We have considered, and we hope with charitable eyes, the scenes resulting from the victory in that skirmish at Homestead, between Carnegie, Frick, and the Common People; we have thought of the result of the picket fire at Buffalo between organized labor and the combination of capital represented by the New York Central Railroad; both of which engagements, while only out-post encounters of the on-marching army of the Common People, were decisive victories for the capitalists, the sham aristocrats, believers in “caste.” In the name of law and order (so dear to the American heart) they had appealed to the power of the State to protect, with militia, their property, and that militia, ever loyal and truly American, had responded to the call of the Executives (both Democrats) of the two most powerful States in the Union. That militia, largely composed of poor men, and men of the people, absolutely abhorring anything like the disregard of established laws, had responded to the call of the Governor of each respective State, New York and Pennsylvania. Law and order were re-established by the people of which the militia is but part. Two Democratic Governors, like patriotic citizens that they are, had bowed their heads before enacted laws—no matter what their personal feeling may have been upon the subject—and granted protection to the property of the capitalists, who, as citizens of each State, were entitled thereto, no matter by what means the capitalists and sham aristocrats may have acquired that property. The result of the action of these two Governors, and the acquiescence by the people and the support of the militia, is incontestible evidence that Socialism and Anarchism have no home in America.
The people accepted the result, as did the people of Homestead starvation and distress, because its presence at every hearth became a matter of trifling consequence; each hearth of the poor “Common People” of America is illuminated and warmed by the patriotic fires lighted thereon by our forefathers in 1776. The law must be obeyed! As long as that law exists, unrepealed, unmodified, or unamended, it must be obeyed! And the might of the people, the “Common People,” the Abraham Lincoln party, the Andrew Jackson party, the Thomas Jefferson party, and the Grover Cleveland party, all guarantee the enforcement of every law upon our statute-books. And the chiefest of these is the Constitution of the United States of America, wherein is guaranteed the franchise of every citizen; wherein is declared that the “majority shall rule in America.” The poor, the “Common People,” have suffered defeat in their strikes and attempted resistance to the claim of social difference existing in our country. They have borne the arrogance, insults, and wrongs inflicted by a sham aristocracy. All attempts at correction of the evil have proved abortive.
On November 8, 1892, the “Common People” resorted to that most efficacious of remedies in this great Republic, the ballot-box; and their victory was as great and pronounced as their suffering had been severe in the past. As the fruit of their victory, as in 1860, they will place in the Presidential chair at Washington a MAN OF THE PEOPLE—Grover Cleveland—whom they believe to be honest, as they believed that Abraham Lincoln was honest, in 1860. They have elected the men of their choice, men representing the “Common People,” to both branches of the Legislature of the National Government. They have selected those who will express the sentiments of the “Common People” in the legislative halls of the nation. They, the “Common People,” will be heard through their representatives in the Congress of the Union.
From the sad picture of unsuccessful strikes, starvation, and destitution, let us turn to the more pleasing picture of the possibilities offered by this exhibition of the POWER OF THE PEOPLE.
Carnegie, Frick, Webb, and others, have enjoyed a transient, delusive dream in which the delights of victory were enjoyed for the moment. Now comes the time of the people! They have learned that their power does not lie in associations, amalgamations, and organization. It lies in the selection by the majority, at the ballot-box, of representatives who will express the will of the people in making the laws of the land, such laws as will enforce and insure equality, the extinction of “caste,” and the protection of the poor men, who constitute the larger portion of the population of our country, and are therefore greater, being the majority on election day, than the rich, sham aristocrats, who have insulted, jeered, and snubbed the poor during the past twenty-five years.
Now will come the crucial test of the honesty and fidelity reposed, by the people, in the administration and legislative bodies elected by them. Should they prove recreant and traitors to the trust reposed in them, it would be the first time in the history of the nation (with possibly the single exception of John Tyler, who became President by the death of William Henry Harrison). Then, should the will of the people become manifest through the agency of their representatives, in Congress assembled, whereby the present laws be repealed; if it become evident that it was the will of the people that the Constitution of the United States should be amended, so as to be in accordance with the laws the enactment of which the people demanded, the legislators would be obliged to so amend and change the Constitution of the United States to make it consistent with the will of the people. Rock and foundation of the edifice of the Federal Government, the Constitution as it is, that which is more powerful than even the Constitution is the will of the people, the majority of the citizens of the Union, irrespective of wealth or assumed social position. It has been demonstrated that by some peculiar kind of method the wealth of the nation is becoming centralized in the hands of a few families and persons who render possible the construction of an oligarchy similar to that existing in the Republic of Venice.
Suppose that the people should demand and insist upon the passage of an income tax for the support of the Federal Government, which would relieve them, the “Common People,” from paying for the privileges enjoyed by the rich, of living in a Republic and the security which their property there enjoys.
And, suppose that the sham aristocracy should cry, “Inherent Rights,” as they would; the people might respond that it is not a question as to the Inherent Right of Mr. Astor, Mr. Vanderbilt, Mr. Rockefeller, et al., to possess, under the present system of laws, any amount of property. It is a mere question of the Will of the People. Many good, learned, and great Constitutional lawyers have argued, and with much apparent truth, that the federation of States prior to 1865 was but a mutual copartnership entered into by the sovereign States, springing from the original thirteen colonies, constituting but a copartnership, surrendering no right to the firm or copartnership except such rights as had been specifically named in the Federal Constitution.
Without entering into the legal aspects of the case, as to whether these claims be just or not; without assuming to know whether the nullification proposed by John C. Calhoun was legally sound; without discussing the question whether South Carolina and the other States of the South had a right to secede and disintegrate the Union; assuming that they had the right, inherently, and to draw a parallel to the assumed Inherent Right of the rich of America under the laws and the Constitution as they now exist, their attention might be attracted profitably to the lesson that was taught the minority in the South when they assumed to exercise Inherent Rights contrary to the wishes of the majority. 2,800,000 bayonets, with the flag of the Union floating over them, was conclusive argument that the Inherent Rights claimed by the Southern States were actually Wrongs in a Republic.
“Vox populi, vox Dei.” The voice of the people, the majority, is the voice of God in a Republic, from which there is no appeal. Seek it, as the South did in 1861, and the result will be the same. The Majority will rule.
Suppose that the Common People should demand a repeal of all the revenue laws, a repeal of all tariff duties and protection which did not result in direct benefit to them; suppose that they should insist that, except so far as protection benefited them (the “Common People”) by an increase of wages, which should be arrived at by a fair adjustment of the conflicting interests of capital and labor, adjusted by a board of arbitration selected by them, the Common People; suppose that the people should demand that these tremendous incomes enjoyed by the Vanderbilts, Astors, Goulds, Carnegies, Fricks, and others, should pay the pensions of the Federal soldiers who fought for the preservation of the Union; suppose the people should demand that the expenses of the Federal Government, instead of being levied upon them, should be levied upon the incomes of those who remained at home in safety during the four years of the Civil War; who, while far away from the field of battle, have speculated upon the necessities and needs of the nation, who have utilized that protection, born in a spirit of patriotic desire to furnish means for the support of the defenders of the Union, emanating from patriotic principles of the Abraham Lincoln Republican party; suppose that the people should demand that they—not out of the accumulated mass, but out of the interest upon the amount accumulated under existing laws—which said laws the people, through their representatives, shall deem wise to change—requiring that in the future these masters of immense wealth shall contribute a share to the defraying of the expenses of the Government commensurate with the advantages they have derived, from the load of debt, in the shape of pensions and otherwise, occasioned by the Civil War, wherein the Union was preserved.
Let us imagine a scale of income tax for the people of America: $5000 and under, untaxed; $5000 and over, to be taxed. If the chosen representatives of the people, selected by them last November and to be selected by the various State Legislatures elected by the people within the near future, refuse to make such an enactment as an income tax upon all incomes of more than $5000; suppose the people organize themselves, and call upon the country in a general election; gentlemen of aristocratic proclivities, where will you be? Of the mass of freeborn American citizens (quite as good as the sham aristocrats) not five per cent. enjoy an income as great as $5000. Would you resort to physical force? The Hon. J. Brisben Walker, in his article in the Cosmopolitan, indicates the true position that you would occupy. Consider the possibility. Yell “Unconstitutional.” Proclaim that it is illegal. The people would change the Constitution. By the voice of the majority, they would change the laws.
What have you to offer to stem this tide of indignation that you have provoked? Do you say, “Capital would leave the country?” Well, you can’t carry the railroads, the factories, the soil, the buildings from America. You may have your castles in Scotland, but we have your plants of machinery, your buildings, and that upon which your security depends and is founded is in our power in America. Would you secede, as the Plebeians proposed to do from the Patricians at Rome, and found a city on the Sacred Hills of your sham aristocracy? The Plebeians, the Common People, would never seek you with the olive branch of peace and promise offers of compromise, as did the Patricians of old seek the Plebeians, but they would recall to your attention in forceful manner the lesson taught to the Southerners in 1861, when the “Common People,” the majority in America, by their might, overpowered and overturned the seceders who, when they found that the minority, even though blessed with an attempted social superiority, could not rule in the American Republic, sought to secede.
The Carnegies, Vanderbilts, Astors, Fricks, and others, would be as helpless in such a struggle, and never as brave and earnest, as was Lee’s decimated army at Appomattox.
What the people should or will do, it does not interest us to discuss. What they can do is to require that the payment of the taxes for the support of the nation be derived from those sources which have become hateful and oppressive to the people; and, at a general election, the men who form the majority would be those whose incomes do not exceed $5000—no, not even $2000 per annum.
Then, let us establish for the fancy of our sham aristocrats a picture for those who believe in the crime of “Caste” in our country, to dwell upon. The victors at Homestead and at Buffalo would do well, while imbibing the sweet draughts of victory, to consider the bitter cup of hemlock that the people can require them to partake of. Anything is possible in a Republic, by the votes of the majority.
All incomes less than five thousand dollars to be entirely exempt from taxation; from five to ten thousand, a tax of five per cent.; from ten to twenty thousand, ten per cent.; from twenty to fifty, twenty per cent.; from fifty to a hundred, forty per cent.; from a hundred to two hundred, fifty per cent.; from two hundred thousand to half a million, seventy-five per cent.; from half a million and onward, ninety per cent.
There is no pretence in this scale to be equitable or just. That could be arrived at by the statistician and the legislators. It is merely an example of what the people CAN AND MAY DO. The fund thus derived would more than defray all the expense of the Federal Government, pensions included, and increase the pensions besides.
What is to prevent the enactment of such a law, if the majority should demand it?
You may say, Gentlemen of the Privileged Classes, “It is contrary to the spirit of the Republic. It will amount to confiscation.” To men of the Carnegie, Frick, and Webb stamp the people might reply, “Was the hiring of armed bullies, outcasts, and residents of other States consistent with the spirit of the Republic? When you have formed those hirelings into a private army to do your bidding against the lives of your fellow citizens, is it not late in the day for you to call up ‘the Spirit of the Republic’? You have gloated in triumph over your victories and the wants of the people. You have seen us surrounded by starvation and destitution. You, professing Christianity, have made us objects of your contempt and insult. Our daughters have not been safe from the contaminating gaze of your weak, puerile progeny. You have adopted crests, castes, social distinctions, sham aristocracy. You have bowed the knee before the degenerate British peerage. You have taken the money earned by our labor to purchase alliances with the decayed aristocracy of Europe. Is it not late, good my would-be lords and barons, to call up the Spirit of 1776?”
And, even should it come, like the spectres of the dream of Richard III., would it not make you quake and quiver, so contrary are your wishes to the spirit of the founders of the Union?
“Impracticable, the collection of these taxes,” is one of the excuses for their non-imposition. The people have trusted Grover Cleveland with the power of executing the laws of the nation. The people believe that, as Lincoln, Jackson, and Jefferson, he will not be recreant to the trust reposed in him. He will collect the taxes; he will seize the property of the corporations; he will imprison the perjurers. He will perform the duties imposed upon him, in the high office of the nation to which the will of the people has called him. He will see that the mandates of the people are obeyed. This tremendous accumulation of fortunes must cease! A Vanderbilt leaves a hundred million to one son! At five per cent. per annum, the income is five millions each year. It is impossible for him to spend it. The difference between his expenses and his income is added to this mighty mass of money, which is concentrating each year more and more, compounding the interest thereon, in the hands of a few citizens of the Republic. Mr. Gould dies and leaves a hundred millions. If evenly distributed between his children, it would be impossible for the income to be spent, and it would simply accumulate, generation after generation. The Astors have adopted a habit, like most of the rich men of the nation, in imitation of English entailment, of leaving the bulk of their property to the eldest son, while apportioning off the younger children with a million or two. The impossibility of that elder son spending the income is perfectly apparent. The object is to accumulate, in the hands of a few families, the wealth of the nation. The tendency is exactly in that direction.
Not only is it un-American, but especially obnoxious to the people generally, as it tends toward the accumulation of wealth, not only to an unwholesome but to an alarming degree, in the hands of the eldest sons of these families. It is practically the entailment of the estate, without so announcing it. Let us take, for example, the Goulds, Vanderbilts, or Astors, and let this peculiar kind of distribution of their property continue, apportioning out the younger members of the family with a comparatively small sum, but leaving the bulk to the first son. Is it not concentrating wealth in the hands of one man, the income of which it is impossible that he should spend? The accumulation still goes on from generation to generation until, practically, the money power of our land lies within the grasp of the representatives of a few families. Let us imagine the condition of affairs a few hundred years hence, if we allow the Vanderbilts, Goulds, Rockefellers and Astors to apportion off, from generation to generation, the younger sons and daughters of the family, concentrating the vast accumulation from the interests of their tremendous fortunes in the hands of one representative of the family. Some dozen men of this great Republic, by a combination, could then practically control at all times the financial situation of the nation. There is no possibility of an equalizing process and the scattering of the wealth and accumulations of these families. From generation to generation, under this peculiar method of distribution and disposal adopted by our would-be nobility, there would be created a condition exactly similar to that existing in the pre-eminently commercial Venice, from which thraldom the Common People were only relieved by a foreign conqueror, Napoleon, whom they welcomed with unpatriotic joy because he brought relief from the discriminations with which the masses were cursed.
No one will deny that, under the existing laws, Mr. W. H. Vanderbilt, the gentleman (?) who so forcefully and elegantly expressed himself in the utterance of his sentiments, “The public be damned,” had a perfect right, under the laws as they now exist, to leave the bulk of his property to his eldest son. Nay, he might have called him the Duke of Vanderbilt, if he pleased. By the pleasure of the people, he had the right to dispose of his possessions as to him seemed best.
WM. H. VANDERBILT,
Author of the Famous Speech, “The Public be D——d.”
This is all perfectly within the bounds of and consistent with the laws that the people have made; but remember, that these people who made these laws can UNMAKE them; they can require that a man’s property shall be equally divided among all of his children; they can tax it so that this infernal and ever-increasing income shall not create such an accumulation as to present a danger to the life and existence of the Republic. And this is not against the law. Good my lords, as the barons, the Common People will kill this “caste,” not by the headsman’s axe that decapitated the Stuart, not by the guillotine that drank the blood of a Bourbon; but they’ll do it with legislation, more peaceful, more quiet, and with more “general apathy;” but the result will be just as efficacious.
Now that the nation, composed of the Common People of America, has suffered the assumption, upon the part of these few families, of a sham aristocracy and attempted “caste” in this country; suppose, when the people have felt the power that lies in them, that they should rise in their might and decree that the support of the Federal Government shall come from that surplus income, instead of permitting it to accumulate in the hands of each succeeding generation of a few families in America. What, again it may be asked, can the sham aristocrats do about it?—you people of the Carnegie, Astor, Vanderbilt class. The people decree it, and you must bow your heads to their will.
The people are not socialistic. They do not believe in the division of property. Men like Dolan, at the Clover Club in Philadelphia, and others of his kind, deliberately libel and traduce the Common People when they pretend to explain the defeat of the Republican party upon the ground of a socialistic tendency in the people of this nation. The lie is apparent by the action of the militia, composed of the Common People, both at Homestead and Buffalo. The people are for law and order.
The poor man’s morals are quite as good or better than the morals of the rich. His home is as sacred, and the slimy serpent of Nihilism is as objectionable in his home as it would be to the millionaire in his palace of grandeur. The little holdings of the poor man, his farm, his tool chest, and his furniture, are his; and he holds the right to own them as dear as Astor holds his right to his property in many hundred houses. The poor man, the Common People, nowhere in this broad Union wants anarchy. He’ll stamp it out, as he did in Chicago, and it is a libel upon him and the nation, for the rich and those who would impose the yoke of “caste,” to attempt to wave the bloody shirt of Socialism by their speeches on this subject.
But this accumulation of property in the hands of the few, to the detriment of the nation, has become so pronounced and overwhelming in its productiveness of evil that, suppose the people should—for they could, by means of an income tax—decree that it should cease. Now, men of a sham and wealthy aristocracy, what would you do about it? You would be obliged to drink your cup of hemlock, as the striker at Homestead was obliged to partake of his draught of defeat.
Gentlemen, who assume to be better every other day in the year, but who realize on election day that your votes are no better, and count for no more, than the laborer’s, mechanic’s, and the poor man’s all over our land, what are you going to do about it? It is a condition so pregnant with possibilities that it should occasion you to take thought. Do not arouse the resentment of your fellow-citizens; poor they may be, but rich in their rights as freemen. By the exercise of their franchise they can make legal that which would demand a division of some of your ill-gotten gains for the support of the Federal Government, thus lightening the taxes upon those who can least afford to pay them.
W. SEWARD WEBB,
Vice-President of the New York Central R. R.
The poor have learned; the workman has been taught by sad experience; the laborer has had it forced down his throat, by the point of the bayonet in the hands of the militiamen, that he cannot hope to win in the battle against capital by strikes or organized labor. Homestead, and the wretched condition of the people there, is fraught with significance, to the laboring man, of the consequences of his ineffectual battle against capital. He knows that to resort to violence, mob law, dynamite, is against the spirit of the people of America. In his heart of hearts his home is as dear to the workman as yours is to you, Mr. Carnegie. He does not believe in anarchy, and the dissolution of law, order, and the morals of the people any more than you do. He doesn’t believe, any more than you do, Mr. Son-in-law Seward Webb, in the destruction of property. He feels oppressed; he feels that the burden has been laid too heavily upon his shoulders; he is irritated at the load he is carrying; no longer will he resort, as the acme of his hopes, to a strike or a labor organization; he has learned in the election of 1892 that the power to correct these evils is his; that on election day, at the polls, he may right these wrongs. Be you warned, who count your millions, that the bandage which has blinded the eyes of the poor, making them fight at shadows, has been removed from their eyes, and that they will make such a vigorous and effectual onslaught upon your cherished bulwarks of bullion that the equalizing process may become so rapid and effectual as to demolish your cherished fortresses of wealth.
It is not to disorganize society; it is not to overturn religion, or resort to Nihilism, that the tendency of the workingman’s mind leans. It is your presumption, arrogance, and overwhelming self-esteem that has offended him. A baby’s finger may touch the spring holding the bar by which is caged the lion. The lion once uncaged, and a hundred men cannot restrain its freedom. A little stream of water, flowing over the top of a dam, might have been stopped by a handful of mud in the hands of a child; increasing, the stream weakens the barrier; the dam has gone, the flood has come.
There’s a little stream of truth trickling over the dam that holds back the flood of the resentment of the people; silently, softly, with an appearance of “apathy,” it began to move, until the rich received the first spray, notifying them of its approach, November the 8th, 1892.
Of political parties in America, De Tocqueville declared that “Aristocratic or democratic passions may easily be detected at the bottom of all parties, and although they escape a superficial observation, they are the main point and soul of every faction in the United States.”
That greatest conflict of American history, the military and political struggle between the forces of slavery and the forces of human freedom, was no less a conflict between aristocracy and democracy. In the South, which President-elect Cleveland only the other day termed—with undoubted historical accuracy—the cradle of American liberty, there had been developed a social and political aristocracy as distinct and powerful as almost any the world has seen.
To this development, which did not become marked until after the early part of the present century, many causes contributed. The industry of the South had become centralized in the hands of large land owners who cultivated extensive plantations with slave labor. The tremendous growth of slavery exerted a depressing effect upon the manufacturing spirit; the artisan, the mechanic, and the trader came to be regarded as socially inferior. The planting of rice, sugar cane, and especially cotton, which was found to be the most profitable business, was also the most esteemed; and the South became an almost purely agricultural section.
Lorin Blodget lays it down as an accepted rule that “the country wholly devoted to agriculture necessarily tends to aristocratic despotism, or some form of enslavement of the masses;” and he quotes similar expressions from Adam Smith, Buckle, and other recognized authorities on political economy.
Nor are reasons hard to find. De Tocqueville points out that the great guarantees of popular liberty in America are universal education and the general division of landed property. Now, in a purely agricultural country the education of the people is certain to be defective. The population is necessarily dispersed, for where there are no manufactories there can be few towns; and where there are few towns there are fewer and less efficient schools, and libraries and lyceums are practically unknown. Harrison’s “History of Virginia” states that that State had, in 1848, 166,000 youths between seven and sixteen years old, of whom only 40,000 attended any school.
Landed property had naturally tended to fall more and more into a few hands. As John Stuart Mill said of ancient Rome: “When inequality of wealth once commences in a community not constantly engaged in repairing, by industry, the injuries of fortune, its advances are gigantic; the great masses swallow up the smaller. The Roman Empire ultimately became covered with the vast landed possessions of a comparatively few families, for whose luxury, and still more for whose ostentation, the most costly products were raised, while the cultivators of the soil were slaves or small tenants in a nearly servile condition.” The description is closely applicable to the landed aristocracy of the South in the years immediately before the war.
It is a mistake—a not uncommon mistake—to suppose that the ante-bellum South was poor. It was rich—considerably richer than the North, in proportion to its population. In 1860 the South had much more than its share of the assessed wealth of the nation. The total value of property in the Union was $12,000,000,000, and of this the Southern States, with only one-third of the country’s population (and less than one-fourth of the country’s white population), had $5,000,000,000, or more than forty per cent.
But in the agricultural South wealth was far more unevenly distributed than in the manufacturing and commercial North. In the latter great fortunes were made, but were almost sure to be distributed among several heirs, or lost in the fluctuations of trade, while the prevalence of the industrial and inventive spirit opened the path of advancement to those born at the bottom of the ladder. In the former, large landed properties were handed down from father to son, and tended to grow larger by accretion, as is the rule with great estates. The small land owner could not compete with them. The peasant, whose only calling was the tilling of the soil, had little prospect of bettering his condition.
“The Southern planter,” says a member[2] of one of the old landed families, who is now well known as the self-appointed manager of New York society, “was a born aristocrat. He had literally as much power in his little sphere as any old feudal lord. His slaves were the creatures of his caprice and pleasure. The work of their hands supported him, gave him his position and influence. I have lived on a plantation with twelve hundred slaves, all devotedly attached to their master, evidencing as much loyalty and fealty as an Englishman to his sovereign, and taking great pride in their master and mistress.”
The planter’s life was one of patriarchal magnificence. His entertainments, according to the same authority, “would be appreciated in the old Faubourg at Paris;” his wines were old and abundant; his songs were the ballads of his historical prototype, the mediæval baron of England:
Political power within its own commonwealths was of course practically monopolized by this land-owning caste. Of power in national politics it wielded a tremendous share. It had taken advantage of that feature of the Federal Constitution which, when it was first framed, Patrick Henry attacked when he prophesied that “an aristocracy of the rich and well born would spring up and trample upon the masses.” Outnumbered in the House of Representatives, it had firmly intrenched itself in the United States Senate.
In that body, up to the time just before the war, when it was no longer possible to create a new Southern State to offset each Northern State, it held half the seats and votes—a position that gave it complete control of all Presidential nominations to office. Through its possession of this unassailable veto power on appointments, it had come to pass that, as Mr. Blaine observes in his “Twenty Years of Congress,” “the Courts of the United States, both Supreme and District, throughout the Union, were filled with men acceptable to the South. Cabinets were constituted in the same way. Representatives of the government in foreign countries were necessarily taken from the class approved by the same power. Mr. Webster, speaking in his most conservative tone in the famous speech of March 7, 1850, declared that from the formation of the Union to that hour the South had monopolized three-fourths of the places of honor and emolument under the Federal Government. It was an accepted fact that the class interest of slavery, by holding a tie in the Senate, could defeat any measure or any nomination to which its leaders might be opposed; and, thus banded together by an absolutely cohesive political force, they could and did dictate terms.”
Such was the land-holding, slave-holding, office-holding aristocracy, against which the first directly and avowedly antagonistic movement was that of the Republican party. Young and weak in its first Presidential contest of 1856, the new organization gathered strength steadily; and when, on April 29, 1860, the Democratic Convention at Baltimore was rent asunder by the Secessionists, it became clear that the Republicans would have to face the threatened disruption of the Union.
The Republican Convention met at Chicago and chose, in preference to the able and experienced Seward, Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, a man who, then comparatively unknown, was to take rank as perhaps the noblest and greatest of all America’s sons.
Lincoln, when asked for an account of his boyhood, said that it might be summed up in Crabbe’s famous line: “The short and simple annals of the poor.” J. G. Holland thus reviews the career of the man who led the struggle that began in 1860: “Born in the humblest and remotest obscurity, subjected to the rudest toil in the meanest offices, achieving the development of his powers by means of his own institution, he had, with none of the tricks of the demagogue, with none of the aids of wealth and social influence, with none of the opportunities for exhibiting his powers which high official position bestows, against all the combinations of genius and eminence and interest, raised himself by force of manly excellence of heart and brain into national recognition, and had become the local center of the affectionate interest and curious inquisition of thirty millions of people.”
To the end of his life, Lincoln was the very incarnation of democratic simplicity. He was never at home in a drawing-room; he never could dispose gracefully his hands and feet—appendages whose size was proportionate to his huge stature. After his nomination for the Presidency, he used to answer his own bell at his little house in Springfield, Illinois.
The people’s man of 1860, Abraham Lincoln! The pulse of patriotism quickens at the pronunciation of the name. The people’s plain Abe Lincoln; one of them, a commoner, of them, with them, like them. To foreign nations, he may have appeared as “President Abraham Lincoln, Chief Magistrate of the United States.” He may have been “Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy,” in the minds of his subordinates in those two important branches of his administration from ’61 to ’65. History may record him as the “wise, able, and philanthropical.” But his memory will last enshrined in a temple more lasting than bronze or stone—the hearts of the people.
To them he was Abe Lincoln—one of them, feeling their sensations, a common bond between him and them. He was a democrat by birth, by experience, by sentiment, reason, and patriotism. He was a President of the masses, and how well and loyally did they love him! His homely ways and phrases, his unadorned and vigorous speeches, were the ways of the people, speeches of the people; loved by the people for the very enemies he had made, for his enemies were the enemies of the people. Every caricature of Lincoln was a caricature of the people; every attack upon his personality was an attack upon the personality of the “mudsills” of the people, and his call to arms was their call to arms, and they sprang forward, responsive to his appeal, recognizing in it their appeal, as no sham aristocrat or autocrat can ever hope to have a nation do.
His memory will not remain green in the minds of the masses by his martyrdom; but dear will the picture be, from generation to generation, of the boy studying by the light of a flickering fire, and splitting rails for daily bread; fighting his way onward and upward without wealth, or powerful friends, until at last, in the supreme hour of the people’s need, he comes to bear their standard in the battle which they waged against “caste.” He did not come to the contest as a hired soldier, but as a volunteer, feeling all that was felt by the common soldier. It was his battle, for he had felt the sting of class distinction, as did every private soldier of his army.
Loving, loyal, faithful Abe Lincoln! May your name never be belittled by any of your descendants adopting a crest or coat-of-arms. Your coat-of-arms is engraved in figures as lasting as the eternal hills of America upon the minds of the people. Should a degenerate descendant seek a coat-of-arms, let him make it an axe and rail, surrounded by the laurel wreath bestowed by the loving, trusting people; for Abe Lincoln was best and only loved by the very term by which the aristocrats attempted to disparage him—“the rail-splitter.” After the election of Abraham Lincoln, while he remained at Springfield, the chosen representative of the people, he was the most approachable man in America; even though at that time he must have felt the heavy weight of responsibility thrust upon him, viewing as he could the mass which, like a snowball, was increasing as it progressed under the weak administration of his predecessor. Think of the anxious hours that this man spent, knowing what the people expected of him, and seeing the number of his difficulties being added to, day by day, while those who had the burden to bear were obliged, until the fourth of the succeeding March, to sit still and watch the accumulation. Yet in those anxious hours, while receiving counsel of the mighty of the political world, many of whom were strangers to him and to whom he was a stranger, yet, still, while watching thus, the pillar of the Union, stone by stone falling away; while thus counselled, advised by those he knew not whether to trust or not; while his mind must necessarily have been weighed down with the thought of his own possible inability to meet the expectations of his friends, the people, in that great new sphere to which they had called him, Abe Lincoln still had time to grasp the hand and wish good cheer to an old friend, neighbor, or one of the people. From birth to death, his life will form a lesson that the new Chief of the people whom they have called to be President of the United States, Grover Cleveland, could well study, and Abe Lincoln’s example emulate, if he would hold the love of those who, by their votes, put him into the Presidential chair.
This man, Abraham Lincoln, represented that class of people who had been dubbed “mudsills” by the orators who represented the believers in “caste” in the South. He stood as the very personification of “mudsillism,” which, read in the light of recently written history, meant the Common People—that is, the majority; and the majority ruled after his election in 1860, even though it required the use of bullets against the aristocratic class, just as the majority will rule in 1892, after the election of Grover Cleveland as representative of the Common People.
The South sought by secession to absolve itself from the domination of the masses. It was like the patricians of Rome seeking the Sacred Hill to build a new city. It failed, as will ever the minority, representing a false idea of American society and a false conception of the spirit with which every American is imbued, do in the future. But, be it said to the credit of the believers in aristocracy in 1860, that they had the courage of their convictions, and they fought a manly battle to establish that which is impossible in America. The history of the Southerners’ sufferings and dangers, endured uncomplainingly, forms a bright and shining exception to the conduct of the typical believer in “caste.” Sham aristocracy, which has disregarded the rights and wounded the feelings of the people for the past twenty-five years, that sham aristocracy which is a direct outgrowth resulting from the suppression of the Southern aristocracy, if tested as the Southern aristocracy has been, would be found deficient in those qualities of courage and determination which made even the Southerners’ false ideas respected and respectable.
The sham aristocracy of to-day, unlike the false aristocracy of 1860, would hire bullies, outcasts, and vagrants to do their fighting, as did those magnificent illustrations of “caste” in our country, Carnegie and Frick, at Homestead, and Son-in-law Webb at Buffalo.
The advocates of “caste” in 1860, the Southerners, not alone possessed courage and determination, but, accepting the result of the conflict, have exhibited since the days of Reconstruction that wonderful degree of political acumen for which they have ever been famous. Early recognizing that in their struggle for an independent national existence, the Southern Confederacy, they had been defeated—not by the aristocracy of the North and West, but by the Common People; that is, the most powerful portion of the population of the Union—the Southerner, the secessionist, the aristocrat of 1860, submerged himself in the ocean of the Common People, the great majority, the democracy! The Secessionist, who opposed Abraham Lincoln’s administration in 1860 and used bullets to express his opposition in 1861, had firm conviction carried to his hesitating heart by the events that transpired between 1861 and 1865, that the “Common People”—the majority—must rule; and that with the freeing of his slaves he had lost the only possible foundation upon which he could rest his claim of social superiority in this country. Therefore, as the wise man that he has demonstrated himself to be, the aristocrat of 1860 has become the most earnest and patriotic member of a broad democracy in 1892; realizing from experience that upon that rock alone he can build the edifice of prosperity in his section of the country; also realizing from a sad experience that the Common People, democracy (though it was called Abraham Lincoln’s Republican party), was the crag upon which his bark of Secession was shivered in 1865.
ANDREW JACKSON.
The “People’s” President, 1828.
[2] Of course I mean Ward McAllister. This is not from his book, but from a recent article of his published in the New York World.
Jackson was in truth a popular idol. Hickory poles, the emblem of devotion to “Old Hickory,” stood in every village throughout almost every State, and at the street corners of many a city. In his own Tennessee, less than three thousand votes were cast against him in the entire State, and in many precincts he received every ballot.
The story is told of a stranger who visited a Tennessee village on the afternoon of the election, and found its male population turning out with their guns, as if for a hunt, and in a state of great excitement. On inquiring what game they were after, he learned that they were starting in pursuit of two of their fellow-citizens who had had the audacity to vote against Jackson, thereby preventing the village from casting a solid vote for “Old Hickory.” The miscreants had avoided a tarring and feathering only by taking to the woods.
The result of the campaign was a triumph for Jackson. New England was the stronghold of Adams, who received all its electoral votes except one from Maine. The National Republicans also carried New Jersey and Delaware, and New York and Maryland were divided. Every other State declared solidly for Jackson, whose total vote was 178, to 83 for Adams.
During that campaign, the same question appeared on the surface as that presented in the campaign of ’92. The Whig party represented apparently higher tariff, and the Democrats were opposing the increase of duty; but the fact remained that John Quincy Adams represented the aristocracy of New England, and the Whig Party had become encrusted with the same false stucco of “caste” that concealed the merits, worth, and virtue of Lincoln’s Republican party in 1892. E’en the most wonderful orator that America has ever produced, the great and honored Daniel Webster, with all of his personal magnetism, magic of speech, and logic of argument, could not boost the aristocrats of the Whig party into power; even though the bill for a higher tariff had passed, the cry was kept up, and was made to appear as one of the issues of the campaign of 1892.
Andrew Jackson represented, in his person, the people, the masses. By birth, education, and mode of living, Andrew Jackson was identified with the Common People, and, as we are all common, with all of the people. Like Abraham Lincoln, the masses saw in Andrew Jackson a champion, ready and brave enough to resent the attempted differentiation sought to be foisted upon the people of America by the then Whig aristocracy—the claimed parent of the Republican party. However, Abraham Lincoln’s Republican party was not a progeny of the aristocrats of the Whig party. Andrew Jackson, in his person, represented the purest type of the western pioneer, patriot, and soldier, and such men in America will only be found in the ranks of the people.
In 1828, John Quincy Adams, and his party of the would-be “Four Hundred,” received at the hands of the people the same punishment and rebuke that was administered to Benjamin Harrison and the Republican party, which, just like the Whig party, had become hidden from the view of the people by the glamour of wealth and would-be aristocracy that was thrown over it. In Andrew Jackson, the people elected as their chief one possessed of great firmness and decision of character, one who was honest and true; not always correct in judgment, but when he erred the people were ready to forgive him, because the error was one of judgment and not of intention. He was of them, and like them, as Abraham Lincoln was in 1860, and the people’s love and trust in him erased from their memory mistakes that in another would have been judged with a critical eye. He was often rash in expression and action, but his very rashness was the rashness of a man untrained in duplicity. He was not a diplomat. The people are not diplomatic, and he, as one of them, could not be expected to possess characteristics other than those of the mass. His actions were as a mirror in which the people saw themselves. How the chord he struck, when he threatened to hang John C. Calhoun and the nullifiers, finds a responsive echo in many of the utterances of Abraham Lincoln! What two men so nearly resemble each other to the people?
The mere idle calling one a Democrat and the other a Republican is, as Hamlet says: “Words, words, words.” There is no significance in the mere word Democrat and Republican. Both were men of the people, elected as the choice of the masses, in the constant battle that the masses wage against the crime of “caste.” The similarity in the characters of Lincoln and Jackson is nowhere more forcibly illustrated than in that both were patriots of the purest stamp.
Andrew Jackson took up the administration of the government with fearless energy, feeling confident that he had the unalloyed loyalty of the people to support him. Let us hope that Grover Cleveland, with the same fearless courage, will wage war upon those things objectionable to the people who have placed in his hands the weapons with which to do battle.
The distinguishing act of Jackson’s first term was his veto of the bill to re-charter the United States Bank—the boldest defiance that a President ever cast to the money power of the country. “When President Jackson attacked the Bank,” De Tocqueville notes, “the country was excited and parties were formed. The well-informed classes rallied round the bank, the Common People round the President.” It is a commonplace of history that, in such cases, the “Common People” are more often right than those who claim superior information. Jackson’s veto is regarded by most observers as a remarkable popular victory over a great capitalistic monopoly.
In none of the six Presidential campaigns between the time of Jackson and that of Lincoln was the question of popular sovereignty versus class pretensions brought into the contest as an issue, although events were gradually shaping themselves for the great struggle in which the period ended. Yet, in 1840, the Democratic personality of General William Henry Harrison, the Whig candidate, contributed not a little to his success. The veteran soldier, statesman, and frontiersman had spent most of his life in a log house beside the Ohio River, at North Bend, Indiana. A log cabin was chosen by his political followers as the symbol of his plain and unpretentious way of life, and a barrel of cider as an emblem of his simple but generous hospitality. During the “log cabin and hard cider” campaign all over the country, in cities, villages, and hamlets, log cabins were erected as rallying places for Harrison’s partisans, who met there to toast their champion in abundant glasses of cider.