Illinois, 1858. On a hot, sultry evening, at about nine o'clock, two men stood waiting for a train at a small station some twenty miles west of Springfield.

The station was only a flag stop beside the track, without a building of any kind. One of the men was a German of twenty-three, reporting for a German-language paper in New York, on his way back from a great meeting at Petersburg in Menard County. The other was a lawyer of forty-nine, who had been driven there in a buggy and left alone.

The train for Springfield was already due. They waited half an hour; the train did not come, but a thunderstorm did. The two men took refuge in an empty freight car on a side track, squatted on the floor, and talked about all sorts of things.

The lawyer said that when he was clerking in a country store, his highest ambition had been to sit in the state legislature. "Since then, of course," he said, laughing, "I have grown some, but my friends got me into this business, I did not consider myself qualified for the United States Senate, and it took me a long time to persuade myself that I was. Now I am convinced that I am good enough for it; but every day I keep saying to myself: it is too big a thing for you; you will never get it."

Then he added: "Mary insists, however, that I am going to be Senator and President of the United States, too."

He burst into a roar of laughter, arms around his knees, shaking all over. "Just think," he cried, "of such a sucker as me as President!"

The lawyer was Abraham Lincoln. The young reporter was the man later known as Henry Villard. More than forty years later he put that night into his memoirs.

Ashore with Empty Pockets

Villard was born in Rhenish Bavaria, baptized Ferdinand Heinrich Gustav Hilgard. The introduction his family later wrote for the memoirs says that his father was a stern judge loyal to the crown, while the boy, like several of his uncles, sympathized with the revolution of 1848. At thirteen he came back to school wearing a "Hecker hat" with a red feather, and the rector gave him a choice between the hat and expulsion. Later his father pushed him toward engineering and then law; he wanted only literature, and ran up debts at university.

Rather than go home and throw himself on the mercy of a father who had never treated him other than sternly, the introduction says, he decided to leave, to work hard and show his family he could make an honorable career by his own efforts; later he thought a change of name would help.

He landed in New York on October 18, 1853. By his own account he had no money at all, few clothes and none fit for the coming cold, did not know a single person in New York or anywhere in the East, and could not speak a word of English.

He spent his first day sitting gloomily in his German hotel. A fellow passenger saw what was wrong and lent him twenty dollars. With some other boarders who knew no English he went to dine at the Astor House, then the most famous hotel in the city; the bill of fare was as clear to them as Sanskrit, every dish arrived at once, and they each paid seventy-five cents and walked out as hungry as they had come in.

In the evenings the tap-room filled with German exiles of 1848, loudly denouncing the United States as a sham land of liberty. Their talk, he said, put a damper on his hopes of a rapid and brilliant career.

Special Correspondent for a German Paper

Over the next five years he went west, stayed with relatives in Illinois, tried the law, edited a small German paper in Wisconsin and taught a country school in Pennsylvania. In 1858, at twenty-three, with about sixty dollars in his pocket, he went back to New York and found work with the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, first traveling the Middle West to collect subscriptions and write letters for the paper.

Collecting went badly. Meanwhile the whole country's press was full of the Senate race in Illinois between the Democrat Stephen A. Douglas and the Republican Lincoln, who had agreed to a series of joint debates. Villard proposed that the paper send him to Illinois as its special correspondent, and it agreed.

In Chicago he called on Douglas, who welcomed him along. On the afternoon of August 21, 1858, at Ottawa, he heard the first debate. As he describes it, Douglas had a strong, sonorous voice, forceful gestures and every art of the practiced speaker; Lincoln had a lean, gawky figure and an uncomely face, and his voice, naturally good, often rose to an unnatural pitch. Yet, he wrote, on one side was a skillful debater arguing a wrong and weak cause, and on the other a thoroughly earnest and truthful man inspired by convictions in harmony with the true spirit of American institutions.

He was introduced to Lincoln at Freeport and met him often during the campaign. Lincoln, he says, was approachable, good-natured and full of wit; but he could never take a real personal liking to him, because Lincoln loved jokes and stories, and the coarser the better. He admits too that, like many Republican leaders, he thought it would have been better not to oppose Douglas's reelection, so as to split the Democrats more effectively.

It was a very hot summer and he was almost always on the road. In southern Illinois, he says, food and lodging were nearly always abominable; at Jonesboro he spent a day half-starved and a night with half a dozen roommates. In all he heard four of the joint debates, six other speeches by Lincoln and eight by Douglas.

In the Freight Car

Back to the freight car.

When Lincoln had done laughing, he asked about Villard's background, and was a little surprised at how fluently this German spoke English after so short a time in the country. Then he asked whether it was true that most educated people in Germany were "infidels."

Villard answered that they did not openly profess it, but that most of them did not go to church, from which one might draw that conclusion. As Villard remembered it, Lincoln replied: "I do not wonder at that; my own inclination is that way."

Villard went on to voice his own disbelief in the church's doctrines on God, the divinity of Christ and immortality. Lincoln asked more questions to draw him out but did not commit himself. Villard says he came away with the impression that Lincoln thought as he did. That impression is his alone.

They talked until half past ten, when the late train finally came. He counted that chance meeting among his most precious memories.

A Farewell Written on a Pad

Two years later Lincoln was elected president. In the last days of November 1860, the New York Associated Press asked Villard to go to Springfield and report from there until the president-elect left for Washington.

The man in charge of the journey tried to ignore him. Villard appealed directly to Lincoln, who ordered that he be included in the presidential party. By his account, as far as Cincinnati he was the only member of the press in it.

On Monday, February 11, 1861, shortly after eight in the morning, on a clear, crisp winter day, about a hundred people gathered at the station to shake Lincoln's hand for the last time. Lincoln spoke a few words of farewell: here he had lived more than a quarter of a century, here his children were born, and one of them lay buried; he did not know how soon he would see them again.

Villard says the speech was entirely extemporized; as soon as the train started, he persuaded Lincoln to write it out for him on a pad, and sent it over the wires from the first telegraph station. But for him, he says, it would not have been preserved in the exact form in which it was delivered. He kept the pencil manuscript for some time, then lost it in his wanderings during the Civil War.

The Last Spike

In the war Villard reported from the front for the New York Herald and the New York Tribune, at Bull Run, Shiloh and Fredericksburg. In 1866 he married Fanny, the only daughter of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. In the 1870s he came to America for German bondholders to deal with Oregon railroad debts, and step by step turned from reporter into railroad owner. In 1881, with money raised by a "blind pool," he took control of the Northern Pacific and became its president.

By late summer 1883 the Northern Pacific was about to be completed. He made the opening an international celebration: members of the federal government, governors of the seven states along the line, senators and congressmen, the diplomatic corps and scores of prominent Englishmen and Germans were invited, and General Grant came. Four special trains set out from the East and one from the Pacific coast.

He took his whole family, including his three-month-old son, Henry Hilgard. St. Paul and Minneapolis competed with arches, salutes and parades. At Bismarck he laid the cornerstone of the Dakota capitol, and Sitting Bull, brought from his place of captivity, spoke after him. In eastern Montana, with the permission of the Secretary of the Interior, two thousand Crow people gathered beside the line and performed war dances for the guests.

On September 3, in the waning light, in western Montana, the trains from east and west met. According to the memoirs, the "last spike" was not a golden one, as the press had it, but the very first spike driven on the Minnesota Division in 1872. After the speeches, the thousand feet of track left unfinished for the purpose were laid down before the guests. Amid artillery, military music and wild cheering, Villard hammered down the spike, his family beside him, together with the head chief of the Crows, who, the memoirs say, formally ceded their hunting grounds to the railroad after the baby had touched the spike with his little hands.

"Mr. Villard's emotions at that moment may be imagined," the memoirs say.

The Speed of the Fall

Within months it had all come down.

The memoirs say that the Northern Pacific's construction deficit had grown larger still, a second mortgage was added, and the companies' shares kept falling. He told anxious stockholders it was the work of bears and urged them to buy more at the lower prices, and bought heavily himself to hold the price up; he failed to see that a sweeping crisis, which would spread across the world for years, was already beginning. Friends sold out and stayed away, two directors used inside knowledge to sell short, and the press that had sung his praises turned to attacking his management and his character.

In late November he lost heart and knew that neither he nor his company could be saved. He asked three friends to examine his books, pledging in advance to accept whatever they decided. In the night of December 16 to 17, after midnight, one of them woke him at his hotel and told him he was practically insolvent and the company on the verge of bankruptcy. A syndicate would lend him enough to meet his debts if he pledged all his property and resigned the presidency. He accepted at once. The next afternoon the papers announced his resignation, and by the end of the year he had also left the presidency of the Northern Pacific.

The memoirs say his rise had taken a few years, but his fall from might to helplessness, from wealth to poverty, from public admiration to wide condemnation, was far more rapid. He had just moved into his large new house on Madison Avenue, and part of the press attacked him for living in a palace while others had lost money in his stocks. Only when the friends who had examined his books announced that he had turned over everything he owned to his creditors, and that nothing cast doubt on his honesty of purpose, did opinion turn.

He suffered nervous prostration and for months could hardly sleep. In the spring of 1884 the family moved to the country on the Hudson, and in June he sailed for Germany.

Electric Light

He did not leave the stage.

Around 1880 he had become fascinated with Edison's incandescent lamp. He insisted on electric lighting for his new ocean steamer, the Columbia, over the strong objections of the shipbuilder and of the marine underwriters; the memoirs call it the first electric plant ever placed on a sea-going vessel. He was also one of the first stockholders and a director of the original Edison Light Company.

In 1886 he returned to New York as representative of the Deutsche Bank. In April 1889 he combined the Edison lighting and manufacturing companies into the Edison General Electric Company and was its president until the summer of 1892, when it was merged with Thomson-Houston as the General Electric Company, a merger he opposed.

He returned to the Northern Pacific board, and from 1889 he headed its finance committee. In the summer of 1893 he resigned; by mid-August the court had appointed receivers for the road. The receivers' side later moved to recover profits he was alleged to have made on a branch line; the memoirs say the suit was dropped in the end, and a court-ordered examination of the accounts found that not a dollar of the company's funds had ever been improperly used.

Afterword

After 1895 he held no company office, kept only a small office in the financial district, and gave most of his time to his memoirs. He wrote of his youth in German and of his American years in English, and got as far as the middle of the Civil War. As his health failed and he could not continue on that scale, he spent his last summer compressing the years 1863 to 1900 into a single book written in the third person. So in these memoirs, the early chapters say "I," and the later ones say "Mr. Villard."

He died on November 12, 1900.

On that rainy night in 1858 he squatted in a freight car and listened to a country lawyer laugh at the idea of himself as president. Twenty-five years later he stood beside the track in Montana and hammered down a spike; a few months after that he was woken in the middle of the night and told he had nothing left.

He wrote it all down, the first half as "I," the second half as "he."

[SOURCES, VERSIONS, AND EDITORIAL LIMITS]

1. Scenes, dialogue and feelings come from the Memoirs of Henry Villard, Journalist and Financier, 1835-1900 (2 vols., 1904); no dialogue is invented. Quotations in the Chinese version are the author's translations, with the English originals collected in its quotation notes. The memoirs have three layers, marked in the text: the Introduction (vol. 1, pp. 1-8), which the Preface describes as the family's abstract of Villard's German-language memoir of his youth (privately printed 1902), not his own words; Books I-VII, written by Villard in English in the first person; and Book VIII (1863-1900), a compendium he wrote in the third person in his last summer (Preface, p. v; editors' note at the opening of Book VIII). The sections from "The Last Spike" onward rest on this third layer and are marked "the memoirs say."

2. The freight car: vol. 1, ch. VI, pp. 96-97. Villard gives no date, only "a hot, sultry evening" during the 1858 campaign, at a flag station about twenty miles west of Springfield, on his return from a meeting at Petersburg, Menard County. The date and station name remain to be checked, and the scene is not mapped. Lincoln's "my own inclination is that way" and Villard's impression that Lincoln shared his views rest on Villard alone; he says the Lincoln biographies by Lamon and Herndon confirmed it, which this piece has not checked.

3. Lincoln's age is calculated from his birth in February 1809.

4. Name: the Introduction (vol. 1, p. 8) says only that he later thought a change of name would help, not when he began using "Villard"; the text therefore says only "the man later known as Henry Villard." The date of the change remains to be checked.

5. Ottawa: vol. 1, pp. 92-93, which gives the afternoon of August 21, 1858. His judgments of Lincoln's appearance and speaking, his dislike of Lincoln's coarse stories and his view that Douglas should not have been opposed are his own (pp. 93-94).

6. Springfield farewell: vol. 1, ch. X, pp. 140, 148-150. A footnote says the offer came, "or, rather," from the Herald through Mr. Hudson, and under Associated Press rules his dispatches were shared. "The only member of the press" as far as Cincinnati, the claim that the speech was preserved in exact form only through him, and the fate of the pencil manuscript rest on his word. Other copies and versions of the farewell circulate; whether they match Villard's text has not been checked here. The text paraphrases only two sentences of the version he printed.

7. The last spike: vol. 2, pp. 309-311 (Book VIII, third person). The memoirs name no place, only "western Montana, at the point where the train with guests from the Pacific coast was met," so the event is not mapped. The spike's origin and the Crow chief's cession after the baby touched the spike are the memoirs' account, unconfirmed by contemporary records here. A footnote says the chapter on Villard's presidency in E. V. Smalley's History of the Northern Pacific Railroad (1883), printed for the guests, was dictated by him and partly drawn on in the memoirs.

8. The fall: vol. 2, pp. 313-318. The three friends were Fabbri, Endicott and Rolston. The memoirs also criticize his own mistakes (pp. 314-315).

9. Electric light: the Columbia, vol. 2, p. 290; its claim to be the first such plant on an ocean vessel is not independently checked. Edison General Electric, April 1889, capital $12,000,000, his presidency to summer 1892: pp. 325-326.

10. 1893: vol. 2, pp. 364-372. His resignation was accepted on June 21, 1893, effective July 19; receivers were appointed by mid-August; the later suit and its dismissal, and the court-ordered audit, are Villard's side of the story.

11. The piece covers his rise from immigrant to railroad and electrical magnate and his night with Lincoln in 1858; his war reporting, his purchase of the New York Evening Post and the Nation, and his philanthropy are mentioned briefly or not at all.

Sources: Memoirs of Henry Villard, Journalist and Financier, 1835-1900, 2 vols. (London: Archibald Constable & Co., 1904), OCR text of the Internet Archive scans memoirsofhenryvi01villiala and memoirsofhenryvi02villiala, downloaded November 2, 2026; page numbers from the scans' running heads, not checked page by page against print; public domain in the US. Coordinates for New York, Ottawa (Illinois) and Springfield from Wikidata (Q60, Q576209, Q28515), city-level only and not used as historical evidence.