suddenly as the maps Napoleon used to make of MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS. 93 Europe wlien he would inundate it like a mountain torrent from the Rhine to the Vistula. iStrange animals got in. A hybrid thing, called a registrar, was it not— one-half Bashi Bazouk and the other half horse stealer or blackmailer, went about with his little thing- gum-bo d ballot boxes to cheat, to rob, to ensnare, to betray, to dis- franchise the Bourbon Democrats. These registrars had armed guards. They knew a mule on the other side of a mountain. Fine, fat Durhams made their mouths so water as to cause one to think mad dogs had been about. It was not the drooling and dripping of mercury, but the vims of carpet-baggery, robbery and innate scoun- drelism. In this condition this salivation was saturnalia. The man who would not take the oath to forswear his people, his kindred and his blood was a Bourbon Democrat. So also was the man who defended his stable with a shotgun. So also were the men Bourbon Democrats who organized a body-guard for Frank Blair when on his blessed tour of enfranchisement, and smote the beggars and the bulldozers hip and thigh at Warrensburg and at Marshall. So also were all the people who would not put collars on their necks and chains around their ankles. Then there came another day when all this hierarchy of looters, proscriptionists and thieves was tumbled down in one working and squirming mass together. The blue-bottle flies had found their carrion, and from that hour to this the carcass has never known a resurrection. Hence, when a term is to be applied of particular odium, as is supposed by some of these leavings of the old carpet-bag days, the person so banded against is called a Bourbon Democrat. Hence also the virulence with which Morehouse is being attacked, and Glover and Claiborne and many more who are in the field as candidates upon the Democratic ticket. Very well! It is an honor higher than the grand cross of the Legion of Honor itself. Hunted, proscribed, shot at, robbed, over- ridden, swallowed up, who is on top to-day? The Bourbons, bless God, as they are understood to be by their Republicanrevilers. And look at the hands of these very same Bourbons. Are they not clean? They never stole a railroad nor appropriated money that belonged to some office of trust and responsibility; never broke into churches, never murdered a righteous minister of the gospel, never drove off other people's mules, horses, oxen, sheep, hogs and cattle in droves, never tore jewelry from the ears and fingers of women; but it is on top, we tell you, with victory on every one of its banners which flies to the wind, a president in the White House and Blaine, the speckled gentleman, betwixt the devil and the deep sea. A VERY PLAIN REMEDY. [Kansas City Times, February 36, 1889.] Representative Democrats from all portions of the State have just met in St. Louis to consider the ways and means of a practical and thorough reorganization of the party. Any political caucus or convention which the Hon. Champ Clark, of Pike county, presides over and addresses, commends itself at once not alone to the con- fidence but to the active support of the entire Democracy of Missouri. Young as he is, he is possessed of that kind of progressive ardor and all prevading faith which removes mountains. In the lares and pen- ates of his political household there are only the gods of his fathers. The results of the late election showed all too plainly that the 94 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. Democratic party in IMissouri was sick — sick enough to call in a doctor. Its malady came from a tamperlDg with too many poisons. It had wandered lar atield from the spot where stood many of its ancient landmarks. It had stopped too long to dally with Circe, and all too long to make love to the sirens. y\ olf tracks might be seen all about iis premises. Many of its gods were mere pinchbeck or putty. Its leadership went by the name of nincompoopery or no good. It was everything for men and nothing for principle. The old guard was forced in many instances to give place to conscripts. About many of the camp tires there was eitiier dearth, desolation or absolute night. ISome of its martyrs were stoned, some of its saints were crucified, and some of its heroes were put lo death. Change appeared to have laid its poiluiing hands upon ever}^- thing that should have been held sacred and inviolable. Men who had never been Democrats aspired to gushing and garrulous supremacy in the way of organization Political tramps — pointing to a certain glib unction of speech ix-ijyrima facie evidence of their right to till pulpits and pose as meek and lowly preachers of the gospel of Christ — got thick among the chinaware and the crockery- ware of the Democracy, and did more devilment in one year than so many bulls of Bashan could have done in ten. Emotional women — sometimes unfrocked and alvA^ays unsexed — got among the one suspendered, and so ogled and ogled andso manipulated and manip- ulated them, that in three days they brought each to the verge of insanity, so making him scowl at his wife, his companion for forty years, the blameless mother of six grown up children, with a hideous expression of carving-knives and strychnine. Laws, that the people had been living under peacefully and prosperously for forty 'years, were changed with the rapidity of the tigures in a kaleidoscope. Each session of tbe Legislature exuded from its lowest depths, which is demagogy, cartload upon cartload of oint- ments, unguents and healing things, so that the plan of salvation might be done away wnth, and the great marquee of the millennium pitched upon the blue grass about the capitol buildings. Thecourts also took a hand from the lowest to the highest, and as a result of all these came gloom, disgust, sullenness, an indifference almost sui- cidal, an apathy which froze like a Dakotian blizzard as it fell, a great pulling apart from a lack of cohesiveness, a great falling away because of a scowling demoralization black as a night with a tem- pest in it— and, finally, an almost overwhelming defeat at the polls. We name no names and we make neither a crimination nor a recrimination. We have simply pointed out the wounds upon the body of the Democratic part3" — 3"ttaU unhealed and bleeding— and crj' aloud for that blessed balm w-e know to be still somewhere abiding in this our political Gilead. And now what about a remedy for it alj — a remedy for organiza- tion at its ebb, discipline shattered, querulousness and fault-finding everywhere, four congressmen lost, a bare working majority in the Lower Houseof the Legislature, and some splendid Democratic parties torn from their hitherto steadfast moorings and given over, rudder- less and dismasted to the wreckers and spoilers of the great political deep? A very plain remedy is nigh at hand — come back to first prin- ciples. The present general assembly of Missouri, Democratic in both branches, can do this vitally necessary and inestimable work. Resolutions are all very well in their way, but, like fine words, they butter no parsnips. Such meetings as the one just held in St. Louis, MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS. 95 if they do no good can at least do no harm. The masses, however, want acts not words. If the present general assembly will show to the State that it is a dignilietl, economical, practical body, opposed to every form and feature of experiment in legislation; proscriptive in no single degree and in no single given direction; willing to live • and let live; that it means to purge its lobbies free from the hateful yet ruinous presence of a swarm of gad-fly cranks of all sexes, nationalities and politicalpredilections; if it will quit meddling with old landmarks and cease to follow the teachings and advice ot those who are never happy unless they are living in political chaos, and never well-fed, clothed or housed unless there is political dynamite and upheaval on every hand — if, in short, it will teach by example that the Democratic party of Missouri is what it once was — the pro- tector of the poor man, the friend of the laboring man, a foe to proscription in all its Protean shapes, a zealous guard over the peo- ple's money, free from all manner of envies, jealousies and spites, a true lover of the Constitution, a stalwart champion of home rule and States' rights, despising buncombe, and setting its face as a flint against every quack doctor of a demagogue peddling all sorts of vile legislative nosirums and specifics, the Democracy will rally to it en masse, reform its ranks, and go forward into the next fight with all of its old-time resolution and audacity. But there must be no back- ing and filling. The hour has struck when a new day is to be ushered in of either men or mice. M. TAINE ON NAPOLEON. [Kansas City Times, April 17, 1887.] M. Taine, having in his own estimation, pilloried Victor Hugo, for all the future, has been writiDg a series of articles on the life and character of Napoleon Bonaparte. M. Taine is a French literary charlatan, who carries the commune into literature and strives to pull down as many great names as pos- sible, the better to propitiate the red Republicans of the faubourgs. It is not the first time in history that a rat has been known to attack an elephant — not the first time in history that little six-by-nine luci- fers have risen in revolt against the living God and been kicked into perdition for their audacity. Indeed, among a certain class of authors the writing of sacrileg- ious things is looked upon as the frank license of superior skill, and the formulating of blasphemous speeches the strongest sort of evi- dence that behind the sacrilege and behind the blasphemy there is a genius that might illuminateand entrance theworld. Tothiscla^s belongs Henri Taine. It is positively painful to see him drag his crooked and crippled limbs up to the assault upon the mighty Corsican. Why so feeble an assailant should choose for his patl;ering and inconsequential blows so huge a colossus is only to 1)6 accounted for upon the supposition that notoriety, even though it be of the infamous sort, is better than no notoriety at all. Pos- sessed perfectly of this spirit was Eratostratus, the Ephesian, who burnt the famous temple of Diana, and Randolph, who pulled the nose of Andrew Jackson. Red republicnnis:iu never had a master in Europe until Napoleon came. He organized it, drilled it, armed it, equipped it, and then served it out as food for gunpowder. Jacobin bones were left on every battle-field from Moscow to Waterloo. He found the crown of Louis XVI. rolling in a gutter of blood, and he picked it up, cleaned 96 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. it, and put it upon his head. To keep it there he had to make war. All the kings in Europe coalesced to kill him, and to save his own life he became a king himself. That necessitated army after army, and who so well qualified to fight as those old Septembrizers, those old Dantouian butchers of the Abbaye, those old cut-throats of the Cordelier club who apostrophized the guillotine as a beauti-' ful woman, and wrote sonnets to its knife as to a coquettish maiden. Napoleon knew the who.e savage lot better than any other man in all France, and he managed, first and last, to get the great bulk of them killed. Their lineal descendants to day are such rabid Republicans as Taine, Madame De Remusat, Jung, and a whole host of other third-rate scribblers, who imagine that they can put out the light of the sun by lighting two-penny tallow candles. And how do they seek to blacken the fame of the great Napo- leon? IIow does this despoiler of the dead, Taine, seek to do it? By adverse criticisms of his genius as a soldier? No. By logical discussions of his capacity as a commander-in-chief? No. By showing wherein he failed as a ruler, a lawgiver, an emperor, the conqueror of Europe? No. By comparing him unfavorably to Ctesar, Hannibal, Marlborough, Frederick the Great? No, but by dwelling upon the venial sins and shortcomings of his personal char- acter. He delights to tell how Napoleon gave way at times to par- oxysms of ungovernable temper. How he swore at his secretaries, pinched the ears of his aids decamp, roared out at Josephine, abused his marshals, broke furniture, threw his clothes in the fire, insulted ambassadors, kept five or six mistresses, would not brook contra- diction, did not know what patience was, cared nothing for music, could not spell, did not know French, never read a book, abomin- ated plays, persecuted Madame De Stael, put on theatrical airs, was the terror of courtiers, and the overbearing despot whom all about him feared. And is this not a wonderful way to sum up the life and char- acter of Napoleon Bonaparte? To gossip about him in the style of an old woman; to tell of the little faults and foibles of poor human nature; to become his valet in order to see him at his toilet, in his bath, when he is relaxed, when he has nothing else to do except to make himself disagreeable; to leave out the Italian campaign, the Austrian campaign, the Prussian campaign; to say nothing of the Alps — where the eagles of the mountairs and the eagles of'the standards touched wing and wing and soared together; notliing of Montenotte; of Lodi, of Areola, of Marengo, of Austerlitz, Wagram and Jena, of Eylan, Friedland and 13<.rodino; nothing of the raft upon the Niemen, the peace of Tilsit, and three mouarchs at his feet pleading for the bare right to reign. And yet M. Taine calls ail this interminable stufT of his about Bonaparte's boots, temper, toilettes, idiosyncracies of various kinds, and what not, an accurate and critical summing up of the life and character of the greatest soldier, tlie greatest lawgiver, the greatest adminis- trator and the greatest ruler in all ways to make a nation powerful that the world ever produced The desire of the red Republicans to bring imperialism into disrepute may be all very legitimate and desirable, but why send a rat to attack an elephant? Were there not others of the earth alto- gether earthly to be carped at and picked to pieces? It takes a god to destroy a demi-srod. No pigmy of a man, much less such a man as Henri Taine, chnined Prometheus to the rock and summoned the vultures from the sky to prey upon his vitals. For work like that the forger of the thunderbolts had to apply his hands. The garru- MISCELLANEOUS WHITINGS. 97 lous Frenchman has simply lighted his two-penny candles in front of that tomb under the dome of the Invalides, and proposes to put out the sun of Austerlitz, THE STATUE TO CALHOUN. [Kansas City Times, April 27, 1887.] South Carolina did well yesterday when she unveiled the statue which had been erected to the memory of her foremost citizen, Jolm C. Calhoun. That he was the strongest man the South ever pro- duced in many intellectual ways, no Northern man doubts; that he was the strongest man the nation ever produced in many intellectual ways, the North will never admit. As parlies exist at present; as long as sectional lines remain as rigidly drawn as they are to-day; while the memories and the events of the Civil War still go to make up the standard whereby public men are tried, analyzed, and given a place in contemporaneous history, Calhoun, colossus though he was, can never leave his mighty impress upon much beyond the con- fines of his own immediate section. The day will come, however, when he will be dealt with as an American in the broadest and fullest acceptation of the term. Not as a South Carolinian alone, not as a Southern man alone, not solely as a Stales' rights man, but as a citizen of the entire republic, born to its institutions, the eloquent advocate of its safest policies, the fearless exponent of its best thoughts, the most inspired expounder of its wise institutions, and the most prophetic statesman a nation ever had to warn it of its perils, and point out to it the dangers that might be averted if it were true to its own interests and to the civilization which called it into being. The orator of the occasion was well chosen. The Hon. L. Q. C. Lamar, both by education and sympathetic political training, was thoroughlj^ equipped for the work he was expected to accom- plish. Without feeling it or knowing it, perhaps, the great South Carolinian had been his model in more ways than one. It was in these qualities alone, more than in any other, the orator says, was to be found Ihecauseof his unparalleled hold upon the love, reverence and trust of his people. "His/' hesays, "wasthegreatnessof a soul, which, fired with a love of virtue, consecrated itself to truth and duty, and with unfaltering confidence in God, was ever ready to be immolated in the cause of right and country." In an article of this sort, or even in an article of any kind in this day and generation, it would be time thrown away and effort wasted to attempt a criticism upon the intellectual side of Calhoun's character. As well discuss light, or heat, or germination, or the sun's rays, or the ebb and the flow of the ocean. As the advocate and the champion of States' rights, both in their essence and their purity, he never had an equal. 'None whoever lived in this country approximated him in luminous power and unanswerable logic. He was never ornate. He stood in speaking as some vitalized figure carved from marble. The stream of his discourse flowed from him as some calm, clear, yet resistless river. Many replies were made to his arguments in favor of this States' rights interpretation of the Constitution, but answers never. On one memorable occasion Mr. Webster is reported as sayinsr, in connection with a speech Calhoun had just made in defense of State sovereignty: " It may be replied to, but it can never be answered. Sir, it is unanswerable." Secretary Lamar's address is quite full and satisfactory. He does not present Calhoun in any new light, but it brings him out 98 JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS. again into the full view of the public. His is a character to be studied from every standpoint, especially from every public and political standpoint. The present i!,eneiation do n