I

CHAPTER II

THE MAKING OF A STATESMAN

BOYHOOD

F HIS personal history were not symbolic of that courage which is the essential and abiding spirit of American society, the childhood and youth of William Gibbs McAdoo might be dismissed with that quotation from Gray's Elegy with which Abraham Lincoln epitomized his own boyhood:

"The short and simple annals of the poor;" but, since McAdoo's destiny seems curiously synthetic of his time and nation, a hard struggle against poverty which, remembered in his executive career, was to prove a searchlight upon the problems of the poor, it is essential in the record.

Born near Marietta, Georgia, on the thirty-first of October, 1863, his first definite impression was of the passage of a victorious invading army, and the entire tale of his early years is woven on the woof of a pinching poverty. Long years after he had surmounted that condition, but before his entrance into public life, he said of his youth:

"I was brought up in Georgia, in the path of General Sherman's famous march to the sea. As Henry Grady once remarked, 'General Sherman was a bit careless with fire, and, for this reason, among other things, he has never been a popular man in Georgia.' For myself, however, I feel that I owe General Sherman a debt of gratitude. I believe that character is produced and developed to the highest extent by hardships, suffering and poverty. I have never doubted that whatever of character I have developed has been in a large

measure due to the surroundings and conditions which General Sherman forced upon the people of our section during the great war."

The frame house where McAdoo was born was one which his father, then serving in the Army of the Confederate States, had purchased only a short time before. It stands on the Powder Spring Road, a few miles outside of the town of Marietta, about eighteen miles from Atlanta and near the battle-field of Kennesaw Mountain. At the time of the child's birth, the place was in danger of the approaching Federal Army. A few months afterward, his mother, carrying him in her arms and gathering the other children about her, fled before the oncoming Sherman forces and found refuge in Midway, a suburb of Milledgeville, the old capital of the state.

Not until the time of another great war did McAdoo return to his childhood home in Milledgeville. A widow and her two daughters dwelt within its walls, but in one of its windows hung a service flag of two stars, one of them gold, proclaiming its tribute to the warfare overseas waged by a nation as united in spirit as in constitutional integrity. "Nothing in all my journeying through the country," he said, "touched me as much as the message of that flag in the window. It was the token of healed sectional wounds, of a common cause, of a unified land, and, as I stood at the door where my mother so often stood during the poignant days following the Civil War period, I thanked God that He had given me the chance to do my part in the work those stars typified."

For thirteen years the McAdoos lived in or near Milledgeville. William Gibbs was only a year and a half old when the war ended; but war conditions lasted

in Georgia for many a day, and his persistent memory of blue-coated soldiers straggling through the streets of the little town may be of a time following the passing of "Uncle Billy's boys." It is, however, the center of the picture of a troubled, hard working, but not unhappy childhood.

Its salvation from the misery that is too often the handmaiden of want was due not to outward circumstance but to the remarkable characters of his father, the older William Gibbs, and his mother, Mary Faith McAdoo. Both of them came of "good stock," the former of a family of Virginia-Tennessee pioneers who had won distinction in the War of the Revolution, in the War of 1812, and in the Mexican War where the first William Gibbs held a commission; the latter of the famous Floyd family of Georgia, which had given generals and soldiers to the struggling nation. Both the boy's parents had been married previously to their marriage to each other. They seem to have brought to their union not only a solidity of affection which made their home life peculiarly strong, but also a standard of thought and morality which was unquestionably the determining influence in their son's career. For an understanding of the McAdoo psychology during the six portentous years when he held the greatest fiscal power that any man has ever exercised in the history of the world it is necessary to reconstruct something of the family background, not for its hereditary significance as much as for the traditional inspiration it gave to a sensitive eager child, apparently debarred by the fortunes of a civil war from fulfillment of his own part in the carrying on of the national heritage.

The marriage of a McAdoo to a Floyd was a wedding of pioneer and cavalier. It is fairly easy to trace the

two strains in William Gibbs McAdoo. The breadth of vision, the westward outlook, the rugged humor evident in McAdoo and so often suggestive of Lincoln, whose forebears were of the same race and experience, the sublimation of the personal to the general welfare are characteristic of the Scotch-Irish group who broke down the barriers of the wilderness, while the high daring of action, the aptitude for public service, and the gallantry of courage which are not less notable in him, probably owe their existence to the headier strain which ran through the Floyd blood.

The McAdoos, certainly Gaelic and probably Highland Scotch, came in the seventeenth century to Virginia, but moved southward in the early eighteenth century to North Carolina. Thereafter the urge of pioneering drew them westward to Eastern Tennessee where they settled in the section known as Piedmont. The McAdoo family Bible sets down John McAdoo, born in Virginia in 1757, and dying near Clinton, Tennessee, in 1830. They were born trail-blazers and wilderness fighters, tall, thin, blue-eyed men with a racial flair for struggle against natural forces. They fought in the War of the Revolution at King's Mountain and Guilford Court House. National independence attained, they kept up their own never-ceasing fight for national development. They served under Jackson in the War of 1812. They fought sporadic Indian warfare, and constant battles for homesteading. Life was hard to them, but it was also inspiriting, and they deeded to the elder William Gibbs McAdoo, born in 1820, grandson of the John who had migrated from Virginia, the heritage of their visioning.

This man, McAdoo's father, and unquestionably one of the most potent influences upon his son's life, epit

omized in many aspects the epic of American national existence. His boyhood was spent upon the Island Ford Farm which had been cut out of the wilderness by his family's efforts. His father and mother, "Uncle John" and "Aunt Polly" to the countryside, linked him to a time of his country's infancy. His mother's family, the Gibbses, going into exile from England with the Stuarts, had found their way through Holland to the American colonies, and paralleled the course of the McAdoos to the Tennessee mountains. The boy's home, built at a crossing of river and highroad, was meetingplace for the community. He grew up in an atmosphere of hard work, of occasional neighborly recreations, of dances, and corn-huskings, and political meetings, but, most of all, an atmosphere of ambition. It was a day of adventure, of Jackson and Houston flaming to zenith in his own state, of tense drama in political life with every citizen a partisan spectator if not a participant, of the opening of the West, of luring opportunities, of widening horizons. To these influences the boy was plastic, and, had it not been for a certain scholarly, philosophic bent which turned him toward the law, he might have joined John McAdoo in that association with Houston which held in Damon and Pythias fashion through the thrilling years of the latter's storm-swept life. As it was, he set his goal toward the attainment of an education, more difficult to secure in his time than in later days.

In the early 'forties he went to the East Tennessee University, after having taught school for a few years at both Union and Franklin Academies. He was the principal of the former from 1838 to 1840, and of the latter the following years, returning to Union for two years. At the university he specialized in Latin and