American Men of Action Part 10

It was in 1830 that he delivered the speech already referred to--perhaps the most remarkable ever heard within the walls of the Capitol. Senator Hayne, of South Carolina, had made a remarkable address, lasting two days, advocating the right of a state to render null and void an unconst.i.tutional law of Congress--in other words, the right of secession from the Union. Two days later, Webster rose to reply. His appearance, always impressive, was unusually so that day; his argument, always close-knit and logical, was the very summation of these qualities; his words seemed edged with fire as he argued that the Const.i.tution is supreme, the Union indissoluble, and that no state has, or can have the right to resist or nullify a national law. It was the greatest oration of America's greatest orator.

Of its effect upon the people who heard it we have spoken; throughout the country it produced a profound impression. The North felt that a new prophet had arisen; the South, a new foeman. The great advocate of nullification, however, was not Hayne, who would be scarcely remembered to-day but for the fact that it was to him Webster addressed his reply, but that formidable giant of a man, John C. Calhoun--the man whom the South felt to be her peculiar representative on the question of state rights, of nullification, and, at last, of slavery. His fate was one of the saddest in American history, for the cause he fought for was a doomed cause, and as he sank into his grave, he saw tottering down upon him the great structure which he had devoted his whole life to upholding.

Not much is known of Calhoun's youth. He was the grandson of an Irish immigrant who had settled in South Carolina, graduated from Yale in 1804, studied law, was admitted to the bar, and, returning to his native state, was, in 1811, elected a member of Congress. That was the beginning of a public career which was to last until his death.

Almost from the first, he was consumed with an ambition to be President, and perhaps would have been, but for an incident so trivial that, under ordinary circ.u.mstances, it would have had no consequences. In 1818, as Monroe's secretary of war, Calhoun had occasion at a cabinet meeting to express some censure of Andrew Jackson's conduct of the Seminole war--a censure which was deserved, since Jackson had violated the law of nations in pursuing his enemy into a foreign country. Twelve years later, when Jackson was President and Calhoun, as Vice-President, was in direct line of succession, so to speak, Jackson heard of Calhoun's remarks, flew into a violent rage, came out as Calhoun's declared enemy, and dealt the death-blow to his presidential aspirations.

Smarting from this injustice, Calhoun turned his attention to the question of state sovereignty, and in February, 1833, South Carolina pa.s.sed the nullification ordinance to which we have already referred.

Calhoun at once resigned the vice-presidency and took his seat in the Senate, prepared to defend the att.i.tude of his state. But Jackson did not wait for that. Seeing that here was an opportunity to strike his enemy, he ordered troops to South Carolina, and threatened to hang Calhoun as high as Haman--a threat which he very possibly would have attempted to carry out had not hostilities been averted by the genius for compromise of Henry Clay. From that time forward, Calhoun became the high priest of the doctrine of state rights and the great defender of slavery. He fought inch by inch the growing sentiment against it; he knew it was a losing fight, and almost the last words uttered by his dying lips were, "The South! The poor South! G.o.d knows what will become of her!"

The great triumvirate left no successors to compare with them in prestige or power. Two survivals from the war of 1812 were still on the scene, Thomas Hart Benton and Lewis Ca.s.s. Benton was a North Carolina man who had removed to Nashville, and at the outbreak of the war, enlisted under Andrew Jackson, and got into a disgraceful street fight with him, in the course of which Jackson was nearly killed. Strange to say, that doughty old hero chose to forget the matter long years afterwards, when Benton was in the Senate--a Union senator from the slave state of Missouri.

Ca.s.s also served through the war, but at the North; was involved in Hull's surrender of Detroit and broke his sword in rage at the disgrace of it; and was afterwards governor of Michigan and Jackson's secretary of war; then, in 1848, Democratic nominee for President and defeated because of Martin Van Buren's disaffection; finally, in 1857, Buchanan's secretary of state, resigning, in 1860, because that s.h.i.+lly-shally President could not make up his mind to send reinforcements to Bob Anderson at Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbor. A man who played many parts, filled many positions, and filled them well, Ca.s.s's name deserves to be more widely remembered than it is.

In those days, a strange, pompous and ineffective figure was flitting across the stage, impressing men with a respect and significance which it did not possess, its name, Stephen A. Douglas, nicknamed "The Little Giant," but giant in little else than power to create disturbance.

Perhaps no other man ever possessed that power in quite the same degree; nor possessed in a greater degree that fascination of personality which makes friends and gains adherents.

Consumed by a gnawing desire of the presidency, beaten for the nomination in 1852, destroying the serenity of the land two years later by contending that Congress had no right to limit slavery in the territories, in the vain hope of winning southern support, but finding himself instead dubbed traitor and Judas Iscariot, receiving thirty pieces of silver from a club of Ohio women, travelling from Boston to Chicago "by the light of his own effigies," which yelling crowds were burning at the stake, and finally hooted off the stage in his own city, certainly it would seem that Douglas's public career was over forever.

But he managed to live down his blunder and to regain much of his old strength by reason of his winning personality; yet made another blunder when he agreed to meet Abraham Lincoln in debate--and one which cost him the presidency. For his opponent drove him into corners from which he could find no way out except at the risk of offending the South. In those days, one had to be either for or against slavery; there was no middle course, and the man who attempted to find one, fell between two stools, as Douglas himself soon learned.

Last scene of all, pitted against that same Abraham Lincoln who had greased the plank for him and shorn him of his southern support, in the presidential contest of 1860, defeated and wounded to death by it, for he knew that never again would he be within sight of that long-sought prize; yet rising n.o.bly at the last to a height of purest patriotism, declaring for the Union, pledging his support to Lincoln, pointing the way of duty to his million followers, and destroying at a blow the South's hope of a divided North--let us do Stephen A. Douglas, that justice, and render him that meed of praise; for whatever the mistakes and turnings and evasions of his career, that last great work of his outweighed them all.

A man who had a great reputation in his own day as an orator and statesman, but whose polished periods appeal less and less to succeeding generations was Edward Everett--an evidence, perhaps, that the head alone can never win lasting fame. Everett was a New Englander; a Harvard man, graduating with the highest honors; and two years later, pastor of a Unitarian church in Boston. There his eloquence soon attracted attention, and won him a wide reputation. At the age of twenty-one, he was appointed professor of Greek at Harvard; and in 1824, at the age of thirty, he was chosen to represent the Boston district in Congress. He remained there for ten years, served four terms as governor of Ma.s.sachusetts, was amba.s.sador to England, and then, president of Harvard from 1846-1849; was appointed secretary of state on the death of Daniel Webster in 1852; and finally, in the following year, was elected to the Senate, but was soon forced to resign on account of ill-health.

Soon afterwards, he threw himself into the project to purchase Mount Vernon by private subscription, delivered his oration on Was.h.i.+ngton 122 times, netting more than $58,000 toward the project; obtained another $10,000 from the _Public Ledger_ by writing for it a weekly article for the period of a year, and added $3,000 more, secured from the readers of that paper. From that time on, he delivered various lectures for philanthropic causes, the receipts aggregating nearly a hundred thousand dollars. They are little read to-day because, in spite of his erudition, polish and high attainments, Everett really had no new message to deliver.

With the coming of the Civil War, another triumvirate emerges to control the destinies of the nation--Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner and William Henry Seward. Stevens and Seward had been introduced to politics by the ineffectual and absurd anti-Masonic party, which flitted across the stage in the early thirties. In 1851, Ma.s.sachusetts rebuked Daniel Webster for his supposed surrender to the slavery party, made in hope of attaining the presidency, by placing Sumner in his seat in the Senate, and retiring him to private life, where he still remained the most commanding figure in the country.

Seward was already in the Senate, had spoken in reply to Webster, and a.s.sumed the leaders.h.i.+p which Webster forfeited. In the House, too, was Stevens, who soon gained prominence by a certain vitriolic force which was in him, and these three men labored unceasingly for the defeat of the South--indeed, for more than its defeat--for payment, to the last drop, for the sins it had committed. They were bound together by party ties and in other ways, but most closely of all by a hatred of slavery, which, with Stevens and Sumner, mounted at times to fanaticism and led them into the errors always awaiting the fanatic.

Thaddeus Stevens, the oldest of the three, had been born in Vermont, but removed to Pennsylvania at the age of twenty-two, and began to practice law there. In 1831, he was one of the moving spirits in the formation of the anti-Masonic party, which fancied it saw, in the spread of Masonry, a grave danger to the republic. Two years later, Stevens was chosen a member of the Pennsylvania legislature, but his career did not really begin until, in 1848, at the age of fifty-seven, he was elected a member of the national House of Representatives, where he soon took his place as the leader of the anti-slavery faction. From that time forward, he was unceasing in his warfare against slavery, frequently going to lengths where few cared to follow, and which would seem to indicate that there was a trace of madness in the man. He developed an exaggerated and sentimental regard for the negro, and grew radical and relentless toward the South.

At the close of the war, he regarded the southern states as conquered territory, to be treated as such, and his ideas of treatment seem to have been founded upon those of the Middle Ages. He wished to confiscate the property of all Confederates; endeavored to impeach President Johnson, who was trying to enforce a system of reconstruction which was at least better than that which Stevens advocated. For a time he seemed to suffer from a very vertigo of hatred, which ate into his soul and destroyed him. The plan of reconstruction adopted by Congress was an embodiment of his ideas; but Johnson was acquitted of the charges Stevens brought against him, and Stevens's poison, as it were, turned in upon himself and killed him. His last request, that his body be buried in an obscure private cemetery, because public cemeteries excluded negroes, shows the man's unbalanced condition, the length to which his ideas had led him.

Charles Sumner, who was to the Senate much what Stevens was to the House, although a larger and better-balanced man, was a typical Bostonian and inheritor of the New England conscience, which, of course, meant that he was opposed through and through to slavery. He was a successful lawyer, and as his sentiments were well known, he was chosen to succeed Webster when the latter wavered on the anti-slavery question, and threw some pledges of a.s.sistance to the South. There was never any doubt about Sumner's position, no sign of wavering or coquetting with the enemy, and in 1856, he was a.s.saulted by a southern senator and so severely injured that three years pa.s.sed before he could resume his seat.

He did so in time to oppose any compromise with slavery or the slave power, which the threatening att.i.tude of the South had almost scared the North into considering, and urged the immediate emanc.i.p.ation of the slaves. When this had been accomplished, his first thought was to make sure that the slaves would remain free, and he began the contest for negro suffrage, as the only guarantee of negro freedom, which he finally won. In the reconstruction period following the war, he was inevitably an ally of Thaddeus Stevens, though the latter far surpa.s.sed him in vindictiveness toward the South.

Let us not forget that the South had shown itself blind to its own interests when, as soon as reconstructed by Andrew Johnson, it had, state by state, adopted laws virtually enslaving the black man again.

But for this fatuity, there would probably have been no such feeling of vindictiveness at the North as soon developed there; certainly there would have been no excuse for such severity as was afterwards exhibited.

So it is true in a sense that the South has itself to blame for the horrors of the reconstruction period, and for the suspicion with which its good faith toward the negro was for many years regarded. Sumner was not a vindictive man, and in his last years, incurred a vote of censure from his own State for offering a bill to remove the names of battles of the Civil War from the Army Register and from the regimental colors of the United States. He practically died in harness in 1874. Looking back at him, one sees how much larger he looms than Stevens; one cannot but admire his courage and honesty of purpose; his public life was a continual struggle for the right, as he saw it, and, remembering that, his faults need not trouble us.

When Sumner arrived in the Senate, he found William H. Seward, of New York, already there. Seward, who had been admitted to the bar in 1822, at the age of twenty-one, was carried into the New York legislature by the anti-Masonic wave of 1830. Eight years later, he was the Whig governor of the state, and in 1849 was sent to the Senate. There he soon rivetted attention by his rebuke of Webster for condoning the Fugitive Slave Law, and caught the reins of party leaders.h.i.+p as they fell from Webster's hands. It was then that he made his famous statement that the war against slavery was waged under a "higher law than the Const.i.tution," and that the fall of slavery was inevitable.

In 1856, when the newly-formed anti-slavery party, known as the Republican, met to name a national ticket, Seward was the logical candidate, but refused to allow his name to be considered, and the choice fell upon that brilliant adventurer, John C. Fremont. Fremont was, of course, defeated, and Seward continued to be the leader of Republican thought, and the chief originator of Republican doctrine.

Indeed, he was, in a sense, the Republican party, so that, four years later, he seemed not only the logical but the inevitable choice of the party for President. His most formidable opponent was Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, who had been carefully working for the nomination, and who was blessed with the shrewdest of campaign managers. Seward led on the first ballot, and would have won but for the expert trading already referred to in the story of Lincoln's nomination.

It was natural that Lincoln should offer him the state portfolio, and Seward accepted it. From first to last, he held true to the President, and the services he rendered the country were second only to those of Lincoln himself. When Lincoln was killed, an attempt was also made to murder Seward, and was very nearly successful--so nearly that for days Seward lingered between life and death. He recovered, however, to resume his place in Johnson's cabinet. Over the new President he had great influence; he had long been an advocate of mercy toward the South, and he did much to persuade the President to the course he followed in restoring the southern states to the Union, without reference to the wishes of Congress. Even John Sherman p.r.o.nounced the plan "wise and judicious," but Stevens, Sumner, and their powerful coterie in Congress violently opposed it, and Seward came in for his share of the vituperation and bitter accusation which the plan called forth.

Johnson's defeat closed his political career, and the last years of his life were spent in travel.

The very cause of his downfall marks him as the greatest of the three, for he placed justice above expediency, and not even the attempt upon his life changed his feeling toward the South. Perhaps the wisdom of his judgment was never better exemplified than in his purchase from Russia of the great territory known as Alaska, for the sum of $7,200,000.

Alaska was regarded at the time as an icy desert of no economic value, but time has changed that estimate, and the discovery of gold there made it one of the richest of the country's possessions.

Outside of Seward, Sumner and Stevens, the most prominent public man of the time was Salmon P. Chase, an Ohioan who had for many years taken an important part in the anti-slavery controversy. Although sent to the Senate in 1849 as a Democrat, he left the party on the nomination of Pierce in 1852, when it stood committed to the support and extension of slavery. Three years later, he was elected governor of Ohio by the Republicans. He was Lincoln's secretary of the treasury, and financed the country during its most trying period in a way that compelled the admiration even of his enemies. He served afterwards as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, dying in 1873. He was another man whose life was embittered by failure to attain the prize of the presidency. Three times he tried for it, in 1860, in 1864, and in 1868, but he never came within measurable distance of it. For he lacked the capacity for making friends, and repelled rather than attracted by a studiously impressive demeanor, a painful decorousness, and an unbending dignity, which was, of course, no true dignity at all, but merely a bad imitation of it. In a word, he lacked the saving sense of humor--the quality which endeared Abraham Lincoln to the whole nation.

Another Ohioan who loomed large in the history of the time was John Sherman, a lawyer like all the rest, a member of Congress since 1855, not at first a great opponent of slavery, but drawn into the battle by his allegiance to the Republican party, forming an alliance with Thaddeus Stevens, and collaborating with him in the production of the reconstruction act. He was appointed secretary of the treasury by President Hayes, in 1876, and his great work for the country was done in that office, in re-establis.h.i.+ng the credit which the Civil War had shaken. He, also, was bitten by the presidential bacillus, and was a candidate for the nomination at three conventions, but each time fell short of the goal--once when he had it seemingly within his grasp. A stern, forceful, capable man, he left his impress upon the times.

Of the men who guided the fortunes of the Confederacy, only two need be mentioned here--Jefferson Davis and Alexander H. Stephens; for, rich as the Confederacy was in generals, it was undeniably poor in statesmen.

The golden age of the South had departed; with John C. Calhoun pa.s.sed away the last really commanding figure among Dixie's statesmen, and from him to Jefferson Davis is a long step downward.

Davis's early life was romantic enough. Born in 1808 in Kentucky, of a father who had served in the Revolution, appointed to the National Military Academy by President Monroe; graduating there in 1828 and serving through the Black Hawk war; then abruptly resigning from the army to elope with the daughter of Colonel Zachary Taylor, and settling near Vicksburg, Mississippi, to embark in cotton planting; drawn irresistibly into politics and sent to Congress, but resigning to accept command of the First Mississippi Rifles and serving with great distinction through the war with Mexico; and, finally, in 1847, sent to the Senate--such was Davis's history up to the time he became involved in the maelstrom of the slavery question.

From the first, he was an ardent advocate of the state-rights theory of government, and the right of secession, and for thirteen years he defended these theories in the Senate, gradually emerging as the most capable advocate the South possessed. That fiery and impulsive people, looking always for a hero to wors.h.i.+p, found one in Jefferson Davis, and he soon gained an immense prestige among them. On January 9, 1861, his state seceded from the Union, and he withdrew from the Senate. Before he reached home, he was elected commander-in-chief of the Army of the Mississippi, and a few days later, he was chosen President of the Confederate States.

From the first, his task was a difficult one, and it grew increasingly so as the war went on. That he performed it well, there can be no question. He was the government, was practically dictator, for he dominated the Confederate Congress absolutely, and its princ.i.p.al business was to pa.s.s the laws which he prepared. Only toward the close of the war did it, in a measure, free itself from this control, and, finally, in 1865, it pa.s.sed a resolution attributing Confederate disaster to Davis's incompetency as commander-in-chief, a position which he had insisted on occupying; removing him from that position and conferring it upon General Lee, giving the latter, at the same time, unlimited powers in disposing of the army.

But it was too late. Even Lee himself could not ward off the inevitable.

On the morning of Sunday, April 2, 1865, Jefferson Davis sat in his pew at church in the city of Richmond, when an officer handed him a telegram. It was from Lee, and read, "Richmond must be evacuated this evening," Lee had fought and lost the battle of Petersburg, and was in full retreat. Davis left the church quietly, called his cabinet together, packed up the government archives, and boarded a train for the South. For over a month, he moved from place to place endeavoring to escape capture, his party melting away until it comprised only his family and a few servants; and finally, on May 9th, he was surprised and taken by a company of Union cavalry near Irwinsville, in southern Georgia. Davis was imprisoned at Fortress Monroe for two years--a thoroughly senseless procedure which only served to keep open a painful wound--and on Christmas Day, 1868, was pardoned by President Johnson.

Davis's imprisonment had added immensely to his prestige. The South forgot his blunders and short-comings, seeing in him only the martyr who had suffered for his people, and welcomed him with a kind of hysterical adoration, which lasted until his death. The last years of his life were pa.s.sed quietly on his estate in Mississippi.

When Davis was chosen President of the Confederacy, Alexander H.

Stephens was chosen Vice-President. Stephens had also had a picturesque career. Left an orphan, without means, at the age of fifteen he had nevertheless secured an education, and, in 1834, after two months'

study, was admitted to the Georgia bar. He at once began to win a more than local reputation, for he was a man of unusual ability, and in 1836, he was elected to the Legislature, though an avowed opponent of nullification.

Seven years later, he was sent to Congress, and continued to oppose the secession movement; but he saw whither things were trending, and in 1859 he resigned from Congress, remarking that he knew there was going to be a smash-up and thought he would better get off while there was time. In 1860 he made a great Union speech; and it is a remarkable proof of the hold he had upon the people of the South, that, in spite of this, and of his well-known convictions, he was chosen Vice-President of the Confederacy a year later. He accepted, but within a year he had quarrelled with Jefferson Davis on the question of state rights, and in 1864, organized the Georgia Peace party. From that time on to the close of the war, he labored to bring about a treaty of peace, but in vain.

He was imprisoned for a few months after the downfall of the Confederacy, but was soon released and was prominent in the political life of Georgia for fifteen years thereafter, being governor of the state at the time of his death in 1883. A more contradictory, obstinate, p.r.i.c.kly-conscienced man never appeared in American politics.

So pa.s.sed the era of the Civil War. Have we had any great statesmen since? Some near-great ones, perhaps, but none of the very first rank.

Great men are moulded by great events, or, at least, require great events to prove their greatness. Let us pause a moment, however, to pay tribute to one of the most accomplished party leaders in American history--a man almost to rank with Henry Clay--James G. Blaine.

As a young editor from Maine, he had entered Congress in 1863. There he had encountered another fiery youngster in Roscoe Conkling, and an intense rivalry sprang up between them. They were very different in temperament, Blaine being the more popular, Conkling the more brilliant.

Blaine had a genius for making friends and keeping them; Conkling's quick temper and hasty tongue frequently cost him his most powerful adherents. Three years later, this rivalry came to an open clash, in which each denounced the other on the floor of the House in words as stinging as parliamentary law permitted. Blaine's tirade was so bitter that Conkling became an implacable enemy and never again spoke to him.

It was almost the story of Hamilton and Burr over again, except that the age of duelling had pa.s.sed.

That quarrel on the floor of the House was to have momentous consequences. Blaine became speaker of the House and the most popular and powerful man in his party, so that it seemed that nothing could stand between him and the desire for the presidency which gnawed at his heart, just as it had at Henry Clay's. But always in the way stood Conkling.

In 1876, at Cincinnati, Blaine was nominated by Robert G. Ingersoll in one of the most eloquent addresses ever delivered on the floor of a national convention, and on the first ballot fell only a few votes short of a majority. But his enemies were at work, and on the seventh ballot, succeeded in stampeding the convention to Rutherford B. Hayes. Hayes, however, was pledged to a single term, and Blaine was hailed as the nominee in 1880; but when the convention a.s.sembled, there was Conkling with a solid phalanx of over three hundred delegates for Grant. The result was that neither Blaine nor Grant could get a majority of the votes, and the nomination fell to Garfield. Finally, by tireless work, Blaine laid his plans so well that he secured the nomination four years later, only to have New York State thrown against him by Conkling and to go down to defeat. Conkling had his revenge, and Blaine's career was practically at an end, for he was an old and broken man.