Colonel Johnston: ``What are they doing in the Senate and House, Mr. Secretary?''
Mr. Benjamin: ``Oh, simply debating the Confederate seal, moving to strike out this man and to insert that.''
Colonel Johnston: ``Do you know what motion I would make if I were a member?''
Mr. Benjamin: ``No, what would you move?''
Colonel Johnston: ``I would move to strike out from the seal everything except the cocked hat.''
Colonel Johnston was right; the Confederacy was ``knocked into a cocked hat'' a few days afterward.
In the autumn of that year, September, 1870, I was sent as a delegate to the State Republican Convention, and presented as a candidate for the lieutenant-governorship a man who had served the State admirably in the National Congress and in the State legislature as well as in great business operations, Mr. DeWitt Littlejohn of Oswego. Idid this on the part of sundry gentlemen who were anxious to save the Republican ticket, which had at its head my old friend General Woodford, but though I was successful in securing Mr. Littlejohn's nomination, he soon afterward declined, and defeat followed in November.
The only part which I continued to take in State politics was in writing letters and in speaking, on sundry social occasions of a political character, in behalf of harmony between the two factions which were now becoming more and more bitter. At first I seemed to have some success, but before long it became clear that the current was too strong and that the bitterness of faction was to prevail. Iam so constituted that factious thought and effort dishearten and disgust me. At many periods of my life I have acted as a ``buffer'' between conflicting cliques and factions, generally to some purpose; now it was otherwise. But, as Kipling says, ``that is another story.''
The hard work and serious responsibilities brought upon me by the new university had greatly increased.
They had worn deeply upon me when, in the winter of 1870-71, came an event which drew me out of my university life for a time and gave me a much needed change:
--I was sent by the President as one of the three commissioners to Santo Domingo to study questions relating to the annexation of the Spanish part of that island which was then proposed, and to report thereupon to Congress.
While in Washington at this time I saw much of President Grant, Mr. Sumner, and various other men who were then leading in public affairs, but some account of them will be given in my reminiscences of the Santo Domingo expedition.
I trust that it may be allowed me here to recall an incident which ought to have been given in a preceding chapter. During one of my earlier visits to the National Capital, I made the acquaintance of Senator McDougal.
His distorted genius had evidently so dazzled his fellow-citizens of California that, in spite of his defects, they had sent him to the highest council of the Nation. He was a martyr to conviviality, and when more or less under the sway of it, had strange ideas and quaint ways of expressing them. His talk recalled to me a time in my child-hood when, having found a knob of glass, twisted, striated with different colors, and filled with air bubbles, I enjoyed looking at the landscape through it. Everything became grotesquely transfigured. A cabbage in the foreground became opalescent, and an ear of corn a mass of jewels, but the whole atmosphere above and beyond was lurid, and the chimneys and church spires were topsy-turvy.
The only other person whose talk ever produced an impression of this sort on me was Tolstoy, and he will be discussed in another chapter.
McDougal's peculiarity made him at last unbearable;so much so that the Senate was obliged to take measures against him. His speech in his own defense showed the working of his mind, and one passage most of all. It remains probably the best defense of drunkenness ever made, and it ran as follows:
``Mr. President,--I pity the man who has never viewed the affairs of this world, save from the poor, low, miserable plane of ordinary sobriety.''
My absence in the West Indies covered the first three months of the year 1871, and then the commission returned to Washington and made its report; but regarding this I shall speak at length in the chapter of my diplomatic experiences, devoted to the Santo Domingo question.
CHAPTER X
THE GREELEY CAMPAIGN--1872
Having finished my duties on the Santo Domingo Commission, I returned to the University in May of 1871, devoted myself again to my duties as president and professor, and, in the mass of arrears which had accumulated, found ample occupation. I also delivered various addresses at universities, colleges, and elsewhere, keeping as remote from politics as possible.
