After some years of private practice Commodore Vanderbilt sent for me and offered the attorneyship for the New York and Harlem Railroad. I had just been nominated and confirmed United States minister to Japan. The appointment was a complete surprise to me, as I was not an applicant for any federal position. The salary was seven thousand five hundred dollars and an outfit of nine thousand.
The commodore's offer of the attorneyship for the Harlem Railroad, which was his first venture in railroading, was far less than the salary as minister. When I said this to the commodore, he remarked: "Railroads are the career for a young man; there is nothing in politics. Don't be a damned fool." That decided me, and on the 1st of January, 1921, I rounded out fifty-five years in the railway service of this corporation and its allied lines.
Nothing has impressed me more than little things, and apparently immaterial ones, which have influenced the careers of many people.
My father and his brothers, all active business men, were also deeply interested in politics, not on the practical side but in policies and governmental measures. They were uncompromising Democrats of the most conservative type; they believed that interference with slavery of any kind imperilled the union of the States, and that the union of the States was the sole salvation of the perpetuity of the republic and its liberties. I went to Yale saturated with these ideas. Yale was a favorite college for Southern people. There was a large element from the slaveholding States among the students. It was so considerable that these Southerners withdrew from the great debating societies of the college and formed a society of their own, which they called the Calliopean. Outside of these Southerners there were very few Democrats among the students, and I came very near being drawn into the CaIliopean, but happily escaped.
The slavery question in all its phases of fugitive slave law and its enforcement, the extension of slavery into the new territories, or its prohibition, and of the abolition of the institution by purchase or confiscation were subjects of discussion on the campus, in the literary societies, and in frequent lectures in the halls in New Haven by the most prominent and gifted speakers and advocates.
That was a period when even in the most liberal churches the pulpit was not permitted to preach politics, and slavery was pre-eminently politics. But according to an old New England custom, the pastor was given a free hand on Thanksgiving Day to unburden his mind of everything which had been bubbling and seething there for a year. One of the most eminent and eloquent of New England preachers was the Reverend Doctor Bacon, of Center Church, New Haven. His Thanksgiving sermon was an event eagerly anticipated by the whole college community. He was violently anti-slavery.
His sermons were not only intently listened to but widely read, and their effect in promoting anti-slavery sentiment was very great.
The result of several years of these associations and discussions converted me, and I became a Republican on the principles enunciated in the first platform of the party in 1856. When I came home from Yale the situation in the family became very painful, because my father was an intense partisan. He had for his party both faith and love, and was shocked and grieved at his son's change of principles. He could not avoid constantly discussing the question, and was equally hurt either by opposition or silence.
