Children of the Market Place Part 14

I shall never forget my feelings, but how shall I describe them? My nerves were tense; they rang taut with unexpended energy. I felt death near me. I thought of Dorothy constantly, but I was living with fate.

The line of battle was formed where the valley was narrow. The lofty mountains were on either side of us. Torrents had gullied the plain. The Kentucky volunteers were posted at the left; the Indiana volunteers were stationed near. Our regiment, together with a Texas company, formed the remainder of the line which ran from the plain to the plateau. Extending from these towards the mountains were placed other troops from Illinois, from Indiana, and from Arkansas. Up the valley came Santa Anna, with his 20,000 Mexicans.

He had sent General Ampudia to climb the mountain and fall upon our troops at the left. The battle began in the afternoon and lasted till night.

At dawn Santa Anna advanced his troops in three columns in front of us.

And the battle began to rage. The Indiana troops retreated in disorder.

But the Illinoisians stood their ground, pouring forth sheets of flame upon the Mexicans. We had to retreat. We were pressed back to the narrows. Then General Taylor, hastening up, took command. Batteries were opened. Grapeshot and canister were poured into the advancing Mexicans.

The cannon belched deadly fire. Colonel Davis had routed Ampudia at the left. The Mexicans began to waver in front. We from Illinois and Kentucky started in pursuit. We drove them into a deep ravine.

Here suddenly they were reenforced by 12,000 men. They shot us down like sheep. It was a slaughterhouse. But we fought like madmen. Our riflemen, the squirrel hunters of Kentucky and Illinois, picked off the Mexicans unerringly. Our batteries began to thunder again. Again the Mexicans broke order. They started to run. We pursued them through the valley, under the shadows of the great mountain. Night came.... The silence of night and of our victory.

We had won the battle! The Mexicans fled southward. Then we started to bury our dead. Our losses were terrible. So many boys from Illinois were hea.r.s.ed in this b.l.o.o.d.y soil. Colonel Hardin was killed; but we were commissioned to bring his body back to Jacksonville.

This ended the war in northern Mexico. But meanwhile, as President Polk could not buy California, he seized it. He ordered an American squadron to take San Francisco and other harbors on the California coast. He sent General Kearney with a cooperating force to this end. Kearney occupied the city of Santa Fe and organized a temporary government for New Mexico. The President also sent General Scott against the city of Mexico and Vera Cruz and Cerro Gordo. These were taken; but they were used only as levers in the settlement.

What had been accomplished? We had fixed the Rio Grande as the Texas boundary; we had added California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Utah to the American domain. With Oregon acquired Douglas'

ocean-bound republic was realized. Was it to prove his lasting triumph, or his undoing?

I had been gone less than a year. I was eager to reach Chicago, but I had to stop off at Jacksonville to help bury the body of Colonel Hardin.

We made his grave near the grave of my father and not far from Lamborn's.

What had happened in my absence? How should I find the home that I had left? If Dorothy should be dead, or Mother Clayton, or Mammy or Jenny?

I rang the bell. Jenny came to the door. She gave a cry. Mammy came hurrying through the hall; then Mother Clayton, flinging her arms upward in dumb delight. Then Dorothy, lovely in her young motherhood, carrying our boy, the tears running down her cheeks. She could not speak. She could only rub her cheek against mine, press her lips to mine, hold our little boy's laughing and uncomprehending lips to mine. We cried. We uttered broken words.

I entered. The door closed behind me. I was home. All was well. I sat down. All looked at me. Jenny and Mammy loitered in the room. I wanted to speak. But what had I to say? Nothing! Such happiness at being home!

So we sat until I broke the silence by asking: "When was the baby born?"

Mother Clayton replied: "He is five weeks old to-morrow." Then we all laughed. We had broken this heavy silence with such simple words. And after that, many words, much laughter; and later a wonderful meal prepared by the delighted hands of Mammy and Jenny.

CHAPTER x.x.xVI

But what of Douglas? During the war I had been entirely out of touch with him. What was he doing? What had he accomplished? What was now stirring in his restless imagination? They all had news for me about him and of varied import, according to their att.i.tude.

For one thing he had married while I was in the war. Mother Clayton approved the marriage. Abigail mocked it. For his wife was a southern woman, the owner of many slaves in Mississippi. Douglas had announced that he would have nothing to do with her property, especially with the slaves. But how was he to escape a derivative gain? So Abigail asked. I knew that he disliked the inst.i.tution; but here it was touching him again in a peculiarly intimate way. Texas soiled him with its influence and now his marriage identified him with it. He might regard it, if he would, as a domestic matter like the liquor business, which Maine had just now laid low by a prohibition law. As he would not be a liquor dealer, so he would not be a slave owner. But he was the next thing to it in the circ.u.mstance of his marriage.

But in my absence he had moved to Chicago, and this gave me great happiness. I should now see much of him. He was speculating in land and growing rich. He was advocating the immediate construction of the Illinois Central railroad. He had been triumphantly reelected to Congress. The Mexican War had helped to do that for him. He was only thirty-four, but a great and growing figure.

Chicago had changed in my absence. The second water system, consisting of a reservoir at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Water Street, and a pump, operated by a 25-horsepower engine, was soon to be supplanted by a crib sunk in the lake 600 feet from sh.o.r.e, from which the water was to be drawn by a 200-horsepower engine. The lake traffic had increased enormously. The Illinois and Michigan ca.n.a.l was soon to be opened.

Mother Clayton had saved for me the copies of Niles' _Register_ and had marked pa.s.sages in Douglas' speeches in Congress, particularly his effective retorts to the aged J. Q. Adams, who pursued Douglas with inveterate hostility. It was all about the slavery question.

I looked Douglas up as soon as possible. We invited him and his young wife to dinner. Surely he had found a charming and interesting mate. We now had so much of life in common and of mutual memory to draw upon. He was eager to hear of the war, the battles I had been in. He was very proud of me and happy beyond measure that I had come out of the war without a scar.

How strange about Colonel Hardin! "An able man, that," said Douglas, "but I don't believe he ever forgave me for taking the state's attorneys.h.i.+p from him."

Abigail and Aldington were also at our dinner. Mrs. Douglas found herself quite at home with Mother Clayton and Dorothy. I could see, however, that she did not like Abigail.

After that Douglas and I had many meetings. He was full of ideas and absorbed in various activities. He was pugnacious and energetic. But what friends he made! He pa.s.sed in and out of my view frequently, now that we lived in the same city. And before I knew it, scarcely before there was any talk of it, he was selected as United States Senator from Illinois.

It was in December of 1847. He was within some four months of his thirty-fifth birthday. He had now had an uninterrupted career of political triumph. His one defeat for Congress, when he ran the first time, could scarcely be counted against him.

But to my English eyes, in spite of all my admiration for the man, I saw much imperfection in his intellectual make-up, due in part I think to the haste with which he had lived. He had an adroitness and a fertility of mind which were altogether amazing. Yet he was like Chicago: of quick and phenomenal growth. His protective coloration was like Chicago's, which covered its ugliness and its irregularity with bunting and flags on a holiday. He was growing up rapidly, as Chicago was growing up.

Chicago was facing greater problems as its population increased; and as Douglas rose into higher power, thicker complications entangled him. He dragged after him the imperfect education of his youth, the opinions of his immaturity. He was now enmeshed in the problems of the new territories, and always, slavery. Prepared or not, he would fight for his principles. If defeated he would rise quickly; if triumphant he advanced.

As leisure was possible to me, and because of Dorothy's somewhat frail health, we decided to give up the Chicago house this winter and spend the season in Was.h.i.+ngton. We would take Mother Clayton, of course, and Mammy and Jenny. I would thus have the chance to watch the contests in Congress in which I was so profoundly interested. I wished to witness Douglas' part in these great affairs. Some of the old giants were still there: Calhoun, Webster. How would Douglas face these great men? Above all, the shreds of a decaying past were stretching themselves forward to enter the texture of the new weaving. How would the two pieces be connected? Would it be a patchwork?

Douglas had come to me offering an appointment in Illinois. When I declined this, he suggested a consuls.h.i.+p on the continent, or in London.

But I could not see my way clear to leave America. I had too many interests now, and I wished to see the unfolding of events here.

CHAPTER x.x.xVII

We found Was.h.i.+ngton much as d.i.c.kens had described it seven years before.

The avenues were broad. They began in great open s.p.a.ces and faded into commons equally unbounded. They seemed to lead nowhere. There were numerous streets without houses. There were public buildings without a public. There were thoroughfares that had no markings but ornaments. The residences had green blinds and red and white curtains at the windows almost without an exception. Gra.s.s grew in the avenues. The distances were great, separating the new public buildings from easy access.

Brickyards were in the center of the city, from which all the bricks had been taken, leaving only dust, which was stirred by gusts of wind filling the air at times to suffocation. Pennsylvania Avenue was grotesque with its big and little buildings, its small and impoverished shops set between the more splendid windows of jewelry and fabrics. It was in such sharp contrast with Chicago. No noise here. No smell.

Instead of lumbering drays, many carriages; instead of bustle, leisure; instead of commercial haste, languid strolling along Pennsylvania Avenue. And there at its head stood the unfinished Capitol; and at its other end the executive mansion now occupied by President Polk, and soon to be the residence of the hero of the Mexican War, Zachary Taylor; and soon of Millard Fillmore.

Dorothy and I and Mother Clayton visited the places of interest at once.

We went to the Patent Office and saw the model of the Morse telegraph.

We looked at the Declaration of Independence displayed in a gla.s.s case at the Department of State. We stood before Trumbull's pictures of the celebrated men of an earlier day. We went to the room of the Spring Court, saw the judges in their black robes, the thin intellectual Chief Justice Taney at the center. We went to the slave market, where the capital of the republic trafficked in human flesh for itself and the surrounding country. Lottery tickets were openly sold. Negroes thronged the streets. They were the domestic servants, the laborers, the hackmen.

A raggedness, a poverty, a s.h.i.+ftlessness, characterized external Was.h.i.+ngton. Was.h.i.+ngton was not Chicago.

We found that Douglas had settled himself handsomely with his young and charming wife. He entertained a great deal, and was entertained in turn.

We dined back and forth with each other. And because of Mrs. Douglas'

friends.h.i.+p Dorothy found her social pleasures a.s.sured and advanced.

Was.h.i.+ngton like other cities in America was struggling out of the earth.

The whole country was in a similar throe. Everywhere were great dreams partly realized. One could not help but imagine what the nation would become, just as one could not look at the unfinished Capitol at the end of Pennsylvania Avenue without completing its lines in imagination.

We had come to New York City by boat, as I had gone to Chicago by boat in 1833; but in New York we had taken a train to Philadelphia, claimed our baggage at the station, transferred to another station, and taken another train through Baltimore to Was.h.i.+ngton. The cities of the East were now in telegraphic communication with each other: Was.h.i.+ngton with Baltimore and New York; Philadelphia and Newark were joined. Polk's election had been flashed by the telegraph. And news now came to Was.h.i.+ngton on every subject: markets, fires, catastrophes, elections.

The public press was very active. The country was in a ferment. The great West agitated the more sensitive, the listening East. From beyond the Atlantic news of thrilling import poured upon us. In truth the whole world was trembling at the threshold of a new era. Douglas was keenly conscious of these world changes. They occupied my own thoughts.

In France Louis Philippe had been dethroned, a republic had been established with Louis Napoleon as President. The ideas of the revolution had worked a democratic triumph as to the suffrage and the form of the government. This was February, 1848, the same month that Douglas made his first speech in the Senate.

This February revolution in France had lighted the fires of liberty throughout Europe. In England there was agitation and violence. The people there were demanding the right to vote. In Italy there was a cry for reform and free const.i.tutions. Mazzini was proclaiming the fact that the people in Spain, Hungary, Germany, Poland, Russia, were oppressed.

He called the cause of all peoples a common cause. The French Revolution had announced the liberty, equality and fraternity of individual men; the new revolution should proclaim the liberty, equality and fraternity of nations. Cavour and Garibaldi were getting ready to bring about the unification of Italy. The Germans had gained some liberties in 1830. But when Paris broke into shouts for freedom in 1848, the news went across the Rhine and the German liberals arose and demanded a const.i.tutional government. Metternich was obliged to flee the country. The Emperor Ferdinand abdicated in favor of his nephew, and the people's const.i.tution was granted. There were rioting and bloodshed in the streets of Berlin.

As a result of all this, thousands of Europeans were fleeing to America, the land of the free. Yet there were the slave markets in Was.h.i.+ngton, New Orleans, all through the South. And Congress was about to consider the new territory which had come as a result of the Mexican War and the Oregon settlement. How would Douglas react to these world movements? How would he interpret them? Who could stand against this world-wide avalanche? With the North now greatly the superior of the South in wealth, in railroads, mines, in agricultural productiveness, what could the South do for her slaves and her cotton? What would the t.i.tans--iron, coal, gold, copper, wheat, corn--do to the Giant of cotton?

I heard Douglas' first speech in the Senate and interpreted it against this background. He had already been made chairman of the committee on territories, and thus placed in the very midst of the fight touching the annexations. The great Webster was here. He had opposed the annexation of Texas and the Mexican War, and was the spokesman of the Whig party.

He had split metaphysical hairs with Calhoun, also here. Calhoun declared that the Const.i.tution was over the territory and by that fact carried slavery into it; no imperialism in America. To this Webster rejoined that the territory was the property of the United States and not a part of it. Hence the Const.i.tution was not over it and slavery could be kept out of it. This was implied powers in favor of liberty.