Had these successive and armed protests by America against the Barbary habit of enslaving white Christian captives, taken in war, been properly seconded by the European powers, the dusk Mussulman of Northern Africa would have been then converted from the old Roman practices to which they willingly succeeded,—practices which the author of Don Quixote, himself an Algerine captive for five years, had punctured with his sharp quill over two centuries before, and which Lord Exmouth, with a British fleet, so riddled with shotted logic, in 1816, as to silence forever.

While the play of Lear was so badly acted on the shores of the Mediterranean, Michigan, toddling up from between the lake coasts that bordered her double peninsula, left her ancient name of Wayne County and the protecting hand of Indiana, and assumed an independent territorial status. Her lymphatic temperament enabled her to suck up through her many aquatic ducts an arterial circulation which helped her to stand pretty successfully the dry-cuppings of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. In straits often she has worked her way with moderate success through her Superior Lakes and water-courses to the open paths of seaboard trade. The pictured rocks of her great northern lake illustrate in lithography, rarely copied, some traits which she shares with no others. Fortunately for her future independence, the intervention of Lake Michigan prevents her territory from being laid out in city lots by Chicago.

The American Cain, restless and uneasy, haunted by the pale ghost of Hoboken, set on foot in 1806 an expedition designed either to slice off a piece of American territory west of the Alleghanies, and to give it as a morceau to Aaron the First, to be crowned at New Orleans, his future capital; or to rid Mexico of a part of her troublesome northern possessions and to establish over it the dynasty of the Burrs. Tried at Richmond, Virginia, in 1807, before Chief Justice Marshall, he had the honor of being enclosed in the superb amber vase of Wirt’s rhetoric for immortal preservation, but the misfortune to be dismissed on insufficient proof to the chained companionship of the dreaded ghost.

Bonaparte, tired of his consulate for life, and anointed Emperor December 2, 1804, by a priest whom he called from Rome to Paris for that purpose, known as Pope Pius VII., had raised against himself and his family pretensions the more ancient usurpers of Europe, whose equally bold seizure of the right to govern people, and to take their money whereon to live in ease, was veiled and historically disguised by a few score years of unrighteous possession. Of course the ancient usurpers despised and made faces at the newest. Armies composed of thousands of common people—farmers, mechanics, and poor laborers—padded in bright-colored clothes out of moneys borrowed on their credit and to be repaid by their children, were hurled by these usurpers at each other at Ulm, Austerlitz, and Jena; and after the smoke of the shocks rolled off, it was found that all the crowned graspers were badly shaken up and shattered, and had limped away exceedingly hurt in pride and limb, excepting England only, which, mistress of the water by the victory of Nelson at Trafalgar, in 1805, thrust her hated trident into the face of the master of the land. The sea-tossings of the combatants became profitable to our neutral commerce, which picked up out of the ports of each the articles needed by the other, and laid them down on the rival wharves. England had become too much of a trader and shopkeeper to see such results with complacency, even if, as a belligerent, she could not participate in the dividends. And so, in May, 1806, she attempted to inaugurate against France—in addition to actual hostilities—a paper blockade, by declaring, in a well-sealed and highly respectable looking document, about two thirds of the Continent of Europe, including the French territory and its dependencies, in a state of blockade. Without a blockading squadron to deliver this document and to enforce the blockade, this declaration was an empty bravado, and a fraud on the rights of neutrals. This dog-in-the-manger device to stop the trade it could not supply provoked the newest usurper to a like policy. Napoleon, equally blinded by his resentments, and equally unconscientious in his handling of international law, issued from Berlin a counter document, also well sealed and incapable of delivery, declaring the British Isles in a state of blockade. Without ships—those marine constables—to serve papers and bring offenders within maritime jurisdiction, these orders and decrees became mischievous threats, making lawful trade piracy, and subjecting neutral merchant vessels to arrest, detention, search, and condemnation. England now put forth another pretension. As by the feudal law it was held that “once a subject always a subject,” of course a fortunate Bull remained a Bull, even when seeking work or protection on an American vessel. American ships were thus required to stop on the high seas and be searched for truant English stock. Such a bull England might make of herself; but she was so angry as not to see that neutrals would not become such silly calves as to be driven off by these big-looking shouts.

The question was sharply stated by the Leopard, a British man-of-war, to the Chesapeake, an American frigate, on board of which it was claimed were four British seamen. The refusal to permit the ship’s hold to be looked into not pleasing the Leopard, she fell unexpectedly upon the little frigate and tore the supposed bulls with horny claws out of the grasp of the American. The sight offended all America, especially as it turned out that three of the four seamen were American citizens.

President Jefferson expressed the national resentment in a proclamation interdicting all British ships entering our ports. Great Britain made another bull by half apologizing and delivering up two of the four seamen. The lesson of the stamp duties had not illuminated the density of George III. He had not learned that half-apologies are confessions of wrong, but no atonement.

Further experiments were mutually made by the two enraged fighters on neutral rights and international decencies. In November Great Britain forbade any one trading with France; and France, equally enterprising, ordered the stoppage of all trade with England. Our government replied to these illegal proceedings by an embargo on all vessels in our ports, foreign and domestic. From December, 1807, until March, 1809, marine beaux were abundant, and young ladies joyous. When the embargo was raised the hopes of the latter sank. They became more desponding still when the government forbade all commercial correspondence with France and England.

The Captain and Officers of the “Seventeen Sisters” which put to Sea in a Gale.—Diplomatic Talks.—Difference between one’s own Cows gored, and one’s own Bull in a Neighbor’s Field stoned, exemplified.—Cave canem.—Bonaparte improves the Code Napoleon.—Executions before Trials.—Horace Greeley fights benevolently into the World.—Louisiana and her Vivacious Debts taken in; what sweetened them.—Witch-Hazel Rods of Clay, Cheves, etc., dip to the National Mines of Feeling.—Our Second Wrestling-Match with England.—The Hull-sale Surrender of Michigan.—Colonel Cass breaks his Sword, and gets an Anglo-phobia.—Better Hulls on the Water.—America marries the Sea.—A Wasp on a Frolic.—Marine Flirtations and Engagements.—The Constitution, an Old Sea-Flirt; her rapid Winning and Wooing of the Java.—South Carolina loses a Presidential Candidate.—Of the Three Armies afield.—Harrison at Tippecanoe and the Thames.—Colonel R. M. Johnson’s life-long Chase for Tecumseh’s Scalp.—Toronto emptied and filled.—General Brown, a Real Man, in Spite of his Name.—General Wade Hampton.—Court-Martials, and how they touch off Military Charges.—The United States at Sea on Land.—The Hornet on a Peacock.—An Immortal Word wrung from a Mortal Moment.—Commodore Perry.—General Scott improves the Niagara Frontier for Hack-Drivers.—Macdonough charges Lake Champlain with Heroic Ingredients.—English Marine Parades.—Cotton Breastworks at New Orleans.—Their Feminine Adoption.—The Treaty of Peace and its Wonderful Omissions.—Costs and Gains of the War.—The Hartford Convention and its Equestrian Exploits.—Mr. Calhoun and Invisible Ink.

James Madison, who for eight years past had been first mate on our national craft, was in 1809 promoted by its owners, the people, to be Captain,—Mr. C. C. Pinckney, of South Carolina, receiving a complimentary vote, as a Palmetto fillup. The captain’s principal officers were: first mate, or Secretary of State, Robert Smith; second mate, or Secretary of War, William Eustis; purser, or Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin; boatswain, or Secretary of the Navy, Paul Hamilton; and Cæsar A. Rodney, piper, or Attorney-General. Much need was there of a judicious set of officers on the quarter-deck, as well as of a good crew in the forecastle; for the Seventeen Sisters were about to put to sea, with high storms blowing off and on the coast.

Much talk was there, as soon as Mr. Madison entered upon his duties, between British envoys, Mr. Erskine first and Mr. Jackson afterwards, on the one side, and our Mr. Smith on the other, about our Non-intercourse Act. Of course the Britons did not like to have their own commercial cows gored by our bulls; although they had enjoyed immensely the sight of their own unmuzzled Durhams pushing wildly among our young cattle. The British government—or, rather, their accredited agent, Mr. Erskine—promised to repeal the obnoxious orders in council. Taking the principals at their agent’s word, our government good-naturedly proclaimed the renewal of commercial intercourse with England. Thereupon, George III.—now entering the fiftieth year of king-craft, without any improvement of his crass German notions by a cross with British principles of shop-keeping—repudiated the acts of his agent. The friendly hand we had offered we now took back, giving a perceptible contraction to its muscles as we drew it in. For three years we pocketed our fists and indignities.

In 1809 England had stationed cruisers off our coast to seize our merchantmen, and send them in as prizes to her ports. Every American ship-owner saw mosaicked at the outlet of every American harbor the warning, cave canem, without being at liberty to stone the dog which flew at him. Bonaparte, blood red with Spanish and Portuguese victories, turning in cold, dynastic selfishness from the heart-faithful but childless Josephine, and drawing to her place the reluctant, refrigerating Maria Louise, undismayed by the fear of our junction with the fifth coalition formed against him by England, Austria, Spain, and Portugal, imitated for a time the swaggering injustice of England towards us. In March, 1810, improving upon the Code Napoleon, by execution before suit, he decreed the seizure and summary condemnation of all American vessels entering French ports. This boyish, pouting, and self-extinguishing policy he gave up in November following. England was left alone in keeping unneighborly mastiffs.

Meanwhile, in the midst of the effervescence of national sediment thus foaming up in yeasty ebullition, Horace Greeley, February 3, 1811, fought into life. Ever since that successful contest, the world has advanced with quickened forces. Benevolence felt reinforced by combative intellect, which borrowed the club of logic and strong adjectives to persuade error to keep the ways of tribunitial thought. Soon after Mr. Greeley’s birth, Mr. Smith gave up the State Department to James Monroe, who, for the three years following, found ample employment for his executive abilities, in the double duties of this branch added to those of the War bureau.

In April, 1812, our French sister, Louisiana, brought her vivacity, gayety, and debts into the family. Her high spirits were needed to stimulate the action, and her sugar to sweeten the waters of strife, now effectually stirred between America and England, whose bottomless pretensions had become intolerable. Our public debt had become reduced to about $45,000,000, and our population augmented to seven and a half millions. It needed not the witch-hazel rods of the eloquent Clay, Calhoun, Langdon, Cheves, and others, to dip to and find the mines of national wealth and national feeling. Both were ready. At last, June 4, 1812, after the lapse of twenty-nine years, we found ourselves in a second wrestling-match with Great Britain. Our first grapple was near Detroit, and on the Canadian frontier, where a defeat, under Colonel Van Horne, and a success, under Colonel Miller, equalized losses and gains, through July and August. But the base Hull-sale surrender, without a blow, of Detroit, of an army of two thousand men, and the entire Territory of Michigan, by its cowardly or treacherous governor, caused our captain, officers, and entire crew to explode in very indignant terms. Colonel Lewis Cass, then commanding one of the regiments, snapped his sword in two pieces, rather than surrender it whole to the British General Brock. He took such an Anglo-phobia at this time, that the next fifty years could not cure it.

Fortunately we had better hulls on the water than on the land.

August 19, 1812, Captain Isaac Hull, in the frigate Constitution, fought the British Guerriere, and after knocking down every mast and spar and one third of her crew, compelled her to throw up the sponge. The mourning put on three days before for the loss, by General William Hull, of Michigan, and the army of the Northwest, was now put off for the bridal-wreath presented by Captain Isaac Hull to America, on her marriage to the sea. Like her spouse, the Ocean, the bride hastened to cast her weeds. The pallor of defeat gave place to the summoned roses of joy. Upon the crimson flushes the British bees now sought to light and to extract their carnation.

In October, the British tars, in a Frolic, set out to tease the delighted groom, but a Wasp, hovering near, made for the frolicsome bee, and in three quarters of an hour so stung it, that its shattered wings were only fit for microscopical studies. All the officers and crew of the Frolic, four only excepted, were killed or wounded; while the Wasp, although carrying fewer guns, had only ten killed or injured. A few days afterwards the frigate United States, commanded by Decatur,—whom we left eight years since before Tripoli, clearing out its wretched Bey,—engaged the British Macedonian, and took such a fancy to her that, after some violent flirtation, she completely won her. This engagement went hard with the proud, stiff old people in England, but a repetition of this sort of match-making did much to reconcile them to the first. The second engagement took place on Pacific ground, off the coast of Brazil, between that old sea-flirt, the Constitution, looking out, not for coffee or sparrows, but for a marine flirtation, and the Java, a buxom frigate, long-waisted and well padded with materials, adorned with heavy war jewelry, constituting very attractive charms, at her waist. In less than two hours after their acquaintance, these ardent strangers became so entangled in each other’s fortunes, that the Java gave up, like a true mistress, all her future to her fond and persistent lover. When the news of this wooing reached the stuffy old parents at home, they were frantic with rage. The family pride was alarmed and wounded. They immediately sent out a large fleet to watch that new and fashionable American promenade, the sea, to prevent any more flirtations and engagements like poor Guerriere’s and the unfortunate Java’s.

Meanwhile Mr. Madison was re-elected Captain by one hundred and twenty-eight votes; De Witt Clinton receiving eighty-nine. Mr. C. C. Pinckney, now sixty-six years old, and convinced that his capital was too small, abandoned the business; and as Mr. Calhoun was yet only thirty, and constitutionally ineligible, South Carolina was reduced to the humiliation of voting either for a Virginian or a New-Yorker.

Notwithstanding her successes on the water, America by no means abandoned the land.

She raised and set on foot, although some of course, as usual, got on horseback, three armies. The first of these was the Army of the West, under General William Henry Harrison, whose business it was made to chastise back into submissive quiet the Indian tribes, which England had enticed out to the pillage and harrying of our frontier settlers; a business which he successfully prosecuted at Fort Meigs, at Tippecanoe, and again, in October, 1813, at the Thames. At this last engagement somebody killed Tecumseh, and thus gave Colonel R. M. Johnson employment for the rest of his life in vindicating his right to the Shawnee’s scalp. The red chief thus, like Homer and others, caused after his death more contention than during his life. Soon after the Thames battle, General Harrison repaired to Buffalo, where, in consequence of some unexplained reason,—perhaps overcome by its vigorous Board of Trade, or seized by its enterprising forwarders,—he was transported into a resignation, and to Ohio.

The second army was that of the Centre, under General Dearborn, Jefferson’s Secretary of War, and now Commander-in-Chief of all the forces deployed along the southern shore of Lake Ontario and the Niagara frontier. A portion of this army, in April, 1813, left Sackett’s Harbor, and landing at York, now Toronto, took hold of it, and, shaking it empty of British and Indians, left it so dry, that vigorous drinking since has scarcely sufficed to absorb back any considerable numbers of the brick-colored originals, although something has succeeded in getting up very successful exhibitions of English red and white skins. While General Dearborn was absent from Sackett’s Harbor, Sir George Prevost thought it a good time to sail in. He landed with one thousand men; but General Brown,—a real, actual man, although disguised by this mythical name,—rallied the local militia, and, setting on the baronet and his thousand, took a large number of them, and held them as mutilated specimens of soldiers at leisure. General Dearborn soon after resigned, and General Wilkinson—who had been tried and acquitted for his too great intimacy, while in command at the Southwest, with the American Cain and his schemes—succeeded him; the only success that he ever had, as he always had the ill-assorted habit of never agreeing or co-operating with any one, especially on critical occasions. Like a rocking-chair in moving time, he took up more room than could be spared, and was pretty sure to be broken when required for use.

The third army was that of the North, placed under General Wade Hampton, grandfather of that leader of the Confederate black cavalry in the late Rebellion, who waded to his horse’s bits in the blood of his loyal countrymen, in order to keep the black bipeds in the South bridled and saddled to carry the unwading Hamptons. The army of the North, twelve thousand strong, was stationed on Lake Champlain, and was destined to co-operate with Wilkinson’s for the reduction of Montreal, then holding only a small garrison of six hundred; but the mutual enmity of the generals, growing out of old quarrels at New Orleans, frustrated all co-operation. Each drew himself into warm winter quarters, nursing his private grievances, as Mrs. Gamp did her special infirmities, while the poor unnursed, suffering patient, the campaign, took care of itself. Of course Montreal was not reduced, except to a satisfactory smile over the military pouting of the unco-operating commanders. The Secretary of War preferred charges against Wilkinson. The charges, as usual when touched by court-martials, went off in flashes in the pan. The campaign of 1813, rammed down with the double loads, the armies of the Centre and the North, went off in the same way.

The United States were now more at sea on land than on the sea itself.

Early in the year 1813, the sloop Hornet, roaming at will over the green fields of water, pricked on by Captain James Lawrence, lit on the British Peacock, and so worried her, that in fifteen minutes she fluttered down, down into the opening green gulfs below, with all her bright, well-spread colors. Promoted to the Chesapeake, manned or rather unmanned by an undrilled, miscellaneous crew which had drifted on her decks, the brave Lawrence, counselled more by a chivalric honor than by a cool prudence, accepted the murderous, Burr-like challenge of the well-practised Shannon, carrying a picked and veteran crew and corps of marines. The ill-handled, entangled, and disabled Chesapeake was boarded, and the intrepid commander, carried below with a mortal wound, stammered out that immortal order which hurtles hotly through histories and navies, “Don’t give up the ship.”

On Lake Erie, Commodore Perry, in September, 1813, with a small squadron embraced and took a superior British fleet, announcing his resisted possession in another lively, well-planted message, which floats like a buoy in the crowded harbor of historical anchorage,—“We have met the enemy and they are ours.”

During this year, as in the preceding, American privateers swept from the wavy floor of the ocean hundreds of merchantmen. Forthwith English courts, English premiers, and English writers on international law bristled with freshly sharpened horror at the sin of privateering,—a most un-Christian practice they averred, as it tended violently to abridge the marine wealth of England.

In 1814 a varied war business was transacted between the United States and Great Britain. In July—that month for excursions to Niagara Falls—Generals Scott and Ripley crossed the hurrying river near the cataract, and took Fort Erie, which, fortunately for the hackmen, they left like a toll-gate, to entice yearly from travellers its original cost. As if to increase the wonders of this taking neighborhood, two days after the capture of Fort Erie, the battle of Chippewa was fought, in which bayonets were actually crossed,—a rare checker-work, although often talked of in those select romances, the despatches of raw militia generals, who, in their first sight of glancing steel and first smell of villainousvillainous saltpetre, see many things crosswise and crooked. Fifteen days later, Winfield Scott made a ghostly spectacle, at Lundy’s Lane, of great numbers of well-seasoned British Regulars.

Fortunate Niagara! in owning so many wonders,

Human phosphates are here most advantageously diluted with large parts of uncounted water.

Meanwhile, the veteran English squadrons which had served under Wellington, in Spain and Portugal, glorified by victories over Ney, Massena, Marmont, Soult, and Joseph Bonaparte,—their bullet-slitted flags inscribed “Torres Vedras,” “Talavera,” “Ciudad Rodrigo,” “Almeida,” “Salamanca,” “Madrid,” and “Vittoria,”—mustering fourteen thousand men, and led by Sir George Prevost, pushed down from Canada upon Plattsburg, where General Macomb had assembled fifteen hundred men. Crossing the little river Saranac, on one side of which Plattsburg stood, in modest, village quiet, Macomb posted his men. Like cedar posts, these unseasoned troops stood rooted to the soil, stubbornly refusing to bend before the furious storm of grape and canister which swept through them for four days. While this heroic endurance was maintained on the land side, in front of the village and on the vitreous surface of Lake Champlain, Commandant Thomas Macdonough, on the morning of September 11, with a squadron of fourteen small vessels, carrying 86 guns and 850 officers and men, anchoring in the bay and awaiting the approach of a British fleet of sixteen ships, with 95 guns and 1,000 men, so charged the common trading waters of the lake with soul-lifting influences, that even commerce seems to bear there its pennons more stiffly ever since, and ordinary smacks to kiss the wind with a lover’s trancing relish.

Worsted in square fighting, squadron to squadron, and vessel to vessel, the enemy—not having the fear of this History before their eyes, and finding it easier to harass unarmed merchantmen and to pillage unprotected coasts—ravaged the Chesapeake, burned the Capitol at Washington,—whose corner-stone had been laid by the great American himself in 1793,—and laid in ashes the President’s house. Unfortunately, the Washington Monument was not yet begun; and thus by its escape made the destruction as unpardonable by taste as it was by the code of nations. Baltimore pluck defended Baltimore beauty from attacks by land and water; but the dry goods and shipping of Alexandria were bravely captured and taken prisoners. Weary of the marine parades before New York, Newport, and Stonington, at the North, and Mobile, at the South, a descent upon the city of New Orleans was finally planned by the British military commander, with fifteen thousand hardy and well-seasoned veterans, led by Sir E. Pakenham. To two thousand of them it was a sudden descent to Avernus. Their shades, on every recurring 8th of January, have since been vexed by the sad rites of oratory, poured out on every American stump and platform. Cotton for the first time was here invested with belligerent rights, from its use by General Jackson and his six thousand troops as breastworks. It has ever since been roundly employed by American ladies in the same way against their ardent admirers. The result in the latter case, however, has usually been, not to repel but to heighten the vivacity of the attack; and, unlike that at New Orleans, to procure the surrender of the party with the cotton-works.

The battle of New Orleans was fought in ignorance of the treaty of peace between the United States and Great Britain, signed twenty-five days previously, December 14, 1814, at Ghent,—an agreement which, like frequent make-ups of other quarrels, was wholly silent upon the questions which had caused the long and harassing contention.

On these questions the United States were left at sea.

The war had cost thirty thousand lives and over $100,000,000; but we gained flags, fame, self-confidence, a fine crop of candidates, and subjects for speeches. Through the annealing flames we came out blue steel.

During the December descent on New Orleans, delegates from five of the New England States took Hartford and used it to pass some resolutions against the mode in which, as they asserted, those States had been left out in the cold, bare and unprotected by the government. Many conventions have been since held at the same place and gathered up denunciations with characteristic American fervor; but this one has got somehow astride of history, and ridden it without bridle or stirrups.

In 1816 the second national bank was chartered, with a capital of $35,000,000, lifting the country from suspension to specie payments. Mr. Calhoun, its projector and the supporter of a high tariff, lived to denounce both. Mr. Clay and Mr. Webster, his triangulating rivals, also survived to balance with changing faces the changed front of their Presidential competitor. The strong heats of party, in all times and countries, bring out characters and lines invisible before.

In December, 1816, Indiana, the nineteenth State, came to Washington bearing in her hands a-maize-ing reasons for her admission.

Why Byron did not write sometimes.—Application.—Rainbow after the Shower.—The Happy Family.—An Inlaid Cabinet.—Virginia’s Dower Rights in the Presidency.—Five New States.—The Three M’s.—Proof from the Census of 1820 that Chicago had not started.—The Missouri Compromise.—A Good Bridle until used.—Florida bought in 1819.—What we got over the Bargain.—The Florida Keys.—The Dry Tortugas thrown in.—The Dews fortunately left.—A Cracked Cup in the Family Cupboard.—The Monroe Doctrine.

“Why do you not write now?” inquired a friend of Byron in one of the fitful pauses of his galloping author life.

“Because I am happy now.”

So reply the uneventful, unproductive felicities of Monroe’s term to the distressed hunter after historical sensations.

After the showery storm of Madison’s aquatic epoch, rainbows came out in millennial blendings. Warm sunshine lay upon all the land. Under it the happy family dwelt in peace. Federal and Republican inlaid the Cabinet. Virginia was satisfied with the fourth President. She had got her thirds. The humble eighteen others believed in Virginia Presidents. They were content. It was Solomon’s reign of peace paragraphed between David’s wars and Rehoboam’s troubles. Five Territories took advantage of the open doors to step into family relations. Among the five were the three leading M’s, Maine, Mississippi, and Missouri. Chicago—we mean Illinois—took the year 1818 to enter. Of course Chicago had not yet begun, for in 1820 the census only showed 9,638,191.

The keeper of the happy family was re-elected in 1820. There was only one vote against him,—a little mistake or eccentricity not worth inquiring into. There was a little shimmering over the calm surface for two years, caused by the application of Missouri to bring slaves with her into the family. Of course Mr. Clay produced a compromise as a settlement in 1820. Missouri was allowed slaves; but thereafter slavery was banned from all territory north of 36° 30´. The bridle looked strong when there was no horse. When the black charger was brought out and the bridle put on, it was found, however, that he leaped unchecked over the line.

In 1819 Florida was bought from Spain for $5,000,000, and delivered to us in 1821. We got with it more than our bargain,—a lot of very sharp Indian tomahawks. To blunt them soon cost $30,000,000. The Dry Tortugas were thrown in. So were the Florida Keys. So were the alligators. Fortunately the night dews were left to prevent the peninsula from cracking off. Our Union is for better or worse. We took Florida in the era of good-will; we keep it for nothing. Among the crockery in the family cupboard an occasional cup comes with a cracked handle or broken edge. Having little to do at home, our statesmen turned their attention to Venezuela and New Granada, then fighting under Bolivar for their independence of Spain. Bravely they spoke up for the under cur in the fight; but more courageous still, the President, in his annual message for 1823, declared, as a principle, in spite of the crowds of colonists to our own ports, that no European nation had any right to colonize any territory on the Western continent,—a Monroe doctrine which, like the laws, is very loud-spoken in peace, but very silent in war.

Parallel between Sidney Smith’s Old Razor and J. Q. Adams’s Term.—How several Gentlemen, touched by Age, reached in Vain after Honors too high.—Who they were; and what Acid Grapes the House of Representatives snatched from them.—Pamphleteering and Privateering.—An Italian Saying.—Description of a Good Statesman spoiled in the Mould of a Politician.—An Illustrative Anecdote.—Partisan Scales weighing Public Interests.—The Weights.—The Depravity of Political Blunders.—History vs. Party Judgments.

Sidney Smith once said “that he was like an old razor,—always in hot water or in a scrape.” The term of the second Adams had similar agreeable occupation. The water was very hot when this political blade was first thrust into it. Mr. Monroe’s double term was so quiet, dozy, and apparently so long, that several gentlemen, outside of Virginia, felt that they were growing old, and might, unless they improved the chance, easily slip out of it. Besides Mr. Adams, there were, as candidates, General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, William H. Crawford of Georgia, and Henry Clay of Kentucky; among whom General Jackson received the highest popular vote, and Mr. Adams the next. In the House of Representatives, the ballot taken by States gave Mr. Adams 13, General Jackson 7, and Mr. Crawford 4 votes. Each of these was a dragon’s tooth, which was carefully sown, and produced rank growths of sulphur-colored partisans, whose drifting seeds grew into poisonous crops all along the public roads. Pamphleteering became privateering on private reputation. Industrious falsehoods supplied for many years the warp of history.

“Si non è vero è ben trovato” was the maxim of ingenious and disingenuous fraud.

Nursed and reared a statesman, Mr. Adams made a very poor politician. He could no more run his ever-cooling intellect and scholarly attainments into the curious moulds of party than he could make Q fit the place of A. Worse far, he had such a small organ for a heart, that it sent no blood to his cold fingers for hand-shaking. He had too much conscience to be popular with office-beggars, and not manners enough to go around in the country at large. He never stirred out of Washington, that he did not tread on some one’s foot.

“James,” said a father to his malapropos son, “you have only two faults; one is, that you are good for nothing before breakfast, and the other is, that you are not a whit better after breakfast.” So said of the unpartisan President his political fathers, the heads of committees; and their opinion outbalanced in the scale the petty weights of general prosperity, peace at home and abroad, a careful, scrupulous economy, that kept the entire expenses of the government below thirteen millions annually, and a steady payment on the national debt of seven and a half millions a year. The friendly blunder of appointing Mr. Clay Secretary of State was a political crime; the retention of those already in office, political unrighteousness; the refusal to appoint clamorous partisans to paying places, exaggerated political depravity. History at last inscribes over the gateway of his term “Arabia Felix,” over the place where popular misconception and partisan disappointment had hastily chiselled “Arabia Petrea.”

Military Men, domesticated to Civil Life, like tamed Animals.—General Jackson’s Camp Traits in the White Den at Washington.—His Prehensile Habits claw out the Eyes of several Measures.—How he foraged on his Political Enemies, and turned his Troops of Friends into the Public Pastures.—Lord Palmerston’s Remark upon Gladstone; and its American Application.—An Insurrection among the Household Cabinet Troops.—How the vigorous Hickory Club, wielded chivalrously for a Woman, quelled it.—The President moves on the Bank and captures all its Fortified Points.—Chicago starts in 1830.—Why it did not overtake and annex the United States.—South Carolina threatens Nullification, and is threatened.—Mr. Calhoun violently promised an elevated Position between two Posts. Mr. Clay’s Compromise.—Horace Greeley starts the First Daily Paper.—Its untimely End bewailed in Verse.—Black Hawk caged and shown around.—Georgia, the Cherokees and the Supreme Court.—Three Celebrities gained by the Seminole War.—Of Arkansas and its Papal Little Rock.—Prospects for the Pope when flung from the Tarpeian.—An Arkansas Paul preaching in the American Athens and Corinth.—Old Hickory and the Nuts left to be cracked.

Naturalists tell us that certain animals, domesticated from a wild state, retain some primeval habits so tenaciously as never to shed them; that these animals, for example, never lie down on their new and softer beds without turning around and beating about as in their forest lairs. So military men, tamed down from the independence of camp into the regulated routine of civil life, never lose their unrest in attempting to adjust themselves to their new condition. General Jackson carried the defiant bravery of his campaigns against the Indians into the white den at Washington. He disdained to cover the prehensile claws of new measures with the velvet sheath of official prudence.

Over the eyes of schemes or institutions which he designed to scratch out he cast no glamour.

During his eight years of civil campaigning, he stormed several forts that had become mossed by age through preceding administrations. His first care was to live off the enemy, the Adamites, whose Federal offices he took as forage for his own troops of friends; an example from the military code which every successor, civil or uncivil, has unfortunately hastened to follow. Lord Palmerston once declared “that Mr. Gladstone had not a command of language, but that language commanded him.” So it has resulted from this tough, hickory precedent, that the offices now command the government.

This campaign over, his next exploit was to quell an insurrection among the household troops led by Vice-President Calhoun, Mr. Ingham, Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Branch, Secretary of the Navy, and Mr. Berrien, Attorney-General. These officers were soon cashiered and their places filled by Mr. McLane, Mr. Woodbury, and Mr. Taney. The lily-white arm of a lady, whose social exclusion from the Calhoun set the vigorous old warrior resented, moved the iron sinews of the hickory club which cleaned out the Secretarys’ stables.

The General next moved on the United States Bank, up whose slopes, although jagged with ores and hoary with legislative fortifications, he rushed, carrying them at all points with a coup de main.

His first term, however, was made illustrious, not so much by these destructions as by the first appearance of Chicago. This was in 1830. At this time, fortunately, the population of the United States had reached 12,866,020, and were thus saved from being overtaken and immediately annexed to that rapid and rapidly pushing place. This Northern cosmical event attracted less attention, however, because the public mind was at last and about this time fixed upon the State of Mr. C. C. Pinckney, which, under the guidance of Mr. Calhoun, threatened to exclude the Federal hickory government from its plantation, unless the Tariff Act was repealed.

The old military chief issued a public proclamation, asserting his determination to execute the laws over South Carolina, and private threats to raise the main nullifier to a lofty post under the government. Indeed, he promised to some of his close personal friends, with ejaculations truly Jacksonian, to put him between two posts for the rest of his life.

This was the first sprouting of the carefully engrafted scion of slavery upon the stock of State rights.

Again, the Kentucky compromiser was ready with a harmonizing remedy, which scaled the tariff rates for the next ten years, and then planed them all down to the horizontal level of twenty per cent. South Carolina, lying, like Achilles, near her ships, professed to be appeased. Mr. Calhoun was saved his hempen elevation.

The year following, 1833, Horace Greeley started in New York “The Morning Post,” the first daily paper ever projected, which lived only three weeks, and wondered why it ever lived at all;

The Sacs, Foxes, and Winnebagoes, with tomahawks in their talons, and led by Black Hawk, swooped in hovering circles around the white chickens of Illinois; but were brought down by those practised marksmen, Generals Scott and Atkinson. The old Hawk was captured and shown through the United States in his drooping feathers. In Georgia, on the other hand, the whites were the aggressors, seeking to push the Creeks and Cherokees from their coveted possessions. The Indians fled to the Supreme Court of the United States, which bade Georgia restore the poor Naboths to their vineyards. The Ahab sovereignty of that State resisted. The President refused to interfere. The nullification by Georgia of a decree of the Supreme Court, restoring Indians to their rights, was, in the eyes of the old Indian fighter, quite a different matter from the nullification by Calhoun-led South Carolina of an act of Congress. So far from being a hair-splitter, the General could not even see whole shocks, if the poll was long, straight, and black. In 1835 arose another Seminole war in Florida, caused by an attempt on the part of the government to remove that powerful tribe, under a mock treaty, somewhere, nowhere, anywhere, so that it was west of the Mississippi, and away from present cupidity. On the public debt, now dwarfed to $291,089, this war was like an April shower. Florida had the satisfaction, for the third time in sixteen years, of increasing the obligations of the United States for, if not to, her. In this peninsular campaign, we obtained three celebrities to knob the flat surface of our history,—Generals Zachariah Taylor, Jessup, and Gaines,—gains compared with which the loss of life and lucre are not to be mentioned, except to stiffen our virtues by reproaching their suggestion.

The red tribes began sensibly to experience the truth of that sad tradition, which depicts their fate under the figure of a spirited bull, Manitou, which, chased from Cordillera to higher peak, across plain and river, ever westward, stands frequently on his reluctant retreat at bay, and tosses in vain from his frontlet the burning spears whose arrowy flames the waters of the Pacific only can quench.

After a pause of sixteen years, Arkansas, in 1836, strode, bowie-knife in belt, into the American camp. With Little Rock for its capital, it bids fair for the honor of sheltering the Pope when flung off from the Tarpeian at Rome. Its Saul-like Legarès, having been struck down by miraculous lights since 1861, we shall probably see, becoming zealous Pauls, mending apostolic nets on the Red River, and preaching to the ignorant worshippers of unknown gods, in the Athens of New England and the Corinth of New York.

At threescore and ten, Old Hickory was transplanted to the Hermitage. The merits and demerits of his administration, his political principles and his personal character, constitute still the Flanders of American parties, over which much hard swearing and fighting are still vigorously carried on. The rough-nutted tree has been well shaken by friend and foe; and its shaggy fruit we leave to be cracked, at family firesides, to season insipid pauses and to flavor uneffervescing drowsiness.

A New-Yorker reaches the White House, and has Hard Fare there.—The Disadvantages of Competition.—A Financial Earthquake breaks large Amounts of Crockery.—How much made a Pile in 1837.—The Sub-Treasury.—The Connection between long Messages and Anarchy in Finance.—Defalcations in Office.—Why an Old Man’s House is easily robbed.—The Phantom of Slavery.—Extraits de l’Afrique.—Principles and Goods sold at a Profit.—A Political Trader loses his Capital, and gives up Business.

At last New York saw one of her citizens reach the White House. Several other gentlemen, General William Henry Harrison of Ohio, Judge Hugh L. White of Tennessee, Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, and Willie P. Mangum of North Carolina, were each desirous of getting to this favorite inn before the others, and of securing exclusive possession of it. For four years the Dutch guest had a very hard time of it. All of his disappointed competitors watched him, as hounds the fox in his hole, ready for hot pursuit as soon as the brush showed from cover.

A financial earthquake broke through the commercial crust the first year of Mr. Van Buren’s term, shattering most of the crockery in the great cities, and sputtering red menaces of ruin through almost every village and country store. In New York alone merchants toppled down amid heaps of indebtedness piled up to $100,000,000,—a respectable pile then, now scarcely worth failing for. To help up the departing credit, the President recommended the sub-treasury scheme, or separate chests for guarding the public moneys. Of course this expedient, like all financial measures, was Dutch to the people generally, who became more hopelessly anarchical by the interminably long messages, which aggravated their want of ideas, and somehow fretfully tangled their losing tempers and accounts.

A few defalcations among public officers chafed the popular mind to an illogical but natural irritation. They looked upon the guard-houses of the national moneys, like an old man’s residence, insecure from his broken gait and few locks. The dark phantom of slavery again flitted over the land, its dusky shadow disturbing the vision of commercial and political traders. The President had, in his boresome in-augur-al, promised to his Southern supporters, in advance of Congressional action, to veto any bill forbidding slavery in the District of Columbia. Petitions against slavery were laid under the table, while speeches in its favor were extremely fashionable. Mails at the South were opened for the discovery of antislavery papers. Politicians perfumed their handkerchiefs with extraits de l’Afrique, and Northern merchants on the seaboard sold to the South their principles and goods at a profit. Still the great trader in the White House kept losing his capital. The new war with the Seminoles created bad debts. A proposition for a standing army mined his credit. The sub-treasury scheme drained specie from the people into Federal pools. To Lindenwald he retired, enriched by experience, but with his political ballot-paper at a heavy discount.