Washington, June 19, '61.
Don't let any one blame Governor Andrew — he is good and
thoughtful, and if he is sometimes misled by good nature, he is never hampered
by ulterior personal aims; all the faculty of ways and means in the
world, if so hampered, is a curse to the country. At least I am sometimes
tempted to say so.1
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1
As for our good and great War-Governor, the doubts concerning him when
elected, his early unpopularity, and his triumphant record, I quote the words
of that admirable citizen, the late Colonel Henry Lee of his staff: —
“Meeting
the Governor just after his election, at a political levee, I refrained from
joining in the congratulations generally expressed because I was afraid he
might be one-sided and indiscreet, deficient in common sense and practical
ability. . . . I unexpectedly received a
summons to a position upon his staff. .
. . Work began at once. But it is needless to repeat the hundred-times-told
tale of Governor Andrew’s military preparations, the glory whereof has since
been comfortably adopted by Massachusetts as her own — by right of eminent
domain, perhaps — whereas in fact nearly all Massachusetts derided and abused
him at the time, and the glory was really as much his individual property as
his coat and hat.
“The war had begun, and Massachusetts,
that denounced State which was to have been left out in the cold, had
despatched within one week five Regiments of Infantry, one Battalion
of Riflemen, and one Battery of Artillery, armed, clothed, and equipped. Behind
every great movement stands the man, and that man behind this movement was the
ridiculed, despised fanatic, John A. Andrew. As the least backwardness on the
part of Massachusetts, whose sons had done more than all others to promote the ‘irrepressible
conflict,’ would have endangered the Union and exposed us to the plottings and
concessions of the Conservatives and ‘Copperheads,’ so her prompt response, in
consequence of the courage and foresight of her Governor, strengthened the
timid, rebuked the disaffected, cemented the Union, fused the whole country
into one glow of patriotism.
“Saint
Paul was not more suddenly or more thoroughly converted than were many of those
who had, up to that week, been loudest in their lamentations, or denunciations
of the Governor. Rich men poured in their gifts. . . . Conservatives and Democrats rushed to
pay their respects and to applaud the very acts which they had so deplored and
ridiculed.” (Memoir of Henry Lee, by John T. Morse, Jr. Boston:
Little & Brown, 1905.)
SOURCE: Edward Waldo Emerson, Life and Letters of
Charles Russell Lowell, p. 212, 403-4
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