General Harrison’s Death and Life-Insurance Companies.—Whig Bank-Bills with no Tyler Bodies to suit them.—A Good Flint which required a first-rate Gun, Stock, Breech, and Barrel, to suit it.—Definition of Crabs, etc.—The Ashburton Treaty.—The Bankrupt Act, and whom it helped.—Misfortunes and Fortunes.—Mr. Calhoun’s Texas Trick.—Diplomatic Magic-Lanterns exposed.—Roman-like Garments with Carthaginian Spots.—Florida our Stocking Heel; how darned.—Yarns about it.—Iron Railings as State Corsets.—How the Florida Keys might be usefully employed.

At the time General Harrison was called from the clerkship of the County Court of Hamilton County, Ohio, to preside at the People’s High Assizes at Washington, he lived at North Bend, a very different crook from that of his predecessor. He was sixty-eight years of age, and in feeble health; yet so seldom do people die in desirable offices, that any life-insurance company would have taken his life in a policy at the lowest premium.

April 4, 1841, however, he died. Of course John Tyler, the Vice-President, did not. To the subsequent regret of his party he lived on—a plane of his own, quite apart from the platform upon which he was placed by them, and bisected by a Virginia ecliptic so oblique that it rarely touched anything or anybody. Mr. Clay and the Whigs tried hard and long to shape a bank bill to his amphibious tastes; but as they could not find a body, neck, or feet to suit the bill, they abandoned the study of natural history as illustrated by Mr. Tyler. A bank—some bank—he seemed desirous to have; because he entertained a profound conviction that a bank was a good place to put a counter in. Like the gentleman who possessed a first-rate flint, and wished a gunsmith just to fit a good breech, lock, stock, and barrel to it, the acting President seemed anxious, in his interviews with the Congressional banksmiths, to have them fit a good bank, vaults, specie, and circulation, to his admirable counter.

As Cuvier objected to the definition of a crab given by the French Academy, namely, “that it was a small red fish which walks backwards,” as “wanting three things to make it correct: first, that the crab was not a fish; second, that it was not red; and third, that it did not walk backwards”: so the leaders of the party which elected him found equal fault with Mr. Tyler as defining in his own person the name of Whig on three grounds: first, that he was not a Whig in principle; second, nor in theory; third, nor in practice.

The original Cabinet members all resigned, except Mr. Webster, Secretary of State, who remained to complete in July, 1842, with Lord Ashburton, a treaty to disentangle our northeastern boundary lines and fish lines from the hard knots into which they were running.

A Bankrupt Act was thrown out by Congress in 1841, as planks for traders shipwrecked by the tidal waves which followed the earthquake of 1837; but the principal benefit of the act resulted in throwing the stranded fortunes to the official wreckers, called assignees in bankruptcy, who secured most of the stuff cast upon the shore. In two years this barbarous wrecking business was stopped by the repeal of the law.

The principal event of Mr. Tyler’s term was the successful trick, shown off in 1845 to the American people, by Mr. Calhoun, the new Secretary of State, by which they were led into the belief that Texas was about to pass under an English protectorate. Stimulating the national antipathies and cupidities, he asked Congress, through Mr. Tyler, to secure the slave empire on the Rio Grande. The dark-lantern exhibition was successful. Congress passed alternate resolutions, one opening negotiations with Mexico for the impracticable cession of Texas, the other providing for its practical annexation. These little State deceits, covered at the time with solemn diplomatic care, seem very pitiful when historically exposed in their pasteboard cheapness and tinselled falsity. The Roman-like virtue of Mr. Calhoun was picked out with Carthaginian spots, and his white state toga shot with colored figures, that will not stand the sun. While he would have scorned with his whole nature any individual fraud for the personal gain of a fortune, he was, like so many other politicians, neither above nor below being more than sharp at a party bargain.

The day before Mr. Tyler went out, Florida came into the Union. She is the heel of the American stocking,—very much darned and always in need of mending. Yarns orange-colored, lemon-hued, and palm-tinted show in the abundant patching. She has been thus far like certain small country places, which scorn fences and paint, ready to borrow money on any security required, and are always foreclosed at some point by mortgages which hurt no one in the neighborhood. Iron railing may stimulate her pride and corset up her untidy ways. She wears the keys at her girdle, but as yet has forgotten to lock up her small politicians and let out her too closely kept products.

The Floor Committee for the coming Polka described.—History of previous Balls, Country Dances, Virginia Reels, Quincy Waltzes, Irish Jigs, South Carolina Shake-ups, etc.—General Taylor, his Advances and Movements at Palo Alto, Resaca de la Palma, Monterey, and Buena Vista.—How his Partner, the Army, was taken away.—General Scott among the Mustangs at Vera Cruz, Natural Bridge, Chapultepec, Mexico, etc.—Of Wool, Kearny, Fremont, and Commodore Sloat.—What New Mexico and California added and subtracted.—The Mustang Liniment, or Treaty of Guadaloupe Hidalgo.—How the Path for the Traditional Sun of Civilization Westward was cut and paved.—Revolvers judicially quoted and applied.—Peculiar Fruit adorning the Pendulous Branches of Trees in New Settlements.—What the Little Trick of the Wizard of the South conjured up.—California in 1848 and now contrasted.—David Wilmot raises a Ghost which disturbs several Party Feasts.—How the Polka Party broke up; and how it pleased some and dissatisfied others.

The committee of the American people, in November, 1844, designated new floor-managers for the coming season of four years.

With Washington and John Adams the nation had had the old-fashioned, respectable country dance; the up and down, square, staid figures, moving through the rhythmic performances and retiring with marked dignity. Then came the Virginia reel, led by Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, with the same partners throughout. The Quincy waltz followed, ending in a dishevelled gallop, when the heated dancers were led off to chilling ice-creams and whipped syllabubs. This was succeeded by a long puzzling Irish jig, under Jackson, with a lively and frequent change of partners and a passionate mixture of feet, heads, and ball-room dresses. A Dutch hornpipe led a select party through the mazy solemnities, and intermixed fandango advances and retreats which characterized the Van Buren schottishe. Then came the quick-footed cachuca, performed by the Harrison-Tyler troupe, ending in a South Carolina shake-up, where the darkies were the principal performers, although Calhouned white men promoted the dance and took the profits of the abundantly patronized bar. The floor was now cleared for the polka, an extremely spirited, gyrating series of figures, in which the main object was to balance, by rapid dodges and double-shuffling whirls, the forcibly acquired colored partner, named Texas, with the new incoming free State arrivals. The sets were soon formed. President Polk was of course head manager, having able assistants in James Buchanan, carrying a stately variegated black and white rose; Robert J. Walker, his button-hole adorned with a gold-colored treasury ribbon; William L. Marcy, resplendent with a broad crimson war-sash across his broad chest; George Bancroft, in a navy-blue uniform, open in front for the ready exit of his never-ceasing orders; Cave Johnson, in mail attire; and John Y. Mason with his narrow cranium transfigured by a straitened cross-barred attorney’s cap. Southern men, North and South, stepped eagerly forward to join in the popular dance.

General Taylor, a modest young man of sixty-one, was directed by the managers to make an advance, with a party clothed in the United States military dress, to a place on the large floor, chalked out between the Neuces and Rio Grande, with a hint not to be offensive in his attitudes, but to look as disagreeable as he chose; and that if anybody, especially the blanketed Mexicans, who insisted on having that part of the large ball-room exclusively to themselves, should give him any chance, however small, to fall foul of them, ball or no ball. When one is desirous of a quarrel he is not usually, especially at the Southwest, long kept out of the enjoyment. In April, 1846, General Ampudia and General Taylor chanced to touch each other, and off went the chip from the American shoulder. Of course everybody who at the North sold goods to the South, and every one at the South who possessed a colored brother in fee-simple, was indignant about the chip, which for the time conveniently represented American honor.

The national gorge and the price of negroes rose simultaneously.simultaneously. Fifty thousand men and $10,000,000 were voted by Congress to iron out the creases made in our flag. Of course the young man of sixty-one soon got into the adobe-colored tumble which was impatiently expected. May 8, 1846, with the aid of 2,300 men, he tripped up General Arista with 6,000 men, at Palo Alto, and the next day fell violently against him at Resaca de la Palma. The chopfallen Mustangs, picking up themselves and their dirtier blankets, made all haste to get out of reach of the rough-and-ready treatment, and sped across the Rio Grande to Monterey. But the young man, excited by the jerking mazourka step into which the dance now broke, grasped his partner, the army, around the waist, and flung across the opening spaces against the frightened Mustangs at Monterey. It was a hard shock, and, of course, the sorry-visaged Mexicans were hurled against the wall.

The floor managers for some reason—some uncharitably thought from envy at seeing the modest young man attracting so much admiration—took away his partner, and sent it off with a younger man, General Scott, then only sixty, to another part of the room. The figures which he cut with his set of twenty thousand at Vera Cruz, Cerro Gordo, National Bridge, Churubusco, Contreras, Chapultepec, and city of Mexico, were waltzed with unflagging energy.

Meanwhile, the young man Taylor, left with only 4,759 raw troops, was set upon in February, 1847, at Buena Vista, by Santa Anna and 22,000 well-baked Mexicans. The South American Warwick left 1,500 men, his carriage, travelling equipage, and the best part of himself—his wooden leg—upon the field, and with the fragments escaped southwards. Almost simultaneously new-comers were seen flying, in movements more or less effective, across the room,—General Wool, with 2,900 men, at San Antonio; General Kearny, at Sante Fé, New Mexico; Captain John C. Fremont and Commodore Sloat, in California; all performing feats which brought murmurs of applause even from trans-sea critics.

At last the Mexicans gave out, tired and glad to apply to their wounds that Mustang liniment, the treaty of Guadaloupe Hidalgo, mixed up March 2, 1848.

New Mexico and California were, by this treaty, added, with eight hundred thousand square miles, to our westering borders. Henceforth the Rio Grande babbled a bi-lingual story to the Saxon Americans on its right, and the mezzo-tinted, mezzo-clad Mexicans on its left. The path of civilization, whose sun-leaning course through the centuries, from Assyria to America, is not unfamiliar to Americans, was now securely macadamized by Yankee pavers to the Pacific. The Atlantic slopes, of course, were easily turned westward, and their readily manufactured fruits rolled down into the Mississippi basin, and over its heaping rim beyond. Revolvers were boxed and transported in increased quantities to the Southwest, to supply the judicial demand; as every man who takes up government land is liable to sudden litigations, where the trials revolve quickly, and cast with fatal speed one of the litigants. The wonderful vegetation of this newly opened region, gorgeous in tropical luxuriance, was for a few years made more remarkable by the human fruitage, which not unfrequently hung suspended with impressive weight from the pendulous branches. Fortunately these productions are short-lived. They are but the morning mists that hide for an hour the mammoth sierras and wide-armed plains, that nurse continents and centuries to manly vigor.

The little Calhoun trick had, quite unexpectedly to the wizard of the South, conjured up,—not a few paltry African patches grinning with ghastly spectres, chained in the linked dance of death,—but broad empires brimming soon with stalwart men and women. Calhoun proposes, but conscience disposes.

The yellow-fever broke out, soon after the treaty of Guadaloupe Hidalgo, in our new Californian possession, carrying off people, not thence, but thither. By the side of palace hotels, now gleaming along golden bays; solid warehouses, through whose opened doors show the well-stored sheaves of Continental harvests; settled industries that spike the land with stacks, vineyards, mills, and spired villages; palace cars which in a week have blazoned their luxurious splendors through solitudes threaded only a few years ago by the dangerous blazed track; and giant steamers wading the Pacific Sea, and carrying to the Mongolian empires of the Orient a staggering back-load of American products,—by the side of these actual marvels, even a score of years has made the contrasted early life of the gold adventurer, gambling in revolver-furnished tents, dangerous night brawls, and rude visits of vigilance committees, a theme for romance and its twin ally, history. It had taken nearly three centuries since Sir Thomas Drake proclaimed California the ward of Elizabeth, for the North American boy to acquire sufficient courage to touch her virgin lips, and claim her in happy wedlock.

Our New Mexico brought immediate and national disturbance. Slavery there was considered objectionable by many; and as soon as Territories were proposed to be carved out of those wide limits, the Wilmot proviso, to exclude slavery from it, arose at the expected Calhoun feast like Banquo’s ghost, and, disturbing the revel, followed with reproachful look almost every American statesman. It strode into the Democratic Convention at Baltimore, which nominated Lewis Cass, and sat alongside of the shivering president and secretaries. It stalked into the Whig assemblage at Philadelphia, which took the young man for its candidate, and troubled its peace. Finally, it flitted to Buffalo, and made its appearance at a mixed gathering which presented Martin Van Buren,—now the political friend of the ghost,—with just the ghost’s chance for the Presidency.

And so the ball and polka party turned out very much as other balls. Those who had expected a great deal from it did not enjoy it much; while those who had no hand in getting it up had a good time, ate the most supper, had the least headache the next morning, and often spoke of it afterwards with pleasurable recollections. Among the former were Mr. Calhoun, Mr. Polk, and the floor committee; among the latter the modest young man, now sixty-five years of age, John C. Fremont, several people who did not part their hair in the middle, and a growing set who were friends of those who could not divide their crinkled hair as yet either way or any way.

The contrasted Beginning and End of the Half-Century.—What America brought to the New-Year’s Day of 1850 in the Raw, and what for the Grill of more refined Tastes.—Historical Stews, and their Foreign and Domestic Sauces.—What they were.—Attempts at, and Failures in, Insurrections in America.—Mechanical Inventions of the Half-Century; Steamboats, Telegraphs, Reapers, Sewing-Machines, etc.—Their Advantages.—Vestments and Investments.—Of Ether.—How Populations drifted to Cities.—Chicago bibulous and dropsical.—Public Men and their Versatile Principles.—Newspapers and their unfulfilled Prophecies.—Plutocracy.—Fashions and their Constancy to Change.—The Stormy Petrels of Commercial Disasters.—How Owners turn Wreckers.—Profits out of Losses.—Of Merchant Salvors.—The Effects of Gold Discoveries in California on Labor, Ladies’ Heads and Hearts.—Auriferous Marriages.—The Spite of Midas against Children.—Ecclesiastical Gardens in America.—The new Mormon Shrub of the Genus Polygamous.—Architectural Improvements.—American Houses and their Sites.—Farmsteads; their Better Complexion.—The Crops from the National Farms, the Sea and Land, in 1850.—Of American Literature, Science, Natural History, The Philosophies and other Branches of Knowledge, and their Cultivators, through the Half-Century.—Summary of the Bill of Fare for the Repast on the Half-Shell.—Its Character and Critics.

The nineteenth century began in America comparatively lean and unfattened, with but sixteen States, and a population of 5,305,939. When, on New Year’s day, 1850, it was taken up from its native beds, it had grown to thirty States, and a population of 23,191,876. It had gathered American history enough to be served up in every style to its hungry, impatiently waiting crowds of customers.

There was still plenty of it in the raw; heaps of materials swimming in abundant liquor; common work at rough, resisting nature, bivalved between the ordinary shells of laborious days and unwaking, sonorous nights; good honest-minded rough-handed labor, swinging the axe among Western settlements, and pricking gold, silver, and lead veins, and draining off their arterial currents into Atlantic bowls; shaggy-jacketed enterprise, brave in work, in patience, and cheerful endurance, quelling the rebellions of empty stomachs,—those quickly rising, wrathful, and speedily armed revolutionists,—and subjecting them to serve while the wheat ripened, and to wait upon a nourishing hope; and ploughmen planting broad and newly claimed fields with tasselled banners, and marching with their sheaved battalions to take growing towns and marts of business.

Others there were drawing fresh, healthy milk, from the breasts of buxom mother Earths; pioneer, shaggy-coated energy, East as well as West, South as well as North, creating, organizing, and crystallizing around nuclei, snatching newly created words, as woman, from the ribs of necessities, and planting them amid the needs of freshly staked Edens; new-laid towns, from whose hasty nests speculators run cackling; mining villages, planted at sunset out of hand, watered by hot whiskeys, stimulated by the guano of revolvers, faro, monte, and warmly stirred politics, and growing over night into rough-timbered climbers up and up the mountain-side, to look over into the canyon beyond; hastily lit oil and other speculations, around whose flame the idle moths of the pulpit, the bar, and the counter fly and singe themselves until they fall helpless upon the table of others; struggling schools, churches, seminaries, and charities, reaching upwards to the sunlight, growing more graceful as they straighten away from their earthy roots, but still raw; and all the many-visaged, polysided life of fresh energy, struggling for the mastery over the down-wrestled but ever-rising work of new soils, wants, and needs, and destined, in spite of its great, rude, sinewy strength, to exhaust itself upon what time, patience, and long-applied skill shall shape into greater symmetry and proportion, and then to vanish away into the tomb of all ex-workmen.

There, too, were heaped up and ready for the grill, and for tastes more refined, capital, massing itself into centripetal, compacting, aggregated wealth, touching large levers that swing inflowing products from port to port, across wide-reaching inland spaces, or over high mountains; multiform industries, translating and exchanging, without parallel, the growths of every parallel; and associated earnings of diligent thrift, extracting the best notions from hard, quartz-headed mountains. There was vivid and intelligent joint enterprise, which plunges beneath the waves, and places the sensitive nerves of thought below the gambols of the leviathan, for the especial benefit of gamblers in bonds, cotton, gold, and stocks; pries open the shut gates of science, and entices her occult learning to minister to the enlarging demands of commerce, agriculture, manufactures, and trade; sets in motion the steel fingers which pick, cull, card, spin, and weave the cotton, flax, silk, and wool, whose fabrics clothe us through all seasons; quickens the spindles, machines, and contrivances—busy everywhere—which create our necessaries and our luxurious comforts; drags our fuel from the tight clutches of the mine; adulterates our food and drinks; sews up our vestments and sometimes our investments, and supplies our dwellings with furniture, our stores with goods, our fields with mowers, reapers, steam-ploughs, and steam-impelling implements, and our grave-yards with monuments, hewn by machinery and chiselled by the nimble fingers of patented tools.

Historical stews, too, those fifty years had, of course, produced in abundance; some flavored with British, others with French sauces. Domestic ones, too, had simmered and sputtered; but, stirred by bayonet-shaped spoons, they had so far gone off in smoke as to leave only an insipid taste on the homely palate of our peace-loving household. Of these were the Whiskey Insurrection in Pennsylvania, and Dorr’s Suffrage Rebellion in Rhode Island in 1842, made of very poor materials, and smothered with a rude domestic bread sauce, which, more like a poultice for the outside than a relishable compound for the inside, soon took away the vicious appetite. Indeed, since the Great Rebellion which severed the long threads that tied us to Great Britain, no insurrections have ever had any success in America. Sharp newspaper émeutes, looking like imminent war, yes; sectional animosities threatening, like the South Carolina chattering of 1832, to embroil a piece of us, yes; State grievances, bubbling up with heated convention resolves, until the steam of revolution almost arose from the agitated surface, yes, and often; and, to quote an example since 1850, even a land-wasting war of four years, reducing large plantations to cinders, and leaving in funereal gloom many hopes and households,—even this, yes; but a genuine, earnest, well-founded, and just revolt, rising from wrongs and oppressions, and appealing to armed manly protest, and resulting in deserved success, never, never!

Upon the half-shell were served some remarkable mechanical inventions. Water raised into steam was, in 1806, applied by Fulton to propel the first steamboat over water; an application never contemplated by the Constitution, but which, in spite of the many private constitutions suddenly broken up by it, the appalling increase in American biographies, and the wreck of matter thrown upon life-insurance reserves, must be kindly remembered as one of the great benefactions of genius to humanity. In 1832 Samuel F. B. Morse discovered the mode of electro-magnetizing thought, and of ticking down words at places where thoughts were seldom spontaneously produced. The wiry telegraph is daily bringing to light other incidental discoveries, which show how great benefits sometimes pendulate with petty remorses. There are developed at most stations a class of people, formerly unknown, and called “operators,” who believe that small accidents, in places unrewarded by the notice of geographers, are national; that the births, deaths, or marriages of owners of petroleum, fast horses, or other rapid stock, concern all readers of newspapers; that the time, age, and pedigree of quadrupeds, kept for jumping long spaces in a short time, and the weights of bipeds, sent to college to acquire an increase of their intellectual strength, but who punish instead an ash stick some four hours a day, by sweeping with it some frog-pond in the vicinity, are vital statistics; and that the election of constables, supervisors, aldermen, mayors, and members of Congress are matters which every intelligent patriot, instead of banishing from all recollection as speedily as possible, desires to have forced upon his journalistic readings. If Morse started, re-morse has often followed after, the telegraph.

In 1833, one Hussey, from Cincinnati, improving upon hints glinting out through agricultural books and poems from the time of the Romans, perfected somewhat a mower and reaper, which, as since bettered by Manny, Ketchum, and McCormick, has made such quick work with our meadows and grain-fields, as to break up all the delicious reveries into which picturesque men in them, and sentimentalists over books representing them, formerly indulged. Gone is the mower’s scythe, now nicked into the quick-sliding saw which eats in a day through acres of grass and golden-bloomed wheat. Gone, Ruth-lessly, the maidens in broad hats, turning with a fork the low-lying clover, and with their eyes the uncut young Timothy, ever near at hand. Vanished from American harvest-fields the whistling grain-gatherers, driven from sight and pictorial illustrations by a single hussy.

During the half-century, too, was set up that useful American music-box, the sewing-machine,—a box that now sings joyful songs of shirts, frills, pantaloons, and vests, in all airs, flights, and stories. In 1846 the application of ether to lure pain into insensibility was first discovered. The honor is contested between three Americans, an honor large enough to be divided up, and a third given to each; but as each naturally covets the exclusive claim, the retort-like monument to perpetuate the discovery must be inscribed, to ether.

At the middle of the century populations had begun to gather into city centres; 515,547 in New York; 340,045 in Philadelphia; 169,054 in Baltimore; 136,881 in Boston; 116,375 in New Orleans; 115,436 in Cincinnati; 77,860 in St. Louis; and in Brooklyn, un-scared by German invasions, 96,838. Chicago, with just a score of years, had more than a score of thousands; but its frequent doublings since have run up so many scores, that the sum leaps the bars of all arithmetics, save its own. Since it has taken to drinking out of Lake Michigan, and begun to draw upon the Atlantic and Liverpool, our calculations have become so dropsical that nothing but tapping can save them.

With greater wealth had come, of course, into America greater variety of aspirations, tastes, modes of display, versatility of social invention and experiment. Most of our leading public men had lived long enough to have as many principles as they could number decades, as many heads as the hydra, as unlike each other as in cheap weeklies, and yet at one period or another a faithful likeness. Good-natured voters, who could recall twenty years of ballot experience, could remember a vote given for and against almost every Whig and Democratic chief. The country had survived the predictions of its downfall, although, at intervals, the New York “Evening Post” for forty-nine years, the “National Intelligencer” for thirty-seven, the “Boston Post” for nineteen, the “New York Herald” for fifteen, and the New York “Daily Tribune” for nine years, had in startling type assured its readers, with most staccato emphasis and adjectives, of its speedy overthrow, if some measure which it reprehended was adopted, or unless some principle which it advocated was not at once received into the national creed.

Plutocracy, of course, also, got larger Josses and re-gilded their shrines with many fantastic patterns. Fashions enlarged and contracted, through the five decades, with every east wind from Paris; and American men, women, and children hastened to change the boots, hats, and vestments, so lovely and so much admired before the last arrival, with the same alarm after the new mode was out, as they would have doffed a garment that had encased a cholera patient.

Fortunate then as now the feather or flower which formed a whole tri-mestral lodgement among the native, or foreign beds of hair, that are so beautifully upholstered one month to be taken down and ridiculed the next.

The stormy petrels of disaster had frequently appeared over the fluctuating sea of our commercial life, covering it in 1837, and in every few successive epochs since, with its screaming, ill-omened, harpy brood, while fleets and single vessels of mercantile adventure broke up and lined the shore with their shattered wrecks. Then as now the owner sometimes turned wrecker of his own cargo, and often made more from the stranded pieces than he would have netted from the entire cargo had it arrived safely in port; as the expected payment of its purchase price would then have reduced the profits. This species of mercantile salvage, by which the proprietor profits by his losses, although not unknown to the traders of Carthage, has had an extension in modern days, that threatens to put merchandizing among those equivocal ventures, which puzzle casuists in cases of conscience, and often defy even the doctrine of chances as to the payment.

The discovery, in 1848, of gold in California bestowed upon America the Midas-touch it had fervently prayed for. Gold, sweated from the pores of labor, was sprinkled in a dusty shower upon the head of beauty, dropped in bars upon the scales of the vendors of dry goods and wet goods, filmed the eyes of marriageable girls with an aureous ophthalmia which indisposed them to see any desirable wedding unless it was golden, and so veneered the duties and chairs of railway directors, members of the legislature and of Congress, with a yellow smearing, that nearly all bills, resolutions, or orders have refused to dip into or drink from any stream but Pactolus. Many homes, however, through that half-century, we are happy to say, unwatered by the curse of that thirsty stream, had taken root and sent up solid shafts whose numerous branches bloomed with bountiful clusters, while sweet-smelling vines, springing alongside the family trees from the roots of the simple love-knots, spread a protecting shade over many a family roof-tree.

Curiously enough, Midas always had a spite against children, which grow up thickest among heaps of clam-shells and on poor side-hills.

Into our flowering ecclesiastial garden, planted with every known variety, and exhibiting large and vigorous growths, Joseph Smith—a Vermont simple—introduced, in 1827, a new shrub. It bore at first a double Mormon flower-looking tip, distributed in pretty equal numbers on its deep-green, sucker-like shoots; but transplanted first to Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1838, and ten years later to the alkaline soil of Utah, it immediately bore the female variety in alarming disproportion. This Salt Lake shrub—of the genus polygamous—has become by cultivation a very rank weed, smelling earthily to heaven. Its numerous Young off-shoots require severe cutting, if not distinct subsoil treatment.

Architecture at last began to raise its tasteful fronts, Elizabethan, Gothic, Italian cottage, or American composite, set in trim yards or on smooth-shaven lawns, netted and webbed by paths and walks. On headlands, fringed with sea-wave ruffles; in valleys gladdened by the smiles of brooks and rallied into happy, healthy, joyousness by the outbursting frolicsome hills that cannot hold in their peculiar humors; on the sloping banks of many rivers seaward running; and on bossed and tufted hillocks where the pines, spruces, and larches hang aloft through all seasons their graceful flags, tasteful residences with clustering out-houses, sheltered thrift, corralled the domestic wealth which Midas cannot buy, and resounded with whoops that brought out other hoops in turn. Farmsteads had steadily added improvements, amplified their breadths, changed their white coats into colors more harmonious, and gathered around them well-adjusted farm buildings, and in their neatly fenced yards better stock, quadrupedal, bipedal, feathered, furred, and scaly.

Under improved cultivation our two national farms—the sea and land—produced, in 1850, crops that weighted the census heavily. The former showed 1,360 new American-built vessels, carrying 272,218 tons; and the latter bore a growth that year of 53,000,000 pounds of wool, 100,000,000 bushels of wheat, 592,000,000 bushels of Indian corn, 813,000,000 pounds of cotton, 14,000,000 tons of hay, grown on farms valued at $3,300,000,000, upon which were used implements costing $153,000,000, and stocked with live animals valued at $544,000,000.

But while American hands were thus busy through the half-century, American heads were not idle or unproductive. Of course in numbers political writings led, as political discussion is the intellectual bread and butter of Americans. Histories of many of the States—of Connecticut, by Benjamin Trumbull; of Pennsylvania, by Robert Proud; of New England, by Hannah Adams; “Annals of America,” by Dr. Abiel Holmes, father of the many-tongued, myriad-sided Oliver Wendell, and others—gathered up the variously colored skeins of the busy-fingered past; while lives of eminent statesmen—Patrick Henry’s, by the accomplished Wirt, laus laudato viro; of Columbus, by Irving, himself a discoverer of new worlds in America; Washington’s, Franklin’s, Adams’s, and others, by Jared Sparks; and a long catalogue of others—presented pictures of rare personal daring, heroism, patriotism, learning, and worth, set in choicely carved and polished frames.

Investigations in, and sketches of, our physical geography and of the natural history of our flora, fauna, reptilia, fishes, and birds, by Professor Barton, Alexander Wilson, John J. Audubon, Samuel L. Mitchell, Timothy Flint, and kindred minds, brought out, in lights as brilliant as our October sunsets, our wide surfaces, and the objects crawling, flitting, or flying upon and over them. In sacred literature, theology, and polemics, Samuel Miller, Edward Robinson, Moses Stuart, William Ellery Channing, Francis Wayland, Nicholas Murray, the Wares (father and son), Theodore Parker, the Alexanders, George Bush, Edward Beecher, and a marshalled host of others, upheld by logical force and with learned or lively dialectics the cherished views of their various sects. Philosophy, moral, mental, metaphysical, and international, spoke golden-mouthed and eloquent its reasoned rules, principles, and large, grasping deductions through Henry James, Tayler Lewis, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Asa Mahan, C. S. Henry, L. P. Hickok, Henry Wheaton, and other diligent minds; while language was enriched and fertilized by the culturing labors of Worcester, Webster, Marsh, Schoolcraft, and Duponceau.

In general literature our hemisphere sparkled with fixed stars, like Irving, Prescott, Story, the Everetts (Alexander and Edward), Cooper, Motley, Ticknor, Bancroft, Paulding, Hawthorne, Hillard, Wilde, Legarè, and uncounted more, which lit it up with beautiful lights, that blent their flames with the soft poetic rays of Bryant, Longfellow, Halleck, Whittier, Saxe, Lowell, Poe, Willis, Hillhouse, the Careys, the Davidson sisters,—scarcely shown ere they were snatched away,

Magazines and Reviews, although first appearing in 1745, began to be cultivated about 1815 by scholarly minds, for refined readers. “The North American Review,” “The American Quarterly,” “Southern Quarterly,” “The Christian Examiner,” “The New York Review,” “The Knickerbocker,” and eager crowds of less note, presented, ere the half-shell was cast aside, such palatable relishes that people wondered how they had ever contrived to make a meal without them.

On the whole, looking over the multiform bill of fare, it presented a healthy and not discreditable array. If the service was not as faultless as a Sybarite luxury of taste might desire, or if absent, might criticise, it was not destitute of refinement, and while consciously susceptible of improvement, was as consciously guiltless of many of the sins so wittily summarized against it by Sidney Smith. There was, doubtless, veal too young for the goggle-eyed epicure, who had haunted the Trois Freres Provencaux, in Paris, for twoscores of years, and the dishonest debaucheries of European courts, with vicious diligence; there was manifestly beef too much done for the dyspeptically over-fed stomach, too critical to enjoy, too weak to digest, anything hearty; there was pork here and there in the place of pheasants’ hearts and nightingales’ tongues; there were plump joints, which stood where foreign-fed stomachs might have preferred to find some rare, unpronounceable dish, some New-found-land estray, smothered in the sudden tides of French sauces, and, there were, also certain culinary anachronisms that had, by an uncalculating liberality—so abundant in America—piled themselves thoughtlessly on the great half-shell,—a blue-pouted oyster, for example, in a month destitute of an r and of ar-oma, or sweetmeats and sweetbreads for breakfast. Still, there was a very lavish spread, out of which a reasonable foreigner or an un-Europeanized native might pick a good deal, before he churlishly finished his meal on vinegar, or pettishly gave himself up to sugared water.

The Young Polka Dancer becomes Floor Manager.—The large Apples of Discord emptied on the Floor of Congress.—What they were; and the Pacific Trees from which they fell.—Of California, New Mexico, and Deseret.—General Taylor’s Death, and Mr. Fillmore’s suave Manners and smooth Appeals.—Wendell Phillips and J. Davis.—Political Nurses and Anodynes.—Kossuth and his Short Catechism.—How it did not take, and how he did.—A large Piece of Japanned Ware.—Deaths of Clay and Webster.—The Autumn Glory which they shed on a Stormy Season.

The young man who, in Texas and Mexico, had got through the polka to the delight of the spectators, and the discontent of the floor committee, became himself the general manager for the coming season; Millard Fillmore being first assistant.

Already, however, the apple of discord, or rather a whole barrelful of very red-faced Spitzenbergs, mixed with meal-colored russets, had been emptied into the Union, and rolled over the floor of Congress. The acquisitions, gained from Mexico by arms and the treaty of 1848, including the new gold weights handed up by California, disturbed the adjustments of Mr. Calhoun’s patent balances, which only worked well when a colored State was put on one side at the same moment that an uncolored one was put upon the other,—an operation about as difficult and just as natural, as that which regulates the number of children in a family to the number of bushels of wheat grown in any season, or to the number of windy days in the year. In 1850, three Territories pressed for admission as States, each carrying some of the fatal apples; California, with a Constitution excluding slavery; New Mexico, formed out of Texas, but disputing with her a boundary line; and Utah, then called Deseret, taking in all the women which could be drawn thither, and, by the aid of its dry air, absorbing them into the Smith and Young families. Texas herself, admitted into the Union in December, 1847, always swaggering with a rapier in her belt and a patch over her eye, bullied New Mexico lustily on one side, so as to make lustier claims upon the United States on the other,—a cock-eyed way of shooting that made one barrel with two diverging eyes over the sight do the work of a double-shooter. Petitions from the North for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, and from the South for a more stringent fugitive-slave act, rolled very large Spitzenbergs and russets on the floor of Congress.

Looking from the legislative galleries upon the newly arrived heap, a Western stroller might have asked of his comrade, as the freshly landed Irishman demanded of his countrymen, at his first sight of a tortoise walking about, “Be these live snuff-boxes common in these America; be they or be they?” and might have received a like answer, “Be asy, and look on I tell ye, for I dunno’s they be, and I dunno as they be.”

Suddenly, however, Mr. Clay’s old established omnibus, belonging to the compromise line,—which generally took up all the passengers, rejoicing at their good luck, although apt to set them down very discontented at the end of the way,—drove in to carry off in one load all of these fretting, complaining subjects.

Just at this time, July 9, 1850, the large-hearted but short-headed President died, and the polite and urbane Fillmore,

stepped out on the balcony, and, bowing suavely towards the driver and the quarrelsome load, begged Mr. Webster, Mr. Corwin, Mr. Crittenden, and other by-standers, to be good enough to assist in getting the carry-all and the disagreeable objects that kept so many people awake o’ nights, out of Washington. It was not until September, however, before the tightly crammed vehicle was started, carrying California in a State suit, unattended by a colored servant, New Mexico, and Utah as Territorial passengers, with the liberty of having bronzed property or not along with them, slavers taken out of the District of Columbia never to return, a chest containing ten million dollars for the State with a patch on its eye, and messengers to the Northern free States, informing them that hereafter they were to break up all underground railroads, and to send stray Southern baggage, without its owners, back whence it had departed.

Of course everybody was dissatisfied, except Wendell Phillips, J. Davis, and their following,—the ascendentalists and descendentalists,—who, sincere devotees for equality and inequality, found a novel pleasure in having new stand-points, from which they could each look up to or down upon, a grievance large enough for thought, speech, and action.

The political nurses, of course, thought that the paregoric had forever quieted the crying evils; but wiser people foresaw that these attempts to get remedies for wide-awake consciences and interests out of a Congress-water bottle were just as idle as the conjurer’s trick to obtain whiskey, wine cordial, brandy, and milk-punch from the same nozzle.

In 1851 Louis Kossuth, brought over from Turkey, whither he had escaped from Hungary in a national ship, put forth, immediately on his arrival here, a very short catechism, which comprised a single question and answer.

“Q. What is the chief end of Americans?

“A. To fight Austria evermore.”

After spending most eloquent commentaries upon this brief compendium of duty, in which he braided newly spun English words and upbraided American indifference, he abandoned the missionary field, leaving a large Kossuth party, but a very small body of proselytes to Kossuth’s gospel.

In 1852 we obtained an immensely large piece of japanned ware,—a Japanese treaty bargained for by Commodore Perry,—a piece which seems to grow larger the longer we look at it.

The death of Mr. Clay in June, 1852, and of Mr. Webster in October following, left, like the touch of frost in autumn, a dying glory to the troubled and storm-swept season which had just passed over America.