Julian's Political Recollections

THESE Political Recollections¹ have all the refreshing frankness of a posthumous autobiography. Mr. Julian does not hesitate to speak his mind freely about both living and dead, and is evidently quite ready to take the responsibility of all he says. For example, he states on page 249 that General Grant became intoxicated in the presence of the congressional committee on the conduct of the war, and while he was commander in chief of our armies. It is not a rumor or a discreetly veiled allusion which Mr. Julian gives, but a blunt statement of fact, with time, place, circumstances, and witnesses all duly set forth. The wisdom of such very plain speaking in a volume of reminiscences might perhaps be questioned, and we are inclined to think that it will not contribute materially to the repose of Mr. Julian’s declining years; but this concerns the writer and his subjects, and not the public. To the readers of the book — and they ought to be many — this outspoken criticism is of course interesting, and imparts a strong vitality to all the author says.

The first eight chapters are decidedly the best part of the book, and in their way are extremely remarkable. They describe the rise, progress, and triumph of the anti-slavery movement with a vividness and force which are almost painful in their intensity, and which stir the blood like the shouts of battle. There is no account of that memorable struggle which, in our opinion, at all equals this by Mr. Julian. It is necessarily brief, but every word tells. There is a sufficient infusion of the personal element, and not too much. The chief actors in the conflict come sharply before us at the critical moments, and every important incident is clearly defined, while the details are dropped out of sight. Mr. Julian’s success is not due to literary skill, although he writes well and forcibly, but to depth of feeling and intense conviction. Mr. Julian, as is well known, was one of the earliest of the Free Soil leaders, who fought for the cause when it was despised and rejected of men. He faced pro-slavery mobs, and spoke night after night to hostile hearers ; and the contumely and reproach which he endured are real and living to him to day, and the shouts of execration and hatred still ring in his ears. He was one of the little band of nine who rose up in the Thirty-first Congress and struck down the recreant Whig party, and he ran as Vice-President on the ticket with Hale in 1852, when it looked as if the Free Soil movement was about to be submerged in the flood of compromise. A man who had such experiences as these could hardly fail to tell his story well, and Mr. Julian’s narrative is instinct with the fire of those exciting times.

Nothing is more striking, however, than the flashes of light which are here thrown on certain phases of the antislavery movement; enabling us to appreciate some of them, and to read their true character in a way that no other writer has attained. Here, for instance, we see clearly that Taylor’s triumphant election was in reality the death of the Whig party; and no one can read Mr. Julian’s account of that episode and fail to understand why the Whigs went so hopelessly to pieces at the very next election. His analysis of the Free Soil vote in 1848, to take another instance, shows plainly why there was such an apparent falling-off four years later. The vote for Van Buren was artificial; the vote for Hale was genuine, and, far from indicating loss of strength, really gave evidence of remarkable growth. Mr. Julian describes the leading men of the day in the same incisive manner. He has, indeed, quite a faculty for disposing of a man by a single touch, as when he refers to Mr. Thompson, of Pennsylvania, as “ the parliamentary hangman of his employers.” He heard the 7 th of March speech, and he is the first writer of any party who has pointed out the way in which Webster labored in his utterance. The sentences of the great orator were broken in delivery, and big drops of sweat stood on his forehead. Mr. Julian attributes this to a troubled conscience, — the right explanation, undoubtedly, and another striking indication of the sense which Webster had that he was doing wrong, and acting contrary to the impulses of his better and higher nature. Nothing, again, could be neater than this little touch about a first meeting with Sumner, before the latter, whom Mr. Julian profoundly admired, was in active political life: “ He told me that he had recently been lecturing at several points out of the city [Boston], and had been delighted to find the people so intelligent and so capable of understanding him.” Nothing could illustrate better the lack of quick perception and of a sense of humor which was so marked a defect in Sumner’s powerful but solemn mind and character.

The dramatic portion of the book closes with the election of Lincoln ; but we have never seen the absolute violence with which the Republicans recoiled from war, or from any hostile measures, when they first came into power, so strongly portrayed as it is here. They not only would not and did not interfere in any way with the South, hut, overmastered by love for the Union and by dread of its impending dissolution, they stood ready, and were even eager, to make every concession. This attitude on the part of the Republicans, so forcibly described by Mr. Julian, brings out in darker relief than ever the crime of the Southern leaders, who seem to have gone mad with rage because they had merely lost the election, and to have rushed headlong to destruction, dragging their people after them. If any one has doubts as to where the awful burden of having caused the most terrible of civil wars should rest, let him read Mr. Julian’s account of the conduct of the Republicans, which he himself bitterly condemned, in the spring of 1861.

The chapters on the war and the reconstruction period are by no means so interesting or so valuable as their predecessors. They are necessarily fragmentary, and they deal with events for the most part so entirely within the memory of the present generation that they have not yet the charm of history, and smack of present controversies. Nevertheless, there is much in them which will be read with interest and profit, especially the account of the impeachment fever and the inception of the liberal Republican movement, as well as the very able discussion of our policy in regard to public lands, — a subject to which the author gave years of study.

Mr. Julian is himself, as we see him in his book, an interesting type of the men developed by the anti-slavery struggle. He was not an original abolitionist, but he was an extreme Free Soiler and a very radical Republican. He belonged to the class which had a good deal of fanaticism, and who, without that quality, would probably have failed in the grand work in which they were the pioneers. But a man with a strong dash of fanaticism, who has been through such a contest and come out victorious, is often unfitted for the piping times of peace, when the stuff martyrs are made of is not in demand, and when public questions are economic and administrative, and not moral and emotional. He has come to believe that the normal condition of mankind is to be in a state of violent agitation over some fundamental question of right and wrong; of tyranny on the one hand and oppression on the other. Now and then, in the progress of mankind, a great moral issue must be met; but it usually involves a terrible tearing and rending of society and of the body politic. The normal condition of a healthy society is not the fierce conflict engendered by a great moral issue any more than a thunderstorm is the normal condition of any tolerable climate. This simple fact is one which the man who has spent his life in the heat of a tremendous struggle between right and wrong cannot generally realize. He has come to feel that fierce agitation against a burning wrong must constantly be kept up. The original cause to which he has given his life having triumphed, he immediately looks about for another. It is for this reason, for instance, that almost all the men interested in the woman-suffrage business and all who are most prominent in that movement are old men, who were brought up in the abolition school. Slavery being destroyed, they immediately cast about for some other dire oppression; and not finding anything very serious, and craving excitement, they took up the suffrage. They overlooked the important fact that the slavery agitation was fearfully real, while the suffrage agitation is entirely artificial. It is real enough to them, however, and so they go on pouring forth bitter invective and burning appeals which are perfectly comic in their incongruity and misapplication. The great mass of men and women regard the whole thing either with total indifference or as a gigantic bore, and nine tenths of those who nominally sympathize with it do so to make a little political capital or to earn a trifling notoriety. Under these circumstances, to see not merely those who make a living out of it, but sincere men and women, raving to a heedless world about the serfdom and oppression of woman is an amusing example of the necessity of supplying agitation in order to satisfy people of a certain cast of mind, as theatres and picnics are supplied for others. Then, again, a man who has been through the awful reality of such a conflict as came from slavery, and is too sensible to be pacified by playing at agitation with the suffragists, is very apt to regard every real public question as of the same intense moral character as that to which he has devoted himself. We can see it all in Mr. Julian. He is of course a woman suffragist ; and, moreover, he talks about tariffs and railway policies as if they were questions of the same order as the “ middle passage ” or the slave-pens. This quality of mind and character comes out very strongly in his treatment of Lincoln. He finds fault with Lincoln’s conservatism, and even now fails to see that the delay in issuing the emancipation proclamation was a mark of the highest wisdom. Premature action would have been fatal; but Lincoln, with his wonderful instinctive knowledge of the American people, issued the proclamation when the whole nation was ready to respond and cry, “ Well done ! ” Men of Mr. Julian’s type have done, and will do when they are really needed, the best and noblest work ; but in the long intervals of peace, when nations are happy in having no history, they seem singularly out of place in their methods of dealing with commonplace questions. Mr. Julian’s book is not out of place, however, and is the production of a man who may look back upon a public career of which, in point of character and devotion to a principle, anybody might be very proud. No one can do a more foolish thing than to urge some one else to invest money, but in this instance we have no hesitation in advising all who care for American history or pungent personal memoirs to invest their money in buying and their time in reading Mr. Julian’s Political Recollections.