USA > Tennessee > Notable men of Tennessee, from 1833 to 1875, their times and their contemporaries > Part 21
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Now, a few words as to myself. I was unmerciful to Mr. Johnson because he assumed a haughty air of superiority to- ward me. His manner was stern and often discourteous. He never spoke a kind word to me nor did a gracious act. He invariably called me his "Juvenile Competitor," uttered with a sibilant sound. I determined to punish him and to the extent of my ability not to spare him. I knew how he had hacked and bullied old Matthew Stevenson and Brookins Campbell, two of the gentlest of men and as worthy as ever lived in the State, and my spirit arose against such treatment. From a long knowledge of Mr. Johnson I knew there was but one way to meet him-to fight him with his own weapons. I was the first person, and excepting Mr. Haynes, the only person, who ever fought him in this way.
When I became a candidate I had no fixed idea of being elected. I saw in the race, fun, excitement, training, reputa- tion, at least notoriety, with hard knocks, bruises, and scars, with a faint chance of success. My young heart leaped at the prospect. While I was at Blountville, I became thoroughly convinced of my election, if I could overcome the universal opinion that there was no chance. To boast, as Johnson was doing, and to deny his claim made every day, that he was going to be elected by the largest majority of his life, would alarm the Democrats, for it must be kept in mind that they did not desire defeat, but his punishment by giving him only
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a bare majority. Not to boast, and not to deny the unfounded claim of Johnson, was leaving my friends without the stimulus of hope. Notwithstanding the difficulties of the non-alarm pol- icy, I determined to adopt it. I had no one to consult in Blountville in whose judgment I had confidence. The old leaders were standing aloof from me. As it was, I worked privately as few men could have done to overcome the inertia of the Whigs, and to convince them that I could be elected. My labors were incessant night and day, but the time was too short and the incredulity of the Whigs too great for one man. I convinced very few. Perhaps I alone had full confidence. In one of the counties I spent half an hour with its Whig leader, my warm personal friend, in laying the facts before him, when he remarked: "Oliver, I should rejoice at your election as much as any man, but really I can see no chance." That man could have set, by a word, twenty leaders of influence, to riding over the country the next day, working for me. The result was that enough Whigs from that county stayed away from the polls to have elected me, or nearly so.
Johnson and I were the only two men in the district who fully understood the condition of things-both of us knew that I would be elected, if there was a full Whig vote. When he was boasting every day that he would disgrace me by an over- whelming majority, he knew as well as I did that he was politically prevaricating. I think I may say with truthfulness that I was the only person in the district, except Snapp, Rut- ledge, and Millard, and one or two other young men in Sullivan County, who worked in the earnest confidence of my election.
Well, Johnson was elected by 314 votes, his usual majority being reduced from ten to twelve hundred. Although he had won the race, the result was everywhere regarded as my triumph. He was mortified, chagrined, and overwhelmed with shame. On Friday afternoon, the day after the election, the returns from the eastern counties having been received in Greeneville, it was believed that I was elected. The people insisted on our making our acknowledgments to our friends in little speeches. When it came to Mr. Johnson's turn, he shed tears, and almost broke down with emotion. The next day the returns came in from Hawkins and Coke Counties, which gave the election to Johnson. Hawkins was the county where the Whig leaders, for purposes
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of their own, had promised or made a compact with Mr. Johnson that he should have no Whig opposition. In each of these counties the expected Whig majority fell short. In Sullivan, the only county I canvassed thoroughly, even in parts of it, where I spent more than a week, and made five speeches, I re- ceived the largest vote ever given to a Whig, larger than Gen- eral Harrison's, or Jones', or Clay's.
After the election, the Whigs from nearly every county, commenced sending word that if they had dreamed that there was "any chance" they could have brought to the polls, of the stay-at-home voters, nearly men enough in every county to have changed the result. "Too late." They also insisted that I should repeat the race two years hence, and that they would elect me. Too late. The bird had flown. They had lost their only chance. Johnson had learned a lesson, and my com- mon sense told me that he would never repeat his error of 1847, and he never did. He was as docile and as tractable in the next Congress under party leadership as he had formerly been re- calcitrant. The result was, he was re-elected, in 1849, over the eloquent and accomplished Nathaniel G. Taylor, not by 314 majority, but by the usual Democratic majority.
I need not attempt to disguise the fact that this race gave me considerable reputation throughout the State- a reputation entirely disproportioned to any ability or merit of my own. My daring arraignment of Mr. Johnson, his vulnerable record, the unexpected closeness of the election, together with my youth- fulness, gave an unwonted éclat to the result. At no other time in his life could Mr. Johnson have been attacked so merci- lessly and yet so successfully as then.
As for myself, not long after this, being offered a favorable partnership by the generous William H. Sneed, of Knoxville- due no doubt to my late race-I left the first district, where I was born, reared, and educated, and where I had many dear friends, and removed to Knoxville, largely, I confess, to get out of politics and to avoid another race, which I plainly saw would result in defeat. The only chance to defeat Mr. Johnson had been thrown away, not by reason of any objection to me, but by the inertia of the Whigs. In that race I might easily have been elected by from five hundred to one thousand majority. But I can declare truthfully that I never seriously regretted my
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defeat. Even then I feared that an election would prove an injury to me. Since then I have never been tempted to seek Congressional honors, although many opportunities have oc- curred for obtaining them. I never regretted my race, as I can trace to it, directly or indirectly, the source of the most im- portant honors and successes, however inconsiderable, I have attained in life.
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MEREDITH POINDEXTER GENTRY.
Born in North Carolina in 1809-Removes to Tennessee in 1813-Early Education-Extensive Reader-Studied Law-Elected to Legislature, 1835-In Congress, 1839-Powerful Debater-Opinions as to His Abil- ity as an Orator-Runs Against Johnson for Governorship in 1855- Contrast of Their Characters-Defeated by Johnson-In Retirement on His Farm-A Union Man Until Sumter-Then a Secessionist- Elected to Confederate Congress-Loses All His Property Through Failure of Confederacy-Died in 1866.
THE period from 1833 to 1860 was the high noon of greatness in Tennessee. There was during that time a perfect constellation of glittering stars to be seen in the heavens. At the first-named date, Andrew Jackson, that splendid luminary, although fast passing from his zenith to his nadir, still held on his brilliant course. The venerable Hugh Lawson White, although "hasten- ing to his setting," still stood high in the heavens. The elo- quent Felix Grundy gave no signs of diminished brightness. But while these older men still lingered and held the public eye, there appeared above the horizon a younger set of men, little less great than those just named, who were destined to shed their brilliance upon the State and the nation. Among these I mention James K. Polk, John Bell, Ephraim H. Foster, Bailie Peyton, Spencer Jarnagin, Cave Johnson, Aaron V. Brown, James C. Jones, Gustavus A. Henry, A. O. P. Nicholson, Meredith P. Gentry, Emerson Etheridge, William T. Haskell, Andrew Johnson, Isham G. Harris, Thomas A. R. Nelson, William T. Senter, John Netherland, Landon C. Haynes, and Horace Maynard.
Of these distinguished men Meredith P. Gentry was one of the greatest and perhaps the most striking. He was born in 1809, in North Carolina, and was therefore one year younger than Andrew Johnson. In 1813 his father, who was a wealthy planter, moved to Tennessee, and settled in Williamson County, his son being then four years of age. Young Gentry completed his academic education at the age of fourteen, never having had the advantage of a college course. After that time, until he was twenty, he improved his mind while working on his
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father's farm by an extensive reading of history, poetry, and general literature. His memory was retentive, and it never lost what it had acquired.
Shortly after he came to the years of manhood, he delivered a fourth of July address, which was greatly admired and gave promise of his future renown. He studied law, I believe, but it seems he gave it up. From 1835 to 1839, he was a promi- nent member of the Legislature. A committee composed of Mr. Gentry, Mr. Grundy, and Mr. Topp submitted to the · Legislature in 1835 an exhaustive report in favor of the State's lending its aid, by the issuance of bonds, to a system of mac- adam roads. Under an act passed in conformity with that report, Middle Tennessee became dotted over with macadamized roads, and several millions of bonds were issued for that pur- pose, which now constitute, directly or indirectly, a part of the public debt of the State. East Tennessee never availed itself of the liberal terms of that act, not a single mile of road having been built under it.
In 1839 Mr. Gentry was elected a member of Congress, and with the exception of one term, when he declined being a candi- date, he remained in Congress until 1853-twelve years. He soon made his début in Congress. His first speech was in favor of receiving-not granting-the prayer of petitions from the North for the abolishment of slavery in the District of Columbia. This speech attracted universal attention. He was no abolitionist, being a large slave holder himself, but he insisted that to petition Congress was a constitutional right on the part of the citizen, which could not be denied. His second speech was on the subject of securing the freedom of elections, and the restriction of executive patronage. This was one of the ablest speeches of that Congress, and was widely read and distributed. At this time he was only thirty years of age.
During his subsequent terms Mr. Gentry became one of the most powerful debaters and distinguished orators in the lower house of congress. Mr. Alexander H. Stephens said of him that very few members "possessed so much political knowledge, or were so ready in debate." He further said that his eulogy on Mr. Clay, though impromptu, was "apt, powerful, and pathetic." In his diary, John Quincy Adams, a member of the House several years with Mr. Gentry, pronounced him the finest orator of that body. A distinguished member of Congress from Penn-
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sylvania, who served with him, and who often heard Mr. Clay, said that he (Mr. Gentry) was the only man he had ever heard who had a better voice for speaking than Mr. Clay. Having heard both Mr. Clay and Mr. Gentry, the latter several times, I cannot concur fully in this opinion. So far as I am aware, the opinion for seventy-five years has been well nigh universal that no man's voice in this country was so musical, so fascinat- ing, so magnificent as Mr. Clay's.
Mr. Gentry unquestionably had a very grand and a very extraordinary voice. It was clear, ringing, and far-sounding, like the bugle's thrilling notes, and at the same time it was deep, musical, and powerful. In his ordinary mood, it could be heard distinctly at a great distance. He spoke with the same ease both to himself and his hearers that characterized Mr. Clay, and in both speakers in the "very torrent, tempest, and whirl- wind of their passions," as Hamlet advised his players, they manifested a "temperance that gave it smoothness." But to my ear, the indefinable, the bewitching, the flute-like music of Mr. Clay's voice surpassed that of Mr. Gentry's.
Mr. Gentry was a phenomenal man nearly every way. His person was majestic, though not over 5 feet and 11 inches high. It was robust, manly, dignified, and highly impressive. Anyone beholding him would have been struck with his proud, kingly bearing. He had a grand, stately stride, as if above fear, and conscious of his own dignity and worth. His face, to my mind, was handsome and attractive, having a most benignant expres- sion, and being suffused with the ruddy glow of good health and high living. Mr. A. S. Colyer, in an article a short time ago, said of him that he always regarded him as the most accom- plished orator in Tennessee. "He was the most comely man I have ever seen on the platform. His voice was music His head was intellectual and his features regular and nicely chiseled into classical forms. In quickness of apprehension, and in the power of generalization, his mind was nearly of the first order. He needed not to study a diffi- cult subject. His intellect mastered and illumined it at first sight. In the expression of his ideas, he was wonderfully lucid, forcible, and striking. They were sharp cut, incisive, glittering ; they were direct, pointed, and unambiguous, and came from his mind with the force of a ball projected by some powerful agency. He wore his opinions and his principles as he wore his
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face-uncovered. In the avowal of his opinion he was frank and candid, and open as the day. He would have scorned as cowardly and dishonorable any concealment or any equivoca- tion. No public man of his time was so bold and independent. He cared infinitely more for his honor and his self-respect than for promotion, or place, or popular applause. Withal, there was an honesty, a heartiness, a whole-soulness, a don't-care inde- pendence in his speaking that won all hearts. As we shall see presently, when he proudly said in his last speech in Congress, "I defy you all," he only provoked sympathetic laughter. He was so honest and good-natured that the most daring expres- sions gave no offense.
As an illustration. In 1849-50, W. G. Brownlow was press- ing the claims of two or three friends on the new administration, for appointment to offices, through Senator Bell. Mr. Bell was not succeeding as well as Mr. Brownlow wished. The latter became a little impatient at the apparent indifference or slow- ness of his old friend, and wrote him a sharp letter on the sub- ject, and probably wrote an editorial in his paper complain- ing of his conduct. Mr. Bell showed this letter to Mr. Gentry, who knew of the efforts he was making, and the difficulty in the way of procuring the offices for the friends of Mr. Brownlow. Thereupon he sat down and wrote Mr. Brownlow explaining these difficulties, and averring that Mr. Bell was doing all that any human being could do, and wound up by saying: "Now if I were in Mr. Bell's place, I would write to you and tell you to go to h-1." Mr. Brownlow showed the letter to friends and only laughed heartily at it.
As above intimated, Mr. Gentry's power of generalization showed his masterly intellect. He could annihilate a labored piece of casuistry by a single sentence, or blast an argument by a sarcasm, or a witticism. Thus Mr. Johnson once arraigned him for voting while in Congress, to pay the hotel bill of the cele- brated Louis Kossuth, the great Hungarian exile, while in Wash- ington as the invited guest of the nation, although he himself had voted with Gentry in inviting him there. In reply Mr. Gentry indignantly turned upon Mr. Johnson, and with con- temptuous scorn, explained: "Is this Tennessee hospitality to invite a man to your house to stay a few days, and then tell him when he is leaving, 'Sir, I want you to foot your bill; you must pay for the liquor you have been drinking'?"
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He could gather up and throw into the form of an aphorism a whole argument in a case, embodying its very essence and spirit. This was well-nigh genius. Mr. Calhoun possessed this faculty in a high degree. But Mr. Calhoun was a scholar and a student all his life; Mr. Gentry was never a student, nor had he high scholarship.
Mr. Gentry was generally considered an eloquent man. In the sense in which Haskell, Henry, Haynes, N. G. Taylor, and many other Tennessee orators were considered eloquent, Mr. Gentry had no high claim to such a distinction. He was not florid, much less turgid in speech; he used but few flowers of rhetoric; he did not turn his imagination loose to roam at will through the pleasant fields of fiction. There were no brilliant coruscations of fancy ; there were, however, of thought and genius-dazzling and startling by their boldness. But in the sense in which Webster and Clay were eloquent, and Mr. Calhoun sometimes so (as Mr. Benton says), Mr. Gentry de- serves to be ranked very high as a great orator. In the same category may be ranked the illustrious Chief Justice Marshall, who was said by one of his contemporaries, I believe Mr. Madison, to have been the most eloquent man in his speeches he had ever heard. Of the three great men-Webster, Clay, and Cal- houn-contrary to what is the popular opinion, especially of Mr. Clay, Mr. Webster was by far the most ornate, and often indeed florid, in his style and diction. Many of his speeches, or parts of them, were highly embellished with beautiful pearls of rhetoric, and all of them were more or less so. Some of them were gorgeous with beautiful imagery. He clothed his magnificent thoughts in the rich drapery of elegant classical learning. But these were but the accessories, used in the em- bellishment of the great thoughts he uttered. Mr. Calhoun's speeches were never adorned in this way. They were expressed in a simple, terse, compact, crystallized form, always in aid of and in subordination to the most rigid reasoning. Mr. Clay was always ardent, fervid, glowing and impassioned and elo- quent in manner, but he seldom ventured in his senatorial speeches into the higher regions of imaginative oratory, so common with Mr. Webster. And from the fragments of the speeches of Alexander Hamilton which remain-the greatest genius of the Revolutionary epoch, and perhaps of any epoch in our history, and indeed, in the opinion of the celebrated
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Talleyrand, the greatest of the age in which he lived-we may class him as an orator in this respect more after the style of Mr. Calhoun than that of Mr. Webster.
The eloquence of all these great men consisted in the happy and vivid illumination of questions of government by the light shed upon them by their great intellects, expressed in the clearest, and choicest words, and in the most earnest, natural and fasci- nating manner. It was as the light of the X-ray poured upon these questions. In this sense Mr. Gentry was an eloquent man. He was gifted with the power of striking thought, vigorous expression, felicity of language, earnestness of man- ner and conviction, and with a voice and manner in the highest degree attractive and dramatic. Running through it all, there was the evidence of high and noble purpose. When seen in one of his highest efforts the minds of men would involuntarily say, "Behold, what a man !" His speech flowed in a deep, rapid, unceasing silvery current. He was always grand in manner and sometimes when strong emotions stirred him, he was as an irresistible tempest.
If the forcible presentation of great ideas in vigorous and lucid terms ; in a manner earnest, fervid, and flowing; with a voice of surpassing beauty ; and with a mind all on fire with his subject,-if these constituted eloquence, Mr. Gentry was cer- tainly an eloquent man.
But after all, it was not his gifts intellectually and physically, nor his graces of speech, nor his grand manner, but the great soul of honor within him that marked the difference between him and most other men, and made him what he was-an ideal. No earthly consideration-not even to obtain the presidency- would or could have induced him to do a little, a mean, or a dishonorable act. Thus, in his canvass for Governor with An- drew Johnson, in 1855, he suffered his competitor to go all over the State "nagging" him with low innuendoes, without taking any notice of them, except contemptuous silence. When urged to retaliate, he said with lofty pride: "I know the rules of honorable debate among gentlemen, and my sense of self- respect forbids me to violate them, even if my competitor does do so. I cannot have a wrangle every day on the stump with my competitor, if the result is the loss of my election." And he adhered to that high ideal to the close of the canvass, never
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doing or saying anything that would not pass current in the highest court of chivalry.
Indeed Mr. Gentry dwelt in the pure atmosphere of honor and truth and noble purpose-on the very mountain tops, where the murky and miasmatic vapors of envy, slander, falsehood, and littleness never ascended, and where the vision swept the whole boundless horizon.
In 1852 Mr. Gentry arose in his seat in Congress and de- livered one of his characteristically bold speeches, in which he announced his purpose of not supporting General Scott for the presidency in the event of his nomination by the approaching Whig national convention. He was an ardent old-line Whig, a follower of Mr. Clay, and a friend of John Bell. He had fol- lowed the leadership of Mr. Clay in 1850 in support of his compromise measures, and was a devoted friend of the Union. He feared that General Scott was not in good faith a friend of those measures, and charged that he was under the influence of Mr. Seward, and that if nominated he would owe his nomi- nation to him. He charged that General Scott had permitted "Mr. Seward to seize him and wield him as a warrior wields his battle-ax, to cleave down into the dust Fillmore and Webster, and all the patriots of the North who sustained him."
Mr. Gentry went on to say :
"Any gentleman who dreams that any Southern State will cast its vote for General Scott in the next presidential election, dreams, in my opinion, a dream that will never be realized.
"I suppose for this I am to be a proscribed character, an excommunicated Whig. Well, gentlemen, I defy you all. [Laughter.] I only insist that no man shall denounce me until he can show a better Whig character in the past than I can. Observe this condition and I am willing for you to say what you please. I acknowledge to a proper extent allegiance to the party. But I owe a higher allegiance to my country than any party can impose. I should consider myself a traitor, recreant to all the interests of those who honored me with their confidence in sending me here, if I would for a moment co- operate in producing such a result as I have described. What shall I do? Why, I am very much troubled about it. It is a painful idea to contemplate. It is exceedingly painful for a man to stand as I stand, and who has stood as I have stood, to be separated from his party, and to be brought in antagon-
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ism with those with whom he has associated; and therefore I have been recurring to my early reading of poetry to find some consolation, and I have determined to adopt the advice Cato gave to his son :
"'My son, thou oft hast seen Thy sire engaged in a corrupted State Wrestling with vice and faction; now thou seest me Spent, overpowered, despairing of success ; Let me advise thee to retreat betimes To thy paternal seat, the Sabine field, Where the great Censor toiled with his own hands, And all our frugal ancestors were blest In humble virtues and a rural life. There live retired and pray for the peace of Rome ; Content thyself to be obscurely good. When vice prevails, and impious men bear away, The post of honor is the private station.'
"I will go home. [Laughter.] In a sequestered valley in the State of Tennessee, there is a smiling farm, with bubbling fountains, covered with rich pasturage and fat flocks, and all that is needful for the occupation and enjoyment of a man of uncorrupted tastes. I will go there and pray for 'Rome.' "
The country was startled at this speech. The Whigs were confounded. His own friends in Tennessee, who loved him with warmest devotion, were overwhelmed with mingled sorrow and surprise. However, unlike some other prominent Tennessee Whigs, Mr. Gentry neither supported Pierce, nor took any ac- tive part in opposition to General Scott. He quietly cast his vote for Mr. Webster. Like the great Achilles, he now retired to his tent to brood over his imaginary wrongs, while the Trojans and the offended gods, as the great poet tells us, slaughtered the Greeks. Thus for two years this brilliant man remained in self-appointed retirement, on his magnificent blue- grass farm in Tennessee. But in 1855, when there was a demand for the greatest leader in the Whig party, in response to an almost universal call, he came forth from his retreat, and once more became the idolized leader of it. He was nominated for Governor of the State by the Whigs, now calling themselves the American, but popularly called the Know-Nothing party. An- drew Johnson, then Governor, was the Democratic candidate. The contest was exceedingly bitter on the part of Mr. Johnson, as well as on the part of the people; it was indeed malignant and furious; but Mr. Gentry in the presence of this raging
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