Page:Memoirs of Henry Villard, volume 1.djvu/198

172 Still, I greatly admired his natural ability and solid acquirements, and especially his high and pure political aims. My acquaintance with him gradually assumed a confidential character, so that he expressed himself very freely regarding public men and matters.

Cameron was the typical American politician, with a well-defined purpose in all he said and did. He also held himself a little too freely at the disposal of newspaper men, to whom he was by far the most cordial and talkative of all the secretaries. He made them feel at once as though they had met an old acquaintance and friend. He was certainly the cleverest political manager in the Cabinet, and, though unquestionably as ambitious as any member of it, he never was guilty of the indiscretions which the political records of Seward and Chase reveal. He had a very shrewd way of tempting journalists by implications and insinuations into publishing things about others that he wished to have said without becoming responsible for them.

The Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles, was speedily discovered to be a rather difficult subject for newspaper enterprise, and the representatives of the press confined their attention to his assistant secretary, Captain G. V. Fox, formerly a naval officer. Fox had suddenly acquired a well-deserved national reputation for patriotic bravery by the offer of his services in connection with an expedition of a “sink or swim” character for the relief of Fort Sumter, planned by himself and authorized by President Lincoln and actually attempted, but resulting in failure from a succession of untoward accidents. He was a very strong man, endowed with remarkable ingenuity, courage, and energy, but full of personal prejudices that made him hardly a safe conductor of public affairs. He was an unsparing critic, regardless of the rules of discipline, policy, and comity, and astonishingly free in his talk to our fraternity.

His brother-in-law, Montgomery Blair, the