XLIII Henry Wilson
(Born 1812 — Died 1875.)
From the Shoemaker’s Bench to the Chair of Vice-President
Henry Wilson, the Vice-president of the United States, was at my tea-table with the strangest appetite I ever knew. The fact was, his last sickness was on him, and his inward fever demanded everything cold. It was tea without any tea. He was full of reminiscence, and talked over his life from boyhood till then. He impressed me with the fact that he was nearly through his earthly journey. Going to my Church that evening to speak at our young peoples’ anniversary, he delivered the last address of his public life. While seated at the beginning of the exercises, his modesty seemed to overcome him, and he said: “I am not prepared to address such a magnificent audience as that. Can not you get somebody else to speak? I wish you would.” “O no,” I said, “these people came to hear Henry Wilson.” He placed a chair in the center of the platform to lean on. Not knowing he had put it in that position, I removed it twice. Then he whispered to me, saying: “Why do you remove that chair? I want it to lean on.” The fact was, his physical strength was gone. When he arose his bands and knees trembled with excitement, and the more so as the entire audience arose and cheered him. One hand on the top of the chair, he stood for half an hour, saying useful things, and, among others, these words: “I hear men sometimes say, when a man writes his name on the records of a visible Church, that he had better let other things alone, especially public affairs. I am not a believer in that Christianity which hides itself away. I believe in that robust Christianity that goes right out in God’s world and works. If there ever was a time in our country, that time is now, when the young men of this country should reflect and act according to the teachings of God’s holy Word, and attempt to purify, lift up, and carry our country onward and forward, so that it shall be in practice what it is in theory—the great leading Christian nation of the globe. You will be disappointed in many of your hopes and aspirations. The friends near and dear to you will turn sometimes coldly from you; the wives of your bosom and the children of your love will be taken from you; your high hopes may be blasted; but, gentlemen, when friends turn their backs upon you, when you lay your dear ones away, when disappointments come to you on the right hand and on the left, there is one source for a true and brave heart, and that is an abiding faith in God, and a trust in the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Having concluded his address he sat down, physically exhausted. When we helped him into his carriage we never expected to see him again. The telegram from Washington announcing his prostration and certain death was no surprise. But there and then ended as remarkable a life as was ever lived in America.
It is no great thing if a man who has been carefully nurtured by intelligent parents, and then passed through school, college, and those additional years of professional study, go directly to the front. But start a man amid every possible disadvantage, and pile in his way all possible obstacles, and then if he take his position among those whose path was smooth, he must have the elements of power. Henry Wilson was great in the mastering and overcoming all disadvantageous circumstances. He began at the bottom, and without any help fought his own way to the top. If there ever was a man who had a right at the start to give up his earthly existence as a failure, that man was Henry Wilson. Born of a dissolute father, so that the son took another name in order to escape the disgrace; never having a dollar of his own before he was twenty-one years of age; toiling industriously in a shoemaker’s shop, that he might get the means of schooling and culture; then loaning his money to a man who swamped it all and returned none of it; but still toiling on and up until he came to the State Legislature, and on and up until he reached the American Senate, and on and up till he became Vice-president. In all this there ought to be great encouragement to those who wake up late in life to find themselves unequipped. Henry Wilson did not begin his education until most of our young men think they have finished theirs. If you are twenty-five or thirty, or forty or fifty, it is not too late to begin. Isaac Walton at ninety years of age wrote his valuable book; Benjamin Franklin, almost an octogenarian, went into philosophic discoveries; Fontenelle’s mind blossomed even in the Winter of old age; Arnauld made valuable translations at eighty years of age; Christopher Wren added to the astronomical and religious knowledge of the world at eighty-six years of age.
Do not let any one, in the light of Henry Wilson’s career, be discouraged. Rittenhouse conquered his poverty; John Milton overcame his blindness; Robert Hall overleaped his sickness; and plane and hammer, and adze and pickax, and crowbar and yardstick, and shoe-last have routed many an army of opposition and oppression. Let every disheartened man look at two pictures—Henry Wilson teaching fifteen hours a day at five dollars a week to get his education, and Henry Wilson under the admiring gaze of Christendom at the national capital. He was one of the few men who maintained his integrity against violent temptations. The tides of political life all set toward dissipation. The congressional burying-ground at Washington holds the bones of many congressional drunkards. Henry Wilson seated at a banquet with senators and presidents and foreign ministers, the nearest he ever came to taking their expensive brandies and wines was to say, “No, sir, I thank you; I never indulge.” He never drank the health of other people in any thing that hurt his own. He never was more vehement than in flinging his thunderbolts of scorn against the decanter and the dram-shop. What a rebuke it is for men in high and exposed positions in this country who say, “We can not be in our positions without drinking.” If Henry Wilson, under the gaze of senators and presidents, could say No, certainly you under the jeers of your commercial associates ought to be able to say No. Henry Wilson also conquered all temptations to political corruption. He died comparatively a poor man, when he might have filled his own pockets and the pockets of his friends if he had only consented to go into some of the infamous opportunities which tempted our public men. Credit Mobilier, which took down so many senators and representatives, touched him, but glanced off, leaving him uncontaminated in the opinion of all fair-minded men. He steered clear of the “Lobby,” that maelstrom which has swallowed up so many strong political crafts. The bribing railroad schemes that ran over half of our public men always left him on the right side of the track. With opportunities to have made millions of dollars by the surrender of good principles, he never made a cent. Along by the coasts strewn with the hulks of political adventurers he voyaged without loss of rudder or spar. We were not surprised at his funeral honors. If there ever was a man after death fit to lie on Abraham Lincoln’s catafalque, and near the marble representation of Alexander Hamilton, and under Crawford’s splendid statue of Freedom, with a sheathed sword in her hand and a wreath of stars on her brow, and to be carried out amid the acclamation and conclamation of a grateful people, that man was Henry Wilson.
The ministers did not at his obsequies have a hard time to make out a good case as to his future destiny, as in one case where a clergyman in offering consolation as to the departure of a man who had been very eminent, but went down through intemperance till he died in a snow-bank, his rum-jug beside him. At the obsequies of that unfortunate, the officiating pastor declared that the departed was a good Greek and Latin scholar. We have had United States senators who used the name of God rhetorically, and talked grandly about virtue and religion, when at that moment they were so drunk they could scarcely stand up. But Henry Wilson was an old-fashioned Christian, who had repented of his sins and put his trust in Christ. By profession he was a Congregationalist; but years ago he stood up in a Methodist meeting-house and told how he had found the Lord, and recommending all the people to choose Christ as their portion—the same Christ about whom he was reading the very night before he died, in that little book called “The Changed Cross,” the more tender passages marked with his own lead-pencil; and amid these poems of Christ Henry Wilson had placed the pictures of his departed wife and departed son, for I suppose he thought as these were with Christ in heaven their dear faces might as well be next to His name in the book.
It was appropriate that our Vice-president expire in the Capitol buildings, the scene of so many years of his patriotic work. At the door of that marbled and pictured Vice-president’s room many a man has been obliged to wait because of the necessities of business, and to wait a great while before he could get in; but that morning, while the Vice-president was talking about taking a ride, a sable messenger arrived at the door, not halting a moment, not even knocking to see if he might get in, but passed up and smote the lips into silence forever. The sable messenger moving that morning through the splendid Capitol stopped not to look at the mosaics, or the fresco, or the panels of Tennessee and Italian marble, but darted in and darted out in an instant, and his work was done. It is said that Charles Sumner was more scholarly, and that Stephen A. Douglas was a better organizer, and that John J. Crittenden was more eloquent; but calling up my memory of Henry Wilson, I have come to the conclusion that that life is grandly eloquent whose peroration is heaven.—DR. TALMADGE, in The Sunday Magazine.