The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (51 page)

“Our family was very, very poor,” Washburne was later to write in his reminiscences. He was the third of the eleven children—seven boys, four girls (one of whom, a boy, died in infancy)—of Israel and Martha Benjamin Washburn. He had been born on September 23, 1816, in the crossroads village of Livermore in Androscoggin County, Maine, on a windy hill far inland from the sea. His father had come north from Massachusetts and bought a sixty-acre farm and the small general store that stood nearby. The front door of the gambrel-roofed house faced toward the western mountains bordering New Hampshire. On clear days one could see Mount Washington more than fifty miles in the distance.

From behind his store counter Israel Washburn talked politics and extended credit in such generous fashion that people came inordinate distances to trade there. When the business failed in 1829, the sheriff arrived with several yoke of oxen and hauled the store away.

The family struggled to survive on the farm, growing potatoes, corn, apples, wheat, and oats. It was exceedingly hard living, with long bitter-cold winters, and unending hard work for everyone. Maine was known as “a devilish place for oats” and just about everything else, so “unwilling” was the rocky soil. It would be said of the Washburn children that they never knew hardship because they never knew anything like luxury. It would also be said of their capacity for hard work that they had never known work that was not hard. In fact, none of them ever forgot the hardships or the example of their parents, and their mother especially, her courage in the face of adversity and her high ambitions for her family. To judge by the subsequent careers of several of her children, she must have been a force.

She had been born in Livermore. Her father, of whom she was notably proud, had served through the entire Revolutionary War, from Lexington to Yorktown. She had had little education and worried that her plain, country ways could be an embarrassment to her children, but, as Elihu
wrote, her mind was “quick.” She was an ardent reader of the newspapers that arrived weekly by post rider and, like her husband, took great interest in public affairs. Her pride in their children and how far they could go in life had no limits. “The foundation that is layed in youth lasts throu[gh] life,” she wrote to Elihu after he had headed west. He must remember that “if a man’s word is not good he is good for nothing.”

When I think of her labors [remembered Elihu], her anxieties, her watchfulness, her good and wise counsels and her attention to all our wants, my heart swells with emotions of gratitude toward her which no language can express.

Four of her sons would serve in the United States Congress, elected— and reelected—from four different states, Maine, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. At one point there were three brothers—Israel, Elihu, and Cadwallader—in the House of Representatives at the same time, something that had never happened in the history of the country. Israel, the oldest, later became the governor of Maine. Cadwallader, who came after Elihu in age and was the first of the family to go west, made a fortune in banking, railroads, and especially flour-milling. (As one of the founders of General Mills, he made Gold Medal flour known everywhere.) Later he became a Union general in the Civil War. William, the youngest, who settled in Minnesota, also succeeded handsomely in railroads and milling, and helped found the
Minneapolis Tribune
, before serving in the United States Senate.

Because there was not food enough for all the mouths to feed on the farm, Elihu was “hired out” as a farmhand by the time he was twelve. “I dug up stumps, drove the oxen to plow and harrow, planted and hoed potatoes,” and he longed the whole while for something “more congenial.” At age fourteen, forced to fend for himself, he left home in a suit made for him by his mother and went to work as an apprentice printer on a newspaper thirty miles away in the town of Gardiner, a job he loved that provided room, board, and the promise of $24 a year. It was then, too, that he decided to add an
e
to his name, spelling it Washburne, as it had been originally in England.

When the Gardiner newspaper failed, Uncle Reuel Washburn took Elihu into his Livermore law office and taught him Latin.

At eighteen Elihu tried teaching, which he liked even less than farm-work, then started again as a “printer’s devil” at another paper, the
Kennebec Journal
in Augusta, where he was as happy as he had ever been. “There is no humbug about the trade of a printer,” he would later explain. “A man may be a bogus lawyer, doctor or clergyman, but he cannot set type unless he has learned the art and mastery of printing.”

Between times he got what education he could at public schools and, for a while, at a private seminary in nearby Readfield, having earned enough from haying to pay his board. Reading all he could at public libraries, he acquired a lifelong love of Shakespeare, Dickens, and English poetry. In 1839, after another two years working in a law office in Hallowell, he was admitted to Harvard Law School.

Meanwhile, brother Cadwallader had headed west, and in 1840, at age twenty-three, after little more than a year in law school, Elihu followed. Asked later why her sons left Maine, their mother said no state was big enough to hold any one of her family.

Cadwallader, who had settled for the time in Rock Island, Illinois, persuaded Elihu to try nearby Galena on the Galena River, a tributary of the Mississippi.

He arrived by stern-wheeler on April Fool’s Day, knowing no one, found lodgings in a decrepit log building by a cattle yard, and quickly took hold. The population numbered perhaps 4,000, and the mud in the streets was “knee deep.” But because of the lead mines close by at places with names like Bunkham, Hardscrabble, and Roaring Camp, Galena had become a boomtown, and the people, as Elihu said, were “a litigious set.” In less than a month he was sending money home from his legal fees.

In a rough, wide-open town where other lawyers included drunks and gamblers, he vowed never to smoke or drink hard liquor or gamble, a vow he kept. He joined a church. At home the Washburns were Universal-ists, but with only a few churches to choose from in Galena, he joined the Episcopalians.

He liked the life in what he later called the “Golden Years” in Galena, and his success and stature in the community were to be seen in the handsome
Greek Revival house he had built on Third Street. In 1845, at twenty-nine, he married Adele Gratiot, who was ten years younger, small, slender, dark-eyed, well educated, and of French descent. Like Elihu’s mother, she had been born on the frontier, there in Galena. Indeed, she could proudly claim to have been the first white child born in the settlement. Sent to a seminary school in St. Louis, she studied under French nuns and learned French. Thus, Elihu resolved to learn the language, too, and in time French would be spoken within their growing family.

According to an old Washburn family history, “He was not under the influence of anyone except his wife who had much to do with the directing of his career,” and again like his mother, “she never had a doubt that he could do anything which he set out to do.”

Defeated in his first run for Congress in 1848, he tried again in 1852 and won. In little time he became chairman of the House Committee on Commerce. He was praised as “independent,” “intrepid,” “scrupulously honest,” “brimful of things to say and do.” But he could also be abrupt and impatient to the point of rudeness. An Ohio newspaperman watching from the gallery described how Representative Washburne could hardly bear listening to others speak, not even his own brothers, for more than a few minutes before plunging into paperwork at his desk or darting off to talk with someone in the gallery. Or he would tilt back in his seat, hands clasped behind his head, and “blow off like a steam engine.” As chairman of the Committee on Appropriations he was famous for saying no as if it were spelled with two
o
’s.

He and his brothers took up the antislavery cause and became early enthusiasts for the new Republican Party. (It was Israel Washburn, in a speech in Maine, who reportedly first used the name “Republican” for the party.) As debate over slavery grew more heated in Congress, the brothers played an increasingly prominent part and were in the thick of a long-remembered scene on the floor of the House.

It happened at about two in the morning on February 6, 1858. The House had been in session for hours, arguing over slavery, when two representatives—one from the North and one from the South—suddenly began throwing punches. Others rushed to join the fray, and, as reported, “Mr. Washburne of Illinois was conspicuous among the Republicans dealing
heavy blows.” Seeing Representative William Barksdale of Mississippi take a swing at Elihu, brother Cadwallader jumped in and grabbed Barks-dale by the hair of his head, which proved to be a wig that came off in Cadwallader’s hand. The astonishment was enough to stop the fight and set everyone laughing. When Cadwallader returned the wig and Barksdale put it on backward, the merriment grew still greater. Among their constituents back in the Midwest, esteem for both brothers rose appreciably.

At home in Illinois, Elihu had become involved with the political prospects of a former congressman, Abraham Lincoln, whose company he greatly enjoyed. They had first met in 1843. In 1860, when Lincoln ran for president, Washburne wrote a campaign biography for him. On the day Lincoln stepped off the train in Washington, in advance of his inauguration, wearing a makeshift disguise because of a rumored attempt on his life, Washburne alone was at the station to greet him and drive him to his hotel.

Through the grim, painful years of the Civil War, Washburne remained as staunch a supporter of the president as anyone in Congress and, more than any, championed the advancement of Ulysses S. Grant. He had “discovered” Grant earlier, when Grant, having retired from the army and failed successively as a farmer and a real estate agent, came to Galena to work as a clerk in his father’s leather store. As Lincoln himself said, Washburne “always claimed Grant as his right of discovery.”

In long letters to Adele through the war years, Washburne provided a vivid account of people and events in Washington, as well as the realities of the desperate struggle in the field, where, too, he was often on the scene. Of his confidence in Grant there was never a doubt. “Without doing any injustice to anyone, I can say I fully believe this army would have been defeated before this, and in its retreat, had it not been for him,” he wrote to her from Grant’s camp near Spotsylvania, in May of 1864, after some of the fiercest fighting of the war. He was with Grant at Appomattox, saw the final surrender on April 9, 1865, and it was in the library of the Washburne home in Galena in November 1868 that Grant received word that he had been elected president.

The confidence Washburne placed in Grant, Grant returned in kind, appointing Washburne secretary of state, a position from which Washburne
withdrew after only a few days. He had been stricken suddenly by what at the time was called a “congestive chill” and remained desperately ill for days. “His life was despaired of,” wrote his daughter Marie, “and I can remember prayers being said for him at our house.” Once recovered, he felt too shaken and exhausted to take on so great a responsibility as secretary of state. He had had his fill of Washington, he decided. When Grant offered the alternative of going to Paris—and with Adele’s full concurrence—he accepted, expecting to enjoy at last a little “quiet and repose.”

Whatever the editorial skepticism about the appointment, or scorn of the kind expressed by Gideon Welles, those who knew Elihu Washburne, including Grant, had every confidence he would prove a great credit to his country.

In its long history Paris had been under siege fifteen times before. In the first ordeal, in 53
B.C
., the native Parisii on the Île-de-la-Cité had been set upon by the Romans. In the most recent, in 1814, when the combined forces of northern Europe, some 200,000 troops, converged on the city, it held out for just over six months. But Paris had been half the size then, its defenses few compared to those now in place, and most Parisians seemed to feel quite secure, their spirits remaining remarkably high given the circumstances.

The ideal weather continued day after day. Even with soldiers drilling in the streets, Paris seemed much as ever. “The weather is charming and Paris seems wonderfully cheerful,” Washburne wrote to Adele on September 28, the tenth day of the siege. In the interest of keeping communications open with the American minister, Prussian Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck was permitting his correspondence to come through the lines by diplomatic pouch.

The formal exchange of dispatches took place every Tuesday morning at a point two miles southwest of Paris at Sèvres, the village on the Seine famous for its china factory. At the sound of trumpets and the raising of
a white flag at exactly ten o’clock, a German officer in full dress would march forward to a broken arch on the Sèvres Bridge, give a military salute, and address a French officer who came to meet him, saying, “Gentlemen, I have the honor to present you my salute.”

“Sir, we have the honor to salute you,” came the reply.

“Gentlemen, I have the honor to inform you my mission is to place in your hands Mr. Washburne’s dispatches.”

“Sir, we are going to have the honor to send them.”

Each officer, having again saluted, returned to his end of the bridge and stepped down to the riverbank. The French would then send a boat across the river to receive other dispatches and mail from the hands of the German officer. Again salutes were exchanged. Each officer immediately returned to his respective trenches, and the instant the white flag came down, both sides opened fire again.

Others in Paris had begun trusting their correspondence to “balloon mail.” On September 21, a daring balloonist had taken off from the city and successfully proven that balloons could carry word of what was happening to the outside world. From that point on, the balloons kept flying and became the topic of headline stories and great public interest in the United States. Eventually some sixty-five balloons took flight from Paris carrying more than 2 million pieces of mail. To send dispatches into the city, carrier pigeons were used.