Samuel Byers - Twenty Years in Europe

While staying in Switzerland and Italy as a consular officer, during a period of well on to twenty years, I kept a diary of my life. Without being a copy of the diary, this book is made up from its pages and from my own recollections of men, scenes, and events. It was during an interesting period, too. There were stirring times in Europe. Two great wars took place; one great empire was born; another became a republic; and the country of Victor Emmanuel changed from a lot of petty dukedoms to a free Italy. It seemed a great period everywhere, and everything of men and events jotted down at such a time would of necessity have its interest. This book is not a history-only some recollections and some letters.

Among the letters are some fifty from General Sherman, whose intimate friendship I enjoyed from the war times till the day of his death. They are printed with permission of those now interested, and they may be regarded as in a way supplementary to the series of more public letters of General Sherman printed by me in the North American Review during his lifetime. They possess the added interest that must attach to the intimate letters of friendship coming from a brilliant mind. Their publication can only help to lift the veil a little from a life that was as true and good in private as it was noble in public.

St. Helens, Des Moines.

A LITTLE WHITE CARD WITH PRESIDENT GRANT’S NAME ON IT-A VOYAGE TO EUROPE-AN ENGLISH INN-HEAR GLADSTONE SPEAK-JOHN BRIGHT AND DISRAELI.

In the State Department at Washington, there is on file a plain little visiting card, signed by President U. S. Grant. That card was the Secretary’s authority for commissioning me Consul to Zurich. “I would much like to have that little card,” I said to an Assistant Secretary, long years afterward. “Most anybody would,” replied the official, smiling. “You may copy it, but it can not be taken from the files.”

That card, in its time, had been of consequence to me. It took me from a quiet little Western town to a beautiful Swiss city, where I was to spend many years of my life, and where I was to meet people, look on scenes and experience incidents worth telling about. And now it has led to my writing down the recollections of them in a book.

I had served four years, that were full of incident, in the Civil War. At its close the opportunity was mine to enter the regular army with a promotion; but many months in Southern prisons had nearly ruined my health and I declined the proffered commission.

“You did well,” wrote General Sherman to me, “to prefer civil to military pursuits; and I hope you will prosper in whatever you undertake. You now know that all things resulted quite as well as we had reason to expect” (referring to the Carolina campaign), “and now, all prisoners are free-the war over.”

The years immediately following the war were spent in efforts to get well, and now when this offer to go to Switzerland, with its glorious scenery and salubrious climate, came, I was overjoyed.

On the 23d of July, 1869, my newly wedded wife and I were standing on the deck of an ocean steamer in the harbor of New York. It was the “City of London.”

As the sun went down in the sea that night, many stood on the deck there with us, straining their eyes at a long, low strip of land bordering the horizon, now far behind them. It was America. Some were looking at it for the last time. My wife and I were not to see it again, except on flying visits, for sixteen years. The gentle breeze, the summer twilight, the vast and quiet ocean, the limitless expanse, the silence, save the panting of the engines, the white sails and the evening light of distant ships passing, gave us a feeling of far-offness from all that belonged to home.

Shortly the great broad moon, apparently twice its usual size, quietly slipped up out of the sea. At first we scarcely realized what it was, it was so great, so splendid, so unexpected. Moonlight everywhere is calming and impressive to the senses, but at sea, spread out over the limitless deep-with the great starlit tent of the heavens reaching all around and down to the waters, it touches the heart to its very depths. We scarcely slept that night-the sea and the moonlight were too beautiful. We walked the deck and built air castles.

August 3, 1869. -Yesterday our ship entered the Mersey and turned in among a wilderness of masts in front of Liverpool. We walked about some in the city of Gladstone’s birth, and that night had our first experience of the quiet comforts of a little English inn. The gentility, the welcome, the home snugness, the open fireplace, the teakettle, the high-posted, curtained beds, all contrasted strongly with a noisy, American tavern, with its loud talk and dirty tobacco-spitting accompaniments. The enormous feet of the Liverpool cart-horses also impressed us.

This morning we called at the American Consulate. The clerk said the Consul was away at the bank. Possibly like Hawthorne, one of his predecessors, he found nothing to do here but look after his salary. Anyway this Consulate is one of the best things in the gift of the President. In Hawthorne’s time, the pay was four times that of a Cabinet officer. Some years, the fees equaled the President’s own salary.

August 10. -The sights we had most wanted to see in London were the Tower, the Abbey, the Fish Market, the docks, and the fogs; these and Mr. Gladstone. The fogs we did not need to see; we could feel them in our very bones. It was fog everywhere. Three people were reported killed the very day we got here-run over by wagons and omnibuses, plowing through the murky thickness. Street lamps are burning in the middle of the afternoon.

Billingsgate Fish Market was not half so wicked as I had heard. It is said to be two hundred years old. It smells as if it were a thousand. There is possibly nothing so interesting to an American elsewhere on English earth, as the “Poets’ Corner” in Westminster Abbey, and, next to that, the Tower of London.

The opulence of the London docks also simply amazed us. Imagine an underground wine vault, seven acres in extent. The total vaults of the Eastern Dock Co. measure 890,000 square feet. The St. Catherine Docks cost nine millions of pounds.

John Lothrop Motley, the historian, is American Minister at London. We called. Found him a tall, aristocratic, consumptive-looking man, apparently not over glad to see traveling Americans. He had in his youth been a fellow student of Bismarck. Later, his daughters married Englishmen. Mr. Motley, like some other Americans sent to high office in London, is not extremely popular among his own countrymen. Neither did Grant approve him; but removed him later, spite of his backing by Charles Sumner.

The Secretary of Legation kindly got me a ticket to the gallery of the House of Parliament. It seemed extraordinary good luck, for whom else should I hear speak, that very afternoon, but John Bright, Mr. Gladstone and the future Lord Disraeli. I looked for oratory in Mr. Gladstone and saw none, either of voice, manner or word. The subject possibly required none. It was the Scotch Education Bill. The tall, grave, spare-looking man stood there with papers in his hand, talking in the most commonplace manner. Often he turned to some colleague and looked and waited as if expecting an explanation. At last he sat down suddenly, as if he had got up out of time. Mr. Disraeli had been sitting there, writing something on the top of his hat, which he had just taken off for the purpose. There seemed to be no desks. When I first noticed numbers of the members with their hats on, I wondered if the session had begun. What I noticed about Mr. Disraeli was the long legs he stretched out before him, the dark, intellectual face, the large features, the yellow skin, the long black hair, the Jewish expression. He followed Mr. Gladstone, but in a voice so subdued that I, in the gallery, did not understand a word he said. Burly John Bright, with his noble face and sturdy mien, followed. He looked like the typical Englishman. He spoke to the bill in an earnest voice and loud enough, but said nothing that I remember. A Scotch member then rose in confusion, mumbled a few words, got scared, mixed up, turned red and sat down. And this is English oratory, I meditated, and called to mind the names of Douglas and Webster and Lincoln and Blaine. I suppose I was simply there on the wrong day.