Vespers (verse)
Flanagan, Dorothy Belle
334 THE COMMONWEAL July 3 t, i929 voting of intelligent Negroes. He was opposed to interference with the rights of the states. Had John- son only made this plain to Sumner, Chase and Wade...
...The Reeves account is based on his recollections in I928 of what Johnson told him in I874...
...It is an old man's reminiscence, bound to have become inaccurate through the lapse of fifty years...
...Stryker has examined and made use of hundreds of books written by and about the characters of the period...
...There are one or two details in which Mr...
...His own campaign methods laid him open to attack...
...leaves are soundless...
...Stryker could have found many very significant documents in the Johnson manuscripts in the Library of Congress, which would have illuminated this Aha Vela affair quite as thoroughly and much more accurately than the Reeves recollections could have done...
...Colonel Reeves, who was a sort of acting secretary to Johnson during some of his Tennessee political battles following the Presidency, has a remarkable memory...
...Perhaps Mr...
...The birds have ceased their twittering...
...The whole world Is a great blue bell...
...His written letters, messages and talk bear the stamp of statesmanship, but in his off-hand talks to crowds he seems to have thought the type of give and take which had served so well on the stump in Tennessee befitting the dignity of the President...
...In this he followed Savage and one or two other contemporary biographers...
...Stryker seems to have depended upon the recollections of Colonel E. C. Reeves, of Johnson City, to too great an extent...
...You know I cannot pray, There is no whisper of prayer in my heart--I but belong To this blue seal of dusk set upon the day...
...In this same connection the diary of Colonel Moore, Johnson's secretary, could have been profitably employed to reveal the President's contemporary attitude of mind...
...how would I dare To close my eyes to aught of this...
...In doing so, he overrode the repeated advice of his shrewd counselors--such men as old Francis Preston Blair, the veteran of Andrew Jackson's political warfare, Reverdy Johnson, Donlittle, of Wisconsin, Dixon, of Connecticut, and Thomas Ewing, of Ohio, the noblest Roman of them all...
...But the task of writing so imposing a volume should have led its author to make the necessary research...
...For instance, he has young Andrew Johnson apprenticed to Tailor Selby in Raleigh, at the age of ten...
...Why should I utter words...
...One gets the flavor of a scrap-book, of the throwing together of a mass of quotations opposite and the reverse...
...Stanton converted himself into little more than a radical spy, an agent of obstruction in Johnson's Cabinet...
...But it is unnecessary to indicate further instances of what seem to us Mr...
...Stryker quotes the Colonel as of great value in limning the background of an authority on Johnson's conversations with Jeremiah Sullivan Black during the Alta Vela episode, one doubts if the authority is sufficient...
...Had he only taken the trouble to read Judge Winston's book, he could have seen the court order for the indenture, showing the age was not ten but fourteen...
...The case of Edwin M. Stanton, the Secretary of War, soon after Johnson's accession, affords another instance of the evil effects of procrastination...
...He was opposed to interference with the rights of the states...
...DOROTHY BELLS FLANACAN...
...My lifted hands are a soft song Of its beauty, Madonna, of its silent beauty...
...Had Johnson only made this plain to Sumner, Chase and Wade they would not have entertained their delusion, and maybe much toil and turmoil could have been averted or overcome...
...the vesper bell demands I kneel and pray, Madonna...
...Vespers It is dusk, Madonna, it is blue dusk...
...the whole world is a vesper chime...
...It was Johnson's tardy dismissal of this unfaithful constitutional adviser which brought on the famous impeachment test...
...It likewise shows the fruit of a very extended reading...
...One finds insufficient acknowledgment of this Johnson error in the Stryker book...
...334 THE COMMONWEAL July 3 t, i929 voting of intelligent Negroes...
...I cannot make a prayer, Madonna...
...Even the wind has furled Its banners and is still...
...How could I bend my head now...
...His work indicates great loyalty to Andrew Johnson...
...It is my duty Now to pray, Madonna...
...I hold in my hands its quietness...
...It is a pity that these evidences of good writing are imbedded in a mass of verbose quotation...
...the moon is a husk Of white on the rim of sky...
...Stryker's lapses in his appraisal of evidence and in his scrutiny of conflicting facts...
...On the swing around the circle, he was lied about and vilified by the press of the country...
...But when Mr...
...I can only love your son for shaping this blue Out of the robe you wore when he was young with you...
...Stryker is not so much to blame for this, for it is a very involved and little-known chapter in American political history...
...Stryker seems to have accepted without sufficient investigation fables about Johnson's early career...
...The Tennessean added to the grave vice of superprocrastination, the further fault of lack of restraint in his impromptu speeches...
...Johnson played right into the unscrupulous radical's hands...
...Stanton became quite shameless in his obstructive tactics...
...I may add that one likewise discovers with delight many fine sentences, many gleaming bits of portraiture and literary art...
...Had Johnson acted in I865 or I866 and dismissed the Secretary at that time, impeachment might never have come...
...There is the entirely insufficient account of the national union convention at Baltimore in I864, at which Johnson was nominated on the Lincoln ticket...
...Who am I to shatter this with prayer...
...As early as the fall of I865, the President had ample information of this...
...time Is hung in a blue void...
...Unfortunately, he has used them too freely...
...While in the Cabinet, he drafted bills designed to emasculate the powers of the very President in whose Cabinet he served...
...One further matter: Mr...
...I fold my hands Over its peace...
Vol. 10 • July 1929 • No. 13
