Belford's Magazine, Vol 2, December 1888

Four well-known journalists have died during the month: Joseph M. Levy, proprietor of the London Daily Telegraph, who died on October 12th; "Long" John Wentworth, an old journalist, but best known in Chicago politics, whose career closed on October 16th; Colonel R. M. Pulsifer, former owner of the Boston Herald, who committed suicide on October 19th; and Napoleon N. Thieblin, a New York financial writer, who died of consumption on November 1st. The obituary record is also augmented by the death at Tashkend of Colonel Nicholas Prejevalski, the famous Russian explorer, just as he was about to start on an exhibition to Thibet.

REVIEWS

History of Tennessee. – The Making of a State, by James Phelan. (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.) – This book is to us a great delight. It illustrates so clearly what we have often said, that the success of an author is not so much in what he has to say as in the manner of saying it. This is an English rendition of the French axiom that style is thought. Anyone doubting this has only to remember that Shakespeare translated to any other language than his own is poor stuff. We laughed ourselves into tears once over the play of "Hamlet" rendered into French. The melancholy Dane became a grotesque mountebank, and Shakespeare's thoughts the dreariest sort of commonplace. It is the same of all.

Now, we have had histories and histories. Those of the dull, plodding workers in the worm-holes of time lift out the dust, and dust it remains until taken in hand by genius, and the dust is changed to gold. "The rank is but the guinea's stamp" – but the stamp makes it currency, and it is prized as it passes from hand to hand.

We have histories of States, we have histories of Tennessee – and they are too solemnly stupid, it is said, for consultation. The consultations are so rare that moth, mold, and mildew eat in and destroy them unmolested. We are erecting at an immense expense a huge building at Washington to hold the bound commonplaces of authors. How much better it would be to have a commission of good fellows go through and consign to the flames, or to the Young Men's Christian Association, or the common-school libraries, all the unreadable books! What a bonfire we should have of histories alone! The dry theological husks of learning would give Satan material for his furnaces for some days.

To return to our mutton – and it is tender, appetizing, digestible mutton. We have had histories of States and histories of Tennessee. They are all full of solid facts. Yet if a man can be found who will make affidavit that he has read any one of them with comfort to himself, we shall doubt his sanity or his truthfulness. Here is a young man, and a Member of Congress at that, who takes the same dry bones of fact, and through the magic touch of his pen, lo! the old skeletons take on flesh, drink in life, and through the roseate atmosphere of romance the records are fascinating, and one closes the book with the feeling that pervades our being at the close of a grand opera well rendered, when in the silence the feelings yet vibrate like the waves of the sea when the winds that have vexed them are still.

For the first time we waken to the fact that the earlier settlers of Tennessee were not common people. As a well-painted landscape is more prized than the real view, because of the art, so Mr. Phelan has given us a local coloring that makes these hardy pioneers picturesque and poetic. They make a charming background for such men as John Sevier, Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, Daniel Boone, Sam Houston, and other noted characters who toiled and wrought, killed and got killed, while the State was forming.

Mr. Phelan tells us in his charming way of the struggles and hardships, the wanton wrongs and wars, until the forests were felled, the swamps drained, fields opened, highways and railroads built, and the wilderness changed in less than three generations to farms and villages, where the busy hum of human life took the hearing from the cry of wild beasts, the yell of Indians, and the sharp crack of the murderous rifles in the hands of robbers.

Our space will not permit our giving much of this fascinating volume. The author seeks to rescue John Sevier from an undeserved oblivion. At the same time he relegates that historic myth Daniel Boone to his deserved contempt as a land-shark and speculator. It is a great comfort to find a man of genius and a student withal going through these sham gods of the past, and puncturing their bran-stuffed bodies until they collapse into insignificance. What a task some iconoclast of the future will have among our war heroes of the late armed conflict! How the great generals whose fame, like kites, has been made of newspapers, will tumble from their pedestals, while the real heroes are lifted into place!

We give space to give one extract not only as an example of our author's style, but for the facts he narrates. Speaking of the early Methodist Church of Tennessee and its pioneer preachers, he says:

"His manners were not polished, but they were far from rude. They were simple and sincere, and were filled with a real sympathy and warmed the hearts of his associates. He was plain of speech, however, though if he wounded the vanity of his hearers he never wounded their sensibilities. These were his chief limitations: he was narrow, sectional, and bigoted, unpolished, beyond the grasp of any but Christian fellowship, taking a hard, austere, and almost terrible view of the world as it is, having real sympathy alone with the world as it should be or as he would make it. Religion to him was the goal of existence; all other interests were greater or less temptations that drew away from the path of that goal… It is not a figure of speech to say that his path was beset with death, and that for months at a time the penances of a Trappist monastery were but as luxuries as compared to the daily trials of hunger and thirst and sleeplessness which fell to his lot. He would ride for days at a time, through any inclemency of weather, through any degree of heat or cold, to keep an appointment to preach the Word to those who hungered for the Lord. The last rain perhaps had swept a bridge away. A tribe of hostile Indians were prowling through the forests which he would have to penetrate. A heavy fall of snow had obscured the trail that led through the intricacies of a swamp. It was doubtful if he could procure food for man or beast for days, and it was vain to try to carry a sufficient supply. It was impossible to procure a guide across 'the forks' of some range of hills, thickly covered with ravines and with dangerous defiles. Starvation and all the forms of death lay thick around and before him. The stoutest heart might have quailed, the most unflinching sense of duty might have wavered. The rational mind might have justly demanded a greater degree of equality between the magnitude of the thing to be accomplished and the difficulties and dangers attending its accomplishment. All these things gave him not a moment's pause. Herein was manifest the grandeur of the circuit rider's character. His mind was not the mind of a rational man, as we estimate rationality. His profession of faith and his wish for salvation were sincere to the full extent of their importance as he estimated it. Religion was a real and a tangible thing to him. The simple, unhesitating sincerity of his faith was grand, it was wonderful, it was sublime… He merged the individual completely in the work, he lost all sense of personal interest in the craving to advance the interests of others. He was willing to meet death for the attainment of the smallest of the tasks set before him. He was willing to forego all personal comfort as a part of the daily life of which hunger and thirst were the incidents. Luxury he had never known or seen… As the Church increased in numbers and influence, the pioneer of religion, the one who had hewn for it a way through the primeval forests, either pushed forward with the advance line of civilization or yielded to the mellowing influence of a more genial state of society. As villages developed into towns with souls enough to repay an exclusive charge, the saddle-bags and the saddle were exchanged for a settled habitation. Sometimes he married, and from the first, marriage had practically destroyed his usefulness as an itinerant. He is now familiar to us only in tradition. The discipline of Conference assignments of duty, which carry with them change of habitation, still suggests his noble activity in the early days of Tennessee history."

And yet, remembering the self-devotion, the sacrifices, the fervor and force of this religious enthusiasm, how little trace was left. The religion of Tennessee to-day is farther removed from the teachings of those early martyrs to what they believed the cause of God than were the Indians they cared little for, or the rough settlers they sought so fervently to convert. There is no trace of Indian or settler, nor the remotest vestige of the religion these preachers so earnestly taught. This because it was the religion of dogmas, founded upon the vengeance of God as they saw it in the chronicles of the Hebrews. They carried what Burns called "tyding o' damnation;" and the long-haired, hollow-eyed, hot gospeller gave vivid descriptions of unending torture of hell to the unbeliever. The love of God, the tender mercy of our blessed Redeemer, were lost in the awful vengeance of an offended and unforgiving Deity.

Poor human nature, as found among those earlier settlers, was frightened. The historian tells us that these attacks, more on the nerves than the conscience, culminated at revivals in what was called the "jerks." He says: "They were involuntary and irresistible. When under their influence the sufferers would dance, or sing, or shout. Sometimes they would sway from side to side, or throw the head backward or forward, or leap, or spring. Generally those under the influence would, at the end, fall upon the ground and remain rigid for hours, and sometimes whole multitudes would become dumb and fall prostrate. As the swoon passed away, the sufferer would weep piteously, moan and sob. After a while the gloom would lift, a smile of heavenly peace would irradiate the countenance, words of joy and rapture would break forth, and conversion always followed."

It came, in time, to be observed that this conversion affected only the converted member's manner. To be very serious and sad, to have profanity give place to prayers, made the substance of the process through which one escaped eternal punishment after death. Faith that is simply a longing for life was confounded with belief that, having its base in evidence, is entirely beyond the control of the would-be believer. The whole theological affair touched the moral conduct of the true believer only slightly. Life was harder in the Church than out of it. Charity, the love of one's neighbor, the forgiveness of sins on the part of the member – how could he forgive when his God would not forgive? – all gave way to a loud assertion of total depravity in the convert, and a profound belief in the dogmas. It was not long before these settlers observed that in dealing with a class-leader they had to be more cautious and guarded against being cheated than in like transactions with the godless.

However, those simple souls upon the border did not differ much from our humanity of to-day. Poor human nature is prone to love in the form itself the object for which the form was created. The white-chokered leader of Sunday-schools who flees to Canada with the cash of the bank where he was cashier is no more of a hypocrite than the president and directors. Religion to all these is one thing, moral conduct quite another. They are on a par with the bandit of Italy who hears mass, goes to confession, and has prayers said in his behalf before going out to rob and murder. Nor do they differ from the committee of negroes that waited on their white preacher and begged him to stop for one Sunday talking about lying and stealing, and "gib 'em one day ob good ole-fashioned glory-to-God religion."

Men and Measures of Half a Century, by Hugh McCulloch (Charles Scribner's Sons). – Here is a name that will loom up in the hereafter as that of one of the ablest financiers given our country. It is lost now in the yet lingering glare and blare of war, where little men, magnified by newspapers to gigantic generals, famous for the wanton slaughter of their own men, absorb public attention.

Mr. McCulloch was called to the Secretaryship of the Treasury by President Lincoln, and continued there by Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson. It was the hard task of Mr. McCulloch to rectify the errors of Salmon P. Chase. This great man had won success for the government in the war with the South on his financial blunders. Finding capital so unpatriotic that it would loan the government no money so long as the conflict was in doubt, Chase appealed to the people, and made his loans from them in the shape of promises to pay in the currency. While the soldiers in the field and the average citizen took a patriotic pride in accepting this currency at par, the financiers were as busy as Satan in depreciating it, until the Secretary was driven to buying up those money-getters. They drove a hard bargain with the oppressed Secretary, and this bargain ended in turning over a large part of the fiscal agency of the government, and all the currency, to nearly two thousand corporations.

When Mr. McCulloch took the portfolio of the Treasury our financial condition was most deplorable. The land was flooded with an irredeemable currency, and the source of credit being thus poisoned, all business was mere gambling. To understand this, one has to remember that in the first year of the war a tariff on imports was enacted by Congress that amounted at first to prohibition. In thus closing the door against foreign capitalists the government raised the prices of all manufactured goods against itself. The evil did not end here. As a purchaser of supplies in a paper currency for a million of wasteful and extravagant men in the field, the government again augmented prices to its own hurt. After the battle of Gettysburg, when the timid capital felt that it was safe, not to help an impoverished government, but to make investments, bonds were taken, paid for in the depreciated currency – and when the war ended, a subsidized Congress, leaving the loan in the shape of currency made by the people to take care of itself, enacted that these bonds, bought in currency, should be redeemed, capital and interest, in gold.

This was the situation that faced Mr. McCulloch when sworn in office as Secretary of the Treasury. He was selected by President Lincoln, and continued in office by Andrew Johnson. A more admirable appointment could not have been made. Hugh McCulloch is not only a remarkable man, but one singularly well adapted to the position assigned him. An eminently handsome man, he carried a large, healthy brain on a trunk capable of great endurance. It was health, good health, throughout. To a keen, sensitive intellect he adds a calm, dispassionate temperament and the highest courage. Although modest in manner and reticent in speech, his very presence commanded respect among his opponents, such as all positive characters possess; while his friends felt that their cause, whatever it might be, was safe in his hands. Trained a banker, he had made a success of his banking; and while possessed of a thorough acquaintance with the details of his business, he had also a philosophical knowledge of the science. This is a rare combination.

"How little those people know of their own business!" said Salmon P. Chase to Mr. Richard B. Pullen, of Cincinnati, after a meeting of bankers the able Secretary of the Treasury had called for consultation. It was well for the bankers that such was and is their condition. They are practical men – that is, men who accept the fact as they see it, without bothering their brains as to the reason for it. The business man who sends an order through the telegraph or telephone does not stop to consider what strange agency he is using. If he did, he would not only have his mind taken from his avocation, but lose the chance of a deal in the market. The mind given to and capable of study is one given to dreaming, not acting.

The vast debt owing the people by the government in the shape of currency presented to Secretary McCulloch his first problem that had to be solved before credit could be restored and business again put on a sound, healthy basis. He had the advantage of knowing clearly and precisely the work before him. It was the error of the day, as it is the error now, to confound currency with money. By money is meant the great measure of value in gold and silver coin determined on by trade and accepted the world over since trade first began. Currency, on the contrary, is that form of credit used in paper to facilitate exchange. Now, trade calls for a certain amount of this, not so large as is popularly supposed, but fluctuating in quantity as trade makes its demand. Gold and silver cannot be relied on for this purpose, for their intrinsic value, which makes them a measure of value, forbids. This measure of value, like that of the yard as to length, and the pound as to weight, becomes an abstract idea. When one seeks to purchase a pair of shoes, and the shoemaker says that their, price is five dollars, one may pay for them five bushels of wheat; so that on both sides a value is got at that facilitates the exchange. If currency is used, it, too, has the same nature – with this fact added: the intrinsic value of the paper promise to pay coin lies in the credit of the man, corporation, or government issuing the promise.

"If a man fall down a steep place," said the Hon. Tom Benton, "and get killed with a gold dollar in his pocket, and his bones be found a hundred years after, they will be worth the dollar. If, however, he has a promise to pay a dollar, he has that which depends for value on a board of directors sitting around a mahogany table. It may be worth a dollar and it may be worthless."

This disposes of the fiat money. We cannot create something out of nothing by act of Congress. When the government issues its paper, it coins its credit into currency. Its value, if it has any, lies in that.

Now, when Secretary McCulloch took command of the Treasury Department the credit of the government was at a heavy discount, and getting less every hour. The only class at the North that doubted the ability of the government to maintain itself in the War of Secession was the moneyed class, and this class continued to decry the credit of the government long after the war had been brought to a successful conclusion. This, because the condition of discredit was a source of income. They who had refused to fetch out their money-bags to aid the government when the roar of the first artillery was throbbing along the halls of the Capitol, now sought to fatten on its distress.

Hugh McCulloch found the government financially aground like a stranded whale, with sharks eating in at one end, and vultures and wolves at the other.

And yet all the vast powers of the government are given to the aid and support of this class from which come the sharks, buzzards, and wolves.

The new Secretary had this class to contend with; and he had another in the form of politicians, the representatives of the people that represented everything but the people's patriotism. Mr. McCulloch knew that to restore credit and redeem our currency the volume must be contracted. The moneyed class wanted to be let alone – it always wants that. The politicians wanted more currency – or money, as they called it.

In addition to this trouble, the politicians of the dominant party sought to make a colony of the entire South, to be governed by carpet-baggers and bayonets, because Southern staples could thus be made to contribute to Northern capital, and the ignorant plantation negroes could be used to keep that party in power. In this way half our territory and the most valuable of our products were paralyzed.

Fortunately for the country, President Johnson got into a row with both capitalists and politicians. As a poor white of the South, he hated wealth; as a Southerner, he hated Northern politicians. An ignorant, vicious sort of a man, Johnson was obstinate and courageous. It was, however, a sort of moral courage – if we may use such a term in this connection. Probably his nerve had been demoralized by his intemperate habits. It is true that the man who in the Senate defied the fierce slave-holders was the man whom General Don Carlos Buell cowed at Cincinnati, and who ordered the unfortunate and innocent Mrs Surratt to be hanged within twenty-four hours, with the recommendation to mercy of the court that condemned her before him, and the shrieks of her agonized daughter ringing in his ears.

Be all that as it may, Andrew Johnson, cutting loose from Congress and the moneyed class, took the executive government into his own hands. Few of us realize what a tremendous power is this government of ours. The framers of it made it so, to guard against the people in whose behalf it was created. The politicians in Congress saw this, and sought to free themselves of Johnson through impeachment. They charged him with selecting his cabinet. The charge was absurd, and failed; and while Johnson, with little dignity and less success, went on fighting politicians, Secretary McCulloch used the power given him to contract our currency, restore our credit, and put the country once more on the road to honest trade and its high prosperity.

No one, however, must open Hugh McCulloch's book with any hope of finding therein a history of this financial crisis and his part in the restoration to honor we enjoyed. The author is a modest man, and leaves to others the truth and the praise the truth awards him.

There is a more serious objection to the work, and that comes of Mr. McCulloch's marked ignorance of men. While clear-sighted and profound in his knowledge of great economic subjects, he scarcely knows one man from another, save as they are labelled and described by popular expression. It is amusing to run over his list of prominent men and see under each, if not an official pedestal, one given by social verdict. With the conservatism of his temperament in his judgment of men, he seldom departs from the recorded estimate of the public. The most ludicrous instance of this is his history of Grant and his summing up of the man's supposed character. It is the political fiction and newspaper lie of the day.

From this we can turn to the views of a statesman on finance, the tariff, and on reconstruction with not only pleasure but profit. So far we have three great historical characters to record as financiers: Hamilton because of his luck, Chase for his blunders, and McCulloch for his ability.

Recent Novels. – The great stream that swells day by day in the form of prose fiction is simply appalling. It is not only the genius of to-day that has seized on this vehicle of thought and feeling, but the amateur pen-driver plunges in without hesitation. Every male citizen of these United States is born to hold office and edit a newspaper. Every female born under the stars and stripes comes into the world prepared to write a novel. No study, no preparation whatever is needed. When the Irishman was asked if he could play upon the French horn, he responded, "Shure, it looks aisy;" and a love story looks so easy that every little girl is ready to produce one.

Of the pile before us we of course seize first on that under the name of Julian Hawthorne. The admiration felt by all for the father, to say nothing of the love that yet lingers in memory for the man, makes the name of Hawthorne sacred. It brings to mind the noble, handsome, Cæsarian head of the master, that was made winning by the shy, gentle, and affectionate manner – so little understood by the many, so fascinating to the few. Then lived our greatest genius in the world of fiction. When one realizes the nature of the material upon which he had to work, the cold, barren soil of New England, the hard, unsympathetic characters, with no background of romance on which to build, the mighty power of the magician looms up before us. The touch of his pen wrought such strange wonders that the very hardness of the groundwork seemed to play into his hand, and from the Twice-Told Tales to that grandest of all tragedies in the English language, The Scarlet Letter, one is held spellbound.

Well, it is not belittling Julian to say that it is a misfortune that he should be the son of his father. We read his charming stories by the light of a past that can never again be renewed, and all the time the memory of the mighty master dwarfs the work of the son. In this way I read aloud to my dear invalid A Dream and a Forgetting. Had there been any other name upon the title-page than Hawthorne, we should have been charmed with the book that Belford, Clarke & Co. have gotten up so beautifully. As it was, we could not help looking for the sunlight through rifts that, alas! can never come again. It is singular to note, however, the Hawthornish traits that yet linger in the son. The same boldness that made the elder Hawthorne accept and use without hesitation the most unpromising characters, and make them not only acceptable but attractive, belongs to the younger. It is this which drives him not only to depict Fairfax Boardwine, but to make his hero such a weak, selfish creature. After all, he is only a foil to Mary Gault, and the true work in the artist lies in the clear yet delicate prominence he gives to his heroine.