But up in the northwestern part of the state, still referred to, even in days so late as those, with something of the humorous contempt that attached to the term, as the Black Swamp, there had risen a young, fiery, and romantic figure who ignored the past and flung himself with fierce ardor into a new campaign for liberty. His words fell strangely on ears that were accustomed to the reassurance that liberty was at last conquered, and his doctrines perplexed and irritated minds that had sunk into the shallow optimism of a belief that there were no more liberations needed in the world. It was not a new cry, indeed, that he raised, but an old one thought to have been stilled, and the standard he lifted in the Black Swamp was looked upon by many Ohioans as much askance as though it were another secession flag of stars and bars. Indeed, it had long been associated with the cause of the conquered South, because that section, by reason of its economic conditions, had long espoused the principle of Free Trade.
This young man was Frank Hunt Hurd, then the congressman from the Toledo district, and in that city, where my father was the pastor of a church, he had won many followers and adherents, though not enough to keep him continually in his seat in the House of Representatives.
He served for several alternate terms, the interims being filled by some orthodox nonentity, who was so speedily forgotten that there must have been an impression that for years our district was represented by this one man.
I had heard of him with that dim sense of his position which a boy has of any public character, but I had a real vivid conception of him after that Fourth of July when, during a citizens’ celebration which must have been so far patriotic as to forget, for a time, partizanism, and to remember patriotism sufficiently to include the Democrats, I saw him conducted to the platform by our distinguished citizen, David R. Locke, whom the world knew as “Petroleum V. Nasby.”
He delivered a patriotic oration, and anyone,—even though he were but a wondering boy quite by chance in attendance, standing on the outskirts of the crowd, following some whim which for a while kept him from his sports,—anyone who ever heard Frank Hurd deliver an oration never forgot it afterward.
I have no idea now what it was he said, perhaps I had as little then, but his black hair, his handsome face, his beautiful voice, and the majestic music of his rolling phrases were wholly and completely charming. He was explicitly an orator, a student of the great art, and he formed his orations on the ancient Greek models, writing them out with exordium, proposition, and peroration, and while he did not perhaps exactly commit them to memory, he, nevertheless, in the process of preparing them, so completely possessed himself of them that he poured forth his polished sentences without a flaw.
His speech on Free Trade, delivered in the House of Representatives, February 18, 1881, remains the classic on that subject, ranking with Henry Clay’s speech on “The American System,” delivered in the Senate in 1832. In that address Frank Hurd began with the phrase, “The tariff is a tax,” which acquired much currency years after when Grover Cleveland used it.
Everyone, or nearly everyone, told me of course that Frank Hurd was wrong, if he was not, indeed, wicked, and the subject possessed a kind of fascination for me. In thinking of it, or in trying to think of it, I only perplexed myself more deeply, until at last I reached the formidable, the momentous decision of taking my perplexities to Frank Hurd himself, and of laying them before him.
I was by this time a youth of eighteen, and in the summer when he had come home from Washington I somehow found courage enough to go to the hotel where he lived, and to inquire for him. He was there in the lobby, standing by the cigar-stand, talking to some men, and I hung on the outskirts of the little group until it broke up, and then the fear I had felt vanished when he turned and smiled upon me. I told him that I wished to know about Free Trade, and since there was nothing he liked better to talk about, and too, since there were few who could talk better about anything than he could talk about the tariff, we sat in the big leather chairs while he discoursed simply on the subject. It was the first at several of these conversations, or lessons, which we had in the big leather chairs in the lobby of the old Boody House, and it was not long until I was able, with a solemn pride, to announce at home that I was a Free-Trader and a Democrat.
It could hardly have been worse had I announced that I had been visiting Ingersoll, and was an atheist. Cleveland was president, and in time he sent his famous tariff reform message to Congress, and though I could not vote, I was preparing to give him my moral support, to wear his badge, and even, if I could do no more, to refuse to march in the Republican processions with the club of young men and boys organized in our neighborhood.
For the first time in my life I went on my vacation trip to Urbana that summer with reluctance, for the first time in my life I shrank from seeing my grandfather. The wide front door opened, and from the heat without to the dark and cool interior of the hall I stepped; I prolonged the preliminaries, I went through the familiar apartments, and out into the garden to see how it grew that summer, and down to the stable to see the horses; but the inevitable hour drew on, and at last, with all the trivial things said, all the personal questions asked, we sat in the living-room, cool in the half-light produced by its drawn shades, the soft air of summer blowing through it, the odd old Nuremberg furniture, the painting of the Nuremberg castle presented to my grandfather by the American artist whom he had rescued from a scrape, the tall pier glass, with the little vase of flowers on its marble base, and my grandfather in his large chair, his white waistcoat half unbuttoned and one side sagging with the weight of the heavy watch-chain that descended from its large hook, his white beard trimmed a little more closely, his white hair bristling as aggressively as ever—all the same, all as of old, like the reminders of the old life and all its traditions now to be broken and rendered forever and tragically different from all it had been and meant. He sat there looking at me, the blue eyes twinkling under their shaggy brows, and stretched forth his long white hand in the odd gesture with which he began his conversations. Conversations with him, it suddenly developed, were not easy to sustain; he pursued the Socratic method. If you disagreed with him, he lifted three fingers toward you, whether in menace or in benediction it was difficult at times to determine, and said:
“Let me instruct you.”
For instance:
“Do you know why Napoleon III. lost the battle of Sedan?” he might abruptly inquire.
“No, sir,” you were expected to say. (You always addressed him as “sir.”)
“Let me instruct you.”
Or:
“Do you know who was the greatest English poet?”
“No, sir,” you would say, or, perhaps, in those days you might venture, “Was it Shakespeare, sir?”
Then he would look at you and say:
“Let me instruct you.”
This afternoon then, after I had inspected the premises, noticed how much taller my cousin’s fir-tree was than the one I called mine (we had planted them one day, as little boys, years before), and after I had had a drink at the old pump, which in those days, before germs, brought up such cold, clear water, and after I had ascended to my cool room upstairs, and come downstairs again, and we had idly talked for a little while, as I said, he sat and looked at me a moment, and then said:
“Do you understand this tariff question?”
In those days I might have made the due, what I might term with reference to that situation, the conventional reply, and so have said:
“No, sir.”
In these days I am sure I should. But I hesitated. He had already stretched forth his hand.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
He drew in his hand, and for an instant touched with his long fingers the end of his large nose. I plunged ahead.
“I am in favor of Free Trade, sir.”
He did not extend his hand. He looked at me a moment, and then he said:
“You are quite right; we must support Mr. Cleveland in the coming contest.”
And then he sank back in his chair and laughed.
He was always like that, following the truth as he saw it, wherever it led him. But his active days were not many after that; ere long he was kicked by one of his horses, a vicious animal, half bronco, which he insisted on riding, and he was invalided for the rest of his days. He spent them in a wheel-chair, pushed about by a negro boy. It was a cross he bore bravely enough, without complaint, spending his hours in reading of politics, now that he could no longer participate in them, and more and more in reading verse, and even in committing it to memory, so that to the surprise of his family he soon replaced the grace he had always said at table with some recited stanza of poetry, and he took to cultivating, or to sitting in his chair while there was cultivated, under his direction, a little rose garden. He knew all those roses as though they were living persons: when a lady called,—if the roses were in bloom,—he would say to his colored house-boy:
“Go cut off Madame Maintenon, and bring her here.”
Then he would present Madame Maintenon to the caller with such a bow as he could make in his chair, and an apology for not rising. He was patient and brave, yet he did not like to feel the scepter passing from him, and he resented what he considered interferences with his liberties. One day when he had returned from a visit to an old friend, to whose home his colored boy had wheeled him, one of his daughters asked, in a somewhat exaggerated tone of propitiation:
“Well, Father, how did you find Mr. Hovey?”
“I found him master of his own house!” he blazed.
In 1896 he supported Mr. Bryan, and his Republican neighbors said:
“Poor old Major Brand! His mind must be affected!”
It was an effort for him to get out to the polls, but he went, beholding in that conflict, as he could in any conflict however confused and clouded, the issue of free men above any other issue. He did not get out much after that, even when that last summer the few remnants of the 66th regiment gathered in Urbana to hold the annual reunion. He could not so much as get up town to greet his old comrades, and they sent word that in the afternoon they would march in review before his home. He was wheeled out on the veranda, and there he sat while his old regiment, the fifty or sixty gray, broken men, marched past. They saluted as they went by, and he returned the salutes with tears streaming down the cheeks where I had never seen tears before. And he said with a little choking laugh:
“Why, look at the boys!”
It was not long after, that six of us, his grandsons, bore him out of the old home forever. And on his coffin were the two things that expressed him best, I think—his roses and his flag.