Marse Henry | Page 7

error of this. From middle age, though he ever liked
a horse race, he was a regular if not a devout churchman. He did not
swear at all, "by the Eternal" or any other oath. When he reached New
Orleans in 1814 to take command of the army, Governor Claiborne
gave him a dinner; and after he had gone Mrs. Claiborne, who knew
European courts and society better than any other American woman,
said to her husband: "Call that man a backwoodsman? He is the finest
gentleman I ever met!"
There is another witness--Mr. Buchanan, afterward President--who tells
how he took a distinguished English lady to the White House when Old
Hickory was President; how he went up to the general's private
apartment, where he found him in a ragged robe-de-chambre, smoking
his pipe; how, when he intimated that the President might before
coming down slick himself a bit, he received the half-laughing rebuke:
"Buchanan, I once knew a man in Virginia who made himself
independently rich by minding his own business"; how, when he did
come down, he was en règle; and finally how, after a half hour of
delightful talk, the English lady as they regained the street broke forth
with enthusiasm, using almost the selfsame words of Mrs. Claiborne:
"He is the finest gentleman I ever met in the whole course of my life."

VI
The Presidential campaign of 1848--and the concurrent return of the
Mexican soldiers--seems but yesterday. We were in Nashville, where
the camp fires of the two parties burned fiercely day and night,
Tennessee a debatable, even a pivotal state. I was an enthusiastic
politician on the Cass and Butler side, and was correspondingly

disappointed when the election went against us for Taylor and Fillmore,
though a little mollified when, on his way to Washington, General
Taylor grasping his old comrade, my grandfather, by the hand, called
him "Billy," and paternally stroked my curls.
Though the next winter we passed in Washington I never saw him in
the White House. He died in July, 1850, and was succeeded by Millard
Fillmore. It is common to speak of Old Rough and Ready as an
ignoramus. I don't think this. He may not have been very courtly, but he
was a gentleman.
Later in life I came to know Millard Fillmore well and to esteem him
highly. Once he told me that Daniel Webster had said to him: "Fillmore,
I like Clay--I like Clay very much--but he rides rough, sir; damned
rough!"
I was fond of going to the Capitol and of playing amateur page in the
House, of which my father had been a member and where he had many
friends, though I was never officially a page. There was in particular a
little old bald-headed gentleman who was good to me and would put
his arm about me and stroll with me across the rotunda to the Library of
Congress and get me books to read. I was not so young as not to know
that he was an ex-President of the United States, and to realize the
meaning of it. He had been the oldest member of the House when my
father was the youngest. He was John Quincy Adams. By chance I was
on the floor of the House when he fell in his place, and followed the
excited and tearful throng when they bore him into the Speaker's Room,
kneeling by the side of the sofa with an improvised fan and crying as if
my heart would break.
One day in the spring of 1851 my father took me to a little hotel on
Pennsylvania Avenue near the Capitol and into a stuffy room, where a
snuffy old man wearing an ill-fitting wig was busying himself over a
pile of documents. He turned about and was very hearty.
"Aha, you've brought the boy," said he.
And my father said: "My son, you wanted to see General Cass, and

here he is."
My enthusiasm over the Cass and Butler campaign had not subsided.
Inevitably General Cass was to me the greatest of heroes. My father
had been and always remained his close friend. Later along we dwelt
together at Willard's Hotel, my mother a chaperon for Miss Belle Cass,
afterward Madame Von Limbourg, and I came into familiar intercourse
with the family.
The general made me something of a pet and never ceased to be a hero
to me. I still think he was one of the foremost statesmen of his time and
treasure a birthday present he made me when I was just entering my
teens.
The hour I passed with him that afternoon I shall never forget.
As we were about taking our leave my father said: "Well, my son, you
have seen General Cass; what do you think of him?"