Reference, by Believers in the Transmigration of Souls, to Mr. Pierce for its Proof.—His real and apparent Age.—The Slave Colossal Figure bestrides the Presidential Harbor.—How the New President rode in between its Legs, and cast out a curious Anchor.—An Antediluvian Cabinet.—Still Times expected.—Sudden Freshet.—Douglas breaks the Missouri Dike.—Bitter Waters over the Land.—Alarm among the Elderly Gentlemen, and how quieted by J. Davis.—Alarm North and South not quieted.—The African Outlook towards the North Pole.—The Power of Douglas illustrated from his Scotch Namesake and Proverb.—What Warriors rushed to our Flanders.—The Blow on the Head of Sumner and Slavery from Brooks’s Cane.—The Dred Scott Essays.—American Africanization.—An Exploring Party in the Interior.—Discovery of an Extinct Race, and of Fremont.—Undiked Waters not strong enough to float Douglas into a Nomination.—Buchanan in the Dock.—The Know-Nothings make a neat little Present to a Polite Gentleman.

Believers in the doctrine of transmigration of souls point to Franklin Pierce for its triumphant demonstration. Although by ordinary reckoning but forty-nine years old when, in March, 1853, he came out of New Hampshire to be President of the United States, he must have lived—so they assert—somewhere through several previous existences and brought along with him the last time the cherished notions of the first. Certainly he was as much of an anachronism as a two-handled plough, dragged by a yoke of oxen, contrasted with a steam one driving its hot shares through dissolving acres, an undecked Roman trireme rowed against an iron-breasted monitor armed with the heaviest modern gun, or an old-fashioned scythe in comparison with a mower.

His ideas of government were scant for a good-sized town, and of slavery so patriarchal, that a Red River planter might have taken several lessons from him with great profit.

Slavery at that time, like the colossal statue of Apollo at Rhodes, stood with its two feet widely apart. Its right was planted in the commercial cities of the North, covered with a huge stocking of Northern manufacture; its left, spread out like Sambo’s, all over the Gulf States, was carefully enwrapped with raw cotton. Between its wide-spread legs Mr. Pierce, like an ancient mariner, sailed into the harbor, and cast out an anchor, forged at Baltimore, or it may be at Nineveh, with an inscription on its best fluke, “No agitation about slavery.” It might as well have been inscribed, “No more thinking.”

He asked several elderly gentlemen to help him have a good quiet time: William L. Marcy, with the portfolio of State; James Guthrie, incubating the snug little Treasury nest; Jefferson Davis, with the appropriate red-lettered War rifle; Caleb Cushing, holding the Attorney-General’s fool’s-cap brief; Robert McClelland, bringing an oaken inlaid table for the Interior; and James Campbell, an old-fashioned letter-weigher.

They expected to have a good antediluvian time of it, as Mr. Clay’s compromise carry-all had transported into the wilderness the bad-looking lot which had broken into the peace of the gentlemanly Fillmore. Mr. Buchanan was sent away to England, and some restless engineers somewhere toward the Pacific,—a pleasant-sounding place far away out West,—to get up a report on a railroad which might amuse the young people to read in the long winter evenings.

Suddenly, however, all of these serene prospects were clouded. The great shield, constructed by the Democratic Convention to hang in front of the venerable President, and to prevent agitation, was found, in spite of its solid-looking face, to be pierced on the inside by impertinent little teredos, whose ceaseless boring had already begun to weaken its resisting power. Other mariners wished to sail in between the cotton-covered feet. And in January, 1854, one of these Presidential seamen, from Illinois, named Stephen A. Douglas, leaped ashore on a bluff point just outside the harbor, exclaiming with great lung power that “every Territory had a right to do as it chose about slavery.” This declaration from a Democratic friend startled the elderly party not a little; but when that friend rose to a higher pitch and shouted that the Missouri Compromise line of 1821 which kept slavery from all territory north of 36° 30´, was unconstitutional, and leaping upon the solid old dike, with bill and blow, crashed through it, letting out the bitter waters of strife to flood with its pent-up strength all the wide land, the antediluvian party started to their feet in great alarm. When, however, Mr. Davis whispered to the President that this was only undoing a modern wrong, and restoring ancient rights, that venerable gentleman folded his arms and sat down contented.

Looking out upon the freshet, the bewildered Africans seemed to feel that their only refuge was the north pole, now that even the wilds of Kansas and Nebraska furnished only markets for their higher-priced bodies. For a time the “little Douglas” appeared to look as large as the colossus itself. He seemed to be as powerful in American politics as the family of his Scottish namesake, which after intermarrying eleven times with the royal stocks of England and Scotland, became so resistless as to start the proverb, “No man may touch a Douglas, nor a Douglas man, for if he do he is sure to come by the waur” (worse).

But the broad-wasting flood, poured out from the cleft dike, soon sent an alarm throughout the North, and inspired terror among even the conscientious of the South. To protect slavery—however repugnant—where it existed in the old States was felt very universally in the North to be a duty imposed by law, equity, and good neighborhood; but to batter down a barrier which had been erected by both North and South, every timber in which had been paid for by a price given and accepted, shook nearly all consciences into sad action. Wherever the waters swept there were land-slides from Democratic grounds. The shield against agitation now crumbled like the stricken dike.

Kansas became another Flanders, where pikes, knives, and pistols were carried at the plough, into private houses, through villages, and into conventions. They were ever-present adjectives to the noun “man.” As in the tropics, whirlwinds rush in towards the sun’s hot path, so towards Kansas from Missouri swept advocates of slavery with bullets for the settler and brands for his dwelling; from New England long-haired men and short-haired women, ready all, some anxious, to be offered up for the cause of freedom; from the Middle and Western States sharp, bayonet-faced, earnest crusaders to rescue the threatened sacred ground and to throw down the bronze statues and statutes. On the path of these hot streams backward soon lay the scorched and burnt relics of slavery in Kansas.

To slavery in the United States a moral blow was dealt by the cane of Preston S. Brooks, aimed May 22, 1856, at the undefended head of Senator Sumner, which had a few days before opened to express in emphatic words its owner’s ideas about African barbarism in America. This appropriate practical illustration of the argument was visible everywhere, and became more potent than any books from or in behalf of the running Brooks.

The cane given to the chivalrous Carolinian was a poor straw which did not show the way the winds blew.

Still another blow was given by the Dred Scott opinion of a majority of the Supreme Court, which advised the people in choice legal terms that the dike was rightfully cut; that men with dark skins had no rights which those with light ones need pay any attention to; and that uncolored owners might take ebony bipeds along with their quadrupeds into any State in any part of the Union without getting them out of an unpaid state.

This Africanization brought out a new party,—called the Republican,—for keeping the Territories free. Several political missionaries, benevolently inclined towards our continent, started on trips into the interior of America, bent, like Dr. Livingstone, on exploring regions almost surrendered, like Africa, to the descendants of Ham. The result was the discovery of a race, deemed almost extinct, who actually believed that colored men might live unowned, and that Territories, where slavery did not exist, would get along better without than with it.

This party discovered John C. Fremont, and set him up as a candidate. Of course some people thought that his election would fracture the Union, which, they believed, was held together by gum-bo.

The undiked waters would not float Mr. Douglas up to a two-thirds vote for the Presidential nomination. Mr. Buchanan, buoyed up by Southern corks, reached the dock. The Know-Nothings took up the polite Fillmore, and gratified him with a present of the neat but useless eight votes of Maryland.

The new Missionary Party and its Growth.—Character of Mr. Buchanan, and his Want of Same.—Description of curious Drawers in his Cabinet.—The Uses of Isaac Toucey.—The Lecompton Constitution, and how it fell together.—African Order of the Woolly Fleece.—The Mormon Magic-Lantern, and its Shows.—What Minnesota brought into the Union; and how a Long-fellow raised a Fall.—The War of the Illinois Giants.—Abraham Lincoln described.—Self-made Men; their Self-ishness and Unsymmetrical Characters.—Mr. Lincoln’s Growth and Character illustrated.—Mr. Douglas delineated.—Presidential Bonfires, Tar-Barrels, and Oratory.—A Spectre in Virginia; his Body swinging, his Soul marching on.—A live Coal on the Southern Heart.—What the Democratic Convention was asked to solve, and what it re-solved. Heads I win, Tails I don’t lose.—Breckenridge as a rare Prize-Taker.—The Missionary Party makes a Nomination.—New Lights and Shadows.—An original Recipe for threatened Political Apoplexy.—A sudden Convention in South Carolina.—Its mysterious Origin and Dark Ways.—A Chaotic Message.—Of different Secession Ordinances; and Want of Federal Ordnance.—Political Strikers described.—General Cass and a Broken Heart.—John B. Floyd skedaddles, chased by an Indictment.—General Anderson.—Fort Sumter breaks the Cabinet.—The Confederate Government and Flag made.—Their Composition.—History and Character of J. Davis.—Where Mr. Buchanan went March 4, 1861.

The votes for Fremont were 1,341,264, against 1,838,169 for James Buchanan, and showed how successful the missionaries had been, and the rapid growth of the tribe recently discovered and distinctly un-extinct.

Unlike his predecessor, Mr. Buchanan was not so much the representative of a past age, as the gristled type of unboned nothings. He was unorganized chaos, without any personal will to bring it into useful form, swinging through a blind menstruum of thin party air, lit up only by small fire-flies, that left a deeper darkness behind their quickly quenched and shifting sparks. His Cabinet was of course a bureau with no two drawers alike. Its principal one, Lewis Cass, was of rosewood, well seasoned, beautifully grained and polished. The money-drawer, Mr. Cobb, was of bird’s-eye maple, with eyes enough in it to see all ways. Lower down was one of lignum vitæ, hard and tough, John B. Floyd, with a knot-hole in the rear part by which access was had to the drawer above, full of metallic corn shelled off the Treasury cob. Below this was one of soft pine, full of treacherous, punky spots, Jacob Thompson, of and from the Interior. And still lower, Isaac Toucey, brought on from Hartford, Connecticut, looking like a Dismal Swamp cedar, quite unfit for navy purposes, or in fact for aught but the flanges of a dredging-machine, working up stagnant fever-and-ague channels.

The cotton-seeds, so widely planted by Douglas, J. Davis, Brooks, Taney, A. H. Stephens, and others, during the preceding four years, now sprouted up in vigorous shoots. A Constitution, hastily shaken together by self-made delegates, mostly from Missouri, riding in foamy haste to Lecompton, was tied with a very black cord and sent to Washington, to be indorsed as a good thing for Kansas. Mr. Douglas struck it with his dike-cleaver; but Mr. J. Davis, J. M. Mason, John Slidell,—booted Knights of the African Order of the Woolly Fleece,—re-tied the severed strings and lifted it through the halls of Congress.

Meanwhile, the Mormons in Utah, getting up a sort of magic-lantern show of a rebellion,—outlining on the rocky walls of the Salt Lake basin, the shadowy procession of females looking defiantly at United States cannon and canons,—caused a momentary diversion from the new and growing question of a single Union.

The next year, 1858, Minnesota, first penetrated by La Salle in 1680, a year before William Penn stood, for the first time, on the future site of Philadelphia, was brought in as a State, giving us St. Paul as a northwestern Cuba for consumptives, Fort Snelling for gamblers in public lands, and the rather low Falls of Minnehaha to be raised by a Long-fellow into a lofty iridescence, whose rainbow strands have been woven into heavenly fabrics in so many delighted households, American, European, and Asiatic. On paper it is poetically higher by many feet, iambic and trochean, than Niagara, or even the Falls of the Yosemite.

The same year witnessed in Illinois the war of the giants for the vacant Senatorship. The two Anaks were the dike-breaker and one Abraham Lincoln, then forty-nine years old, whose various residences in different States, in Kentucky, his birthplace, in Indiana and Illinois, had taught him the value of the Union; and whose arm, sinewy with labor, and made more vigorous by his largely pumping heart, dealt blows which resounded sharply and broadly beyond the prairie fields which saw the encounter.

A self-made man is too common an object in America to excite or deserve special attention; and most self-made men, so called, are distressingly selfish, unsymmetrical, and one-sided,—poor jobs abandoned by all creators but themselves. Even if they did not proclaim their self-structure to all, every one would at once recognize it by its disjointed architecture. Mr. Lincoln was an exception. More strictly speaking, he was rather a growth than a creation. In his steadily increasing gentle greatness, he reminds one of those slender rills which hesitatingly creep out from some modest, unvisited nook in the Alleghanies, noiselessly finds its way many unnoticed miles, until it begins to glint between cleared farmsteads, and swells slowly into a broad stream, whose brawny shoulders turn with ease mills and factories along its beneficent course. Then gathering volume, depth, and power, it upbears barges, into which whole districts have emptied their rich cornucopias, and pleasure-boats, gay with genial tourists; while along its great triumphal sea-ward march villages, towns, and cities clap their hands with admiring joy. Mr. Douglas is the same low-born rill, which soon, however, swells into the hurrying torrent, clattering over jagged rocks, between bold, mountain-ribbed canyons, jarring the earth with its audacious plunges, shaking defiantly its foamed way through gaps and rent gashes, until it hurls its massed waters over fields which it sweeps with disastrous grandeur.

Although the popular vote in Illinois was in Mr. Lincoln’s favor, the legislative ballots were for his contestant. The new questions now illuminated newspapers, platforms, and domestic hearthstones.

Bonfires, colored lights, and pyrotechnic displays of oratory soon lit up the whole Union, and through the varied flames ever interplayed the figure of the African.

Suddenly, in the autumn of 1859, through the lurid light was thrust a gaunt, resolute, earnest-looking form, with a face calm with long excitement, over whose lines ran the savage history of Kansas murders and house-burnings, fatal shots from border rifles at well-loved sons, midnight escapes from Lecompton riders, and years of hunted violence and wrong. From the close-shut jaws,—seldom opened now except for food, for brief prayer before some new raid, or for an imprecation wrenched out by some cruel recollection,—come no sounds. Across the bridge at Harper’s Ferry, through the scared streets of that little garrisoned place, and next into the jail it stalks. Then it flits into court, calmer than the personated Justice, and then, marched between files of soldiers, to fence off a phantom invasion, it mounts the scaffold. An old man, with a grim smile stranded on the iron rim of his lips, swings in Virginia air, and—John Brown’s soul goes marching on.

On the Southern heart this Quixotic invasion by a mistaken, personally injured father, maddened by the losses of his sons, and unjustifiably wreaking his individual injuries on a community innocent of any wrong to him, laid a live, inflaming coal.

In April, 1860, the Democratic Convention met at Charleston. Some gentlemen asked that body to declare its belief that the Union, having been got up principally to hold Africans in an unpaid condition, any uncolored owner could, by virtue of the laws of his own State, take these bronze-colored bipeds,—always diffusing a bad odor unless to their proprietors,—to any Territory. Not holding such a notion, the Convention declined to make the declaration, but, on the contrary, asserted that each Territory was competent to deal with the matter as it saw fit. The question, thus resolved, was not of course to the minority satisfactorily solved.

Following a convenient practice, deemed by some persons, unschooled in such things, a little uncommon among gentlemen, of getting, if possible, a decision favorable to their views which shall bind the minority, and if unsuccessful repudiating the adverse decision as affecting them, the delegates of six bronze-statued States left the unreasonable party, carrying a banner with a dimly seen inscription, “Heads I win, tails you lose, or, tails I win, heads you lose.” The convention, thus treated to Breckinridge principles, adjourned to meet in June at Baltimore.

Meanwhile, in May, the missionary party, reinforced by numerous converts, assembled and chose the Anak of Illinois as their leader. In June the widowed Democratic Convention reassembled; but only to split up into two family divisions, the one nominating the dike-breaker, the other John C. Breckenridge, then Vice-President, and destined in a few years to take, not the Presidency, but the very first prize for a character which total depravity is occasionally permitted to offer, lest fiction may invent a combination that shall outstrip reality.

Of course the Drummond lights now burned brighter. Tar and oratory illumined corner groceries and open-air meetings. Small men, set to the large honor of presiding over these gatherings, which in an hour or two settled “the most stupendous questions that freemen were ever called to meet,” became apoplectic, and were only saved to their country by an application at the nearest bar-room of a remedy reduced to a prescription in which

When in November, 1860, the lights were put out, it appeared that Mr. Lincoln had received 180, Mr. Breckenridge 72, Mr. Bell 39, and the Douglas 12 electoral votes. There were 130,773 more ballots cast even at the South against Mr. Breckenridge than in his favor. His opinion of the Union, for which he had run out of breath to be President, was now, of course, very unfavorable; but as it was balanced by its kindred opinion of him, he was under no obligation to confirm its judgment by taking the first prize soon after offered to him.

South Carolina, which had often been outvoted before, only waited this time four days—not stopping long enough to see if she was hurt, or how the heads-and-tails flag would look—before calling a convention which more Cariolense substantially resolved that the Union had broken the Union, and that the people who voted differently from South Carolina were unconstitutional, and ergo, that she might have her own Constitution and by-laws. She had helped to rule the roast so long that she could not think of taking turns now.

Congress met in December, 1860. Of course John C. Breckenridge was on hand. To him the Union was a good thing so long as he could preside over its representatives. While caucusing nights against it, he could sit in daylight to administer oaths—and even to take them—to support it.

The message was full of unginned cotton-seeds vigorously sprouting. It charged the attempted burglary of the Union safe, not on the burglars, but upon its owners. It chided the people for having done wrong in electing an Anak so absurd as not to agree with South Carolina on the little dark-skinned question; proposed several Africanizing amendments to the Federal Constitution, and then floundered into the author’s chronic chaos; seeming at one moment to believe that a State could not secede, then again that it rather could; then, that if it did, it ought not to; but then if it ought not to, who could prevent it if it did; and if it did not, why the fire-flies did not hold out their little lanterns long enough to light him, or in fact any one else that he knew of, across the miry place.

The old hickory-tree had manifestly been chopped down and a very spongy bass-wood had been substituted in the Federal grounds.

During January, 1861, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana somehow did something, in some way, somewhere, by somebody,—as did Texas in the month of February following,—which was claimed by the head-and-tails party in the South, as indicating the popular conviction that Sambo was the only proper object of care by Uncle Sam; that they fancied from what they suspected that the Anak Abraham would not carry their pet lamb in his bosom as it had been carried; and that therefore the family was played out. These mysterious, inexplicable somethings, by somebody, somewhere and somehow, were gravely labelled “Ordinances of Secession.” Certain it is, that in not one of these States, except in Texas, were the people consulted about or called to ratify these very grave resolves. Having only three months before voted against their incarnation,—the prize-taker,—it is to be presumed that they would hold to the same beliefs still, in the absence of any act or deed on the part of the Anak to induce a change of opinion.

The uncomic truth is, that in this case, as in so many others which have occurred or are occurring in our political history, these overwhelmingly large questions—upon which hang so many lives, so much happiness or suffering, such accumulated stores of hard-earned savings and character—were undertaken to be answered by a few cunning, selfish, dishonest, narrow-headed politicians, audaciously presuming upon what they ignorantly called leadership,—in the absence of men engaged in more honest work, of clearer head and better instincts,—who, idle hands in a country where all just men are busy, too proud to work, too poor to live without the proceeds of others’ labor, ever restless and intriguing for luxurious places and foremost positions, find that, by getting up a strike, they can preside, officer, talk to, and become prominent at assemblages of arrested workmen, and live from their accumulated fund.

Disturbed, as well they might be, by these mysterious ordinances, forged by these mischievous idlers, an assemblage of white-headed and unwisely patriotic gentlemen met at Washington to get rid of them. Ordnance would undoubtedly have affected it, but ordnance was not to be thought of by those who were recommending cotton-sprouts and hopelessly tramping after fire-flies.

Some of the Southern Senators gathered up their dark robes, and loftily chaffing their Northern associates, strode from the chamber.

There was no ordnance in Washington. Of course John C. Breckenridge did not yet follow them; it was more profitable to him and the ordinance parties to stay.

John B. Floyd dispersed our little army of 16,000 men into small squads far away from the ordnance-makers. He knew that the cotton-sprouts would grow better unshaded by bayonets. On land there was no ordnance where it was needed.

General Robert Anderson, of Southern birth, was, in the autumn of 1860, assigned to Charleston Harbor, and there left with only 80 men to the presumed magnetic attractions of that affirmative place. To these his patriotism declined to be drawn. December 26, 1860, he removed from Fort Moultrie to Sumter, two miles farther off from the magnets. For eight months preceding, Mr. Floyd had sent heaps of muskets and ammunition, as desirable compost for the cotton-sprouts. Isaac Toucey, of Hartford, Connecticut, of a cold temperament, and from a cool latitude, thought the health of naval officers might suffer from the heats of Charleston, Wilmington, Savannah, St. Augustine, Mobile, and New Orleans, and so ordered our ships to rove in distant seas.

There was, therefore, no ordnance off the seaboard.

The little garrison at Fort Sumter now became the pivot of the Union. Around the question of its reinforcement the Cabinet swung and went to pieces. General Cass, who had broken his sword before surrendering it to those who sought to prevent our Union, now broke his heart over the attempts of those who sought to shiver it in pieces. He was succeeded by Jeremiah S. Black, a gentleman devoted to the black family when enchained, indifferent to them when free. Floyd, one of the ring-leaders in the strike, skedaddled to Virginia, followed in his rapid journey by an indictment for having connived at the withdrawal of $870,000 worth of bonds from Jacob Thompson’s loosely managed Interior. His place was taken by the unbelieving Thomas, of Maryland, who soon became tangled by his want of faith, and was succeeded by General Dix, who had more confidence in guns than in Dixie.

On the 4th of February, 1861, the en-gulfed States and South Carolina sent some delegates—chosen also somehow, somewhere, by somebody, in some way unknown—to Montgomery, Alabama, to a convention, where the leading strikers of course got upon the platform, and had the principal chairs. They proceeded forthwith to concoct that first-class patent medicine for all supposed ills, a constitution. In the composition of this draught radex Africanus largely entered. It was to be poured out by slaves, and taken every waking hour. A separate government, called the Confederate, was set up by these somehow delegates.

A flag was also devised, not in consonance with the avowed object of its bearers, namely,—a colored man saddled and running like an unpaid, tireless velocipede with a white rider in the seat working its shackled, eccentric way,—but with stars and bars,—stars rayless as night, and bars destined to be very sinister to the Southern hopes, and eventually to be leaped and beaten down by spirited Northern trampers.

To be President of this African Commonwealth, the mysteriously elected delegates invited J. Davis, who was as ready to say yes as the old maid who had done the courting for a series of years. Of a metaphysical turn of mind,—a turn around which all State rights arguments wind themselves up,—sharp-visaged, lean of muscle, leaner of conscience, and leanest of veracity, he had, after being educated at the government expense at West Point, tracked office with a faultless scent, shown much pluck during the Black Hawk and Mexican wars, gnawed the bone of repudiation in Mississippi, and was now ready to bay at Federal flocks wherever they appeared. Like John Brown, Stonewall Jackson, and those hard Scotch fighters who prayed before the direst slaughters, he was most devout just before writing those calm-looking, philosophy-streaked messages, which massacred truth with a glaived hand, and shamed fiction by the recital of atrocities which had no foundation, except at Andersonville and in the Libby Prison at Richmond.

While these active heats were raging on the edges of the government, cold chaos brooded at the centre. Through the rank growth of cotton, threatening to overtop everything national, only fire-flies still.

At last the weary days vanished. Fourth of March came, and Mr. B. went away—to his own place.

The Second Generation of our Great Men nearer in Time but not in Affection.—Several sufficient Reasons therefor.—Ingenious Biographers confusing our Verdicts over old Offenders.—A Latin Quotation to prove an Original Remark.—Why we should not stick to old Opinions.—Sketches of Clay, Calhoun, and Webster.—Parallels do not always run at equal Distances.—Three Fates.—Original Anecdote of Webster.—Of Lewis Cass and Thomas H. Benton.—Why double-chinned Persons are satisfactory.—The Plutocrats Girard and Astor; how they made Fortunes, and how much.—John Marshall as a Judge, and John Trumbull as a Painter.—Albert Gallatin skims American Cream.—Rembrandt Peale and Washington Allston described.—Why Felix Grundy, S. S. Prentiss, J. J. Crittenden, Samuel Houston, D. D. Tompkins, and Others, were like Shoots grafted upon hardy Native Stocks.—The Senate illuminated by J. M. Berrien, S. L. Southard, W. C. Preston, etc., Legaré, and Butler.—A full-length Portrait of Winfield Scott.—Irving delineated.—Drake, Halleck, and Paulding.—Fenimore Cooper descanted upon.—Science illustrated by Silliman, Hare, and Rush.—Descriptions of Prescott, Mrs. Sedgwick, Greenough, and Hawthorne.—How well the Second Set persuaded the Eighteenth Century over into the Nineteenth.

Between the death of Washington and the middle of the nineteenth century grew up a second and numerous generation of great men. Although nearer to us in time, they are not so near to our affections as the elder set. Most of this younger race some of us have seen; and they have thus lost a certain historic grandeur and magnified proportion, always lent by hazy distance to far-off objects. Most of them have been the subjects of newspaper attack, of conversational controversy, of party assault and defence equally damaging, and so have become doubtfully, perhaps disagreeably, familiar. Many of them have been brought into the jurisdiction of our partisan praises and censures for offences against our political principles or passing tastes. Some have been despatched thence with Arizona justice, others by New York equity. Now we have reluctantly dismissed some with Scotch verdicts of “not proven,” with lurking suspicions more injurious than a positive Saxon condemnation of “guilty”; and anon, we have banished others to the penal settlements of our criminal domain.

Ingenious biographers, taking up characters hitherto surrendered to the public executioner, asking for reviews of judgments alleged to be hasty, and setting forth, in an attractive way, features which even criminals share with the unindicted and facts unstained, perhaps, with the one great crime which slew their reputations, have recently argued for new trials with a convincing sophistry that few can resist after dinner, and which captivates by its audacious novelty. All of us have discovered what Tacitus long ago so tersely expressed,—our readiness to listen to scandal, and our proneness to praise ourselves for our leniency to the maligned:—

“Livor et obtrectatio pronis auribus accipiuntur; quippe adulationi fœdum crimen servitutis, malignitati falsa species libertatis inest.”

If the puzzled are generally unsafe, the censorious are usually unfair judges.

Members of the same family, too, are among each other as likely to do injustice to a fellow-member by their jealous criticisms, as they are apt before strangers to make themselves and their fellows ridiculous by undiscriminating praise.

Over many mounds in our national cemetery the time-stains are growing very dark and the moss thick and undisturbed. As we wander among these with lips less pressed and stern, with perhaps a feeling of repenting forgiveness, slow though it be, towards those from whom politically or otherwise we have differed, and with occasional touches of tenderness, reluctant though at first they may come, for those who nobly erred, if err they did, straining for the right but missing it from the dimness of the light which they carried, let us be sure that in strolling often amid these head-stones, we shall thereby and thereafter be better prepared, by turning out our lower selves, to turn over profitably and pleasantly the pages of our newer National Album which holds a few of their portraits. If on its first leaves we are confronted by the faces of those whose lineaments—like Clay’s, Calhoun’s, Webster’s, Grundy’s, Van Buren’s, Quincy Adams’s, Jackson’s, and others—are associated with watch-words that touch party animosities that were born in us we know not how or when, and survive we know not why, we can, at least, learn to be justly proud of what has floated out from the drift-wood and dirty foam of ephemeral politics, which now no longer conceal their sturdy and solid timber growths.

Clay, Calhoun, and Webster! How much good ink was thrown uselessly away in bespattering them with blame or praise for the half-century during which they actively and industriously braided the public history of America through their triple biographies. Of this triumvirate, Mr. Clay was born in 1777, the two others five years later; Mr. Calhoun received the baptism of death in 1850, two years before his life-long competitors. They were the three American Fates, holding the distaff, the thread, and the shears of its history and administration. Utterly dissimilar in the place and circumstances of their births, educations, trainings, cultures, and courses, they yet supplied for each other the only parallels over that wide tract of time through which their prolonged lives reached.

In the House and in the Senate, sometimes on the same side, but oftener congenially opposed, yet ever divided from each other by rival ambitions, they ennobled the scenes in which they spent such large forces. The American Titans, they tossed heavy bars of logic with such ease, wrestled with such matching-power and balanced success, that we, growing up to the gigantic spectacles, almost lose the consciousness of the unwonted masteries that have so grandly played before us. And yet, somehow, for all this, comparatively little love gathers in our hearts as we look at those well-remembered faces; the large, continental visage of Henry Clay, mapping a hemisphere of vast thoughts and generous though partisan currents of action; the lofty sternness of John C. Calhoun, cast in a Cato-like mould, heroic and defiant; and the square-blocked, cubical, almost repulsive mass, outlined into the head of Daniel Webster, which looks, or rather is looked at, as if it had for several centuries capped the pyramid of Cheops, and had been finally taken down with state ceremonies and transplanted by the Pasha to America, as a testimony of his conception of our large exceptional growth.

Sadder than a professed comedy or a prepared funeral oration over a rich but bad man is the unsatisfied ambition of such tough athletes in the political arena, who, after a long life of great rough play, break up into common earth, and form the subjects for Commencement day or prize compositions in an open grove, where young ladies in white, bound in blue-belting-ribbons, summon their uneasy ghosts before the dull-eyed umpires. From what a cold well-depth sprang to the curb of Webster’s lips those soliloquizing words which, a few days before his death, overflowed from a disappointed life. Sitting in an open doorway at Marshfield, propped up by pillows, he looked out upon his favorite herd of cattle, which were driven up for the last inspection of their attached owner. As the fine animals passed and turned their large eyes upon him,—some pausing and looking a fond recollection into his scarcely wasted face,—he ejaculated, as his thoughts turned backward over the slights of party and the disappointments of an unsatisfied life: “I love the honest faces of animals. They look what they mean.”

Arriving in the world the same year with Mr. Webster, Mr. Calhoun, and each other, Lewis Cass, portly in presence as in learning, varied capacity, and many-sided culture, and Thomas H. Benton, as solid as the bullion which a dim tradition mentions as formerly found in these United States, meet us with that full-orbed spherical satisfaction which double-chinned persons are fortunate in imparting, if not of feeling themselves. The “Recollections of Thirty Years in the Senate” would, one would think, be enough to reduce any mortal to very attenuated proportions. Fortunate is the memory of any M. C. which is constructed like a mining-sieve, letting through the superabundant dirt and retaining only the loosely silted ore.

Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams, destined to be rivals for the Presidency in the fifty-seventh and again in the sixty-first years of their lives, were severally born nine years before the Declaration of Independence. Their lives were as unlike as their faces. The former passed his first score of years in the hard struggles for a livelihood, and mostly amid the scenes made memorable by the cavalry swords of Marion and Sumter and the pen of William Gilmore Sims; the latter spent his in the study of what could best round up a capable mind by discipline and learning, and in the equally advantageous culture derived from the society of his accomplished mother and experienced father. While the stormy incidents of an eventful military life in Florida and Georgia, intercalated with court-martials and official censures, scored in Jackson’s face the notches which, until his death in 1845, kept truthful tally with his warm, violent, generous, resentful, and stern history; over the round, uncreased face of Adams ran the smoothing-iron of literary tastes and pursuits, keeping down the ruffling disturbances of a naturally passionate nature, and the ridges which the excitements from 1824 to 1828, and the antislavery agitations in the latter part of his life, would have otherwise left. Jackson’s virtues deserve signal praise, and Adams’s vices emphatic censure; since the former grew up under circumstances as unfavorable to their existence as a young ladies’ seminary for modesty, or a New York sheriff’s office for integrity; and the latter amid forces as unassailing as a prayer-meeting to piety or sleep to pure thoughts.

Types of American character in many respects are the originals of the two thin-faced portraits to which we next turn,—types in their foreign birth, their obscure social belongings, and their shrewd and successful business ventures,—Stephen Girard, coming into life in 1750, at Bordeaux, France, as acid as the claret of his native city, and commanding, like it, very profitable prices by transportation to this country, a sailor’s son, and until his nineteenth year himself a sailor; and John Jacob Astor, his junior by thirteen years, offspring of a poverty-worried peasant, ushered first into a cabin at Waldorf, near Heidelberg, where black bread and small hopped beer were all that incessant labor could procure. The former lived eighty-one, the latter eighty-five years upon our planet; and by faithfully gathering up from its surface, water and land, from its ships, stores, and offices, and from its furred and unfurred animals, the gains which persistent early rising, industry, and ceaseless penny-turning accumulate, left fortunes, the first of nine, the last of twenty millions of dollars.

The Astral-lamp Library, obtained by funds bequeathed by a benefaction, like Girard’s College, appreciative of what its donor had himself missed, sheds its genial light on many a poor scholar’s desk. If each legacy has been somewhat diverted from its testamentary direction, perhaps the best excuse may be found in the reason why married women were not allowed to have their wills after death, because they had them so much while living.

John Marshall, to whose unmistakably pure-minded face we turn in safe admiration, was one of those types of leadership, one of those representatives of schools, who, violently liked or disliked when living, has by the touch of death been canonized among the white-robed of the nation. An incarnation, when alive, of Federalism, his ermine has become so white under the fulling of time and by contrast with robes since worn, and his grasp of the judicial balances was, as is now seen, so firm, so unimpassioned and unshaken by a nervous partisanship, that he has already passed into the very small list of judges, whose lofty character, stainless purity, large judicial capacities and force, are like solid cool rocks amid the ever-shifting scenes and temperatures of a varied landscape.

An artist’s head sits manifestly on the shoulders of John Trumbull, born in 1756, a year after John Marshall, and living eight years beyond him. At his death in 1843, he left but few as aged. His busy pencil dropped in 1775 for the musket, and, resumed in 1777, has perpetuated in fifty-seven historical pictures, with the fidelity and love of personal friendship, the portraitures of most of the leading actors in the first period of our national story. He was President of the Academy of Fine Arts, from its formation, in 1816, until it gave place, in 1825, to the Academy of Design. His dress, it will be observed, was formally and scrupulously in the mode; his address was as dressy as his wristbands and frills. Quick-eyed mothers would at once, as he took his seat, warn the children, always attracted towards clean vestments, “not to dirty the gentleman’s clothes.”

In 1761 Albert Gallatin was born. Related to Neckar, he seems to have borrowed at the same time much of the financial ability of the French minister, and the ready wit, graceful imagination, and forceful word-power of the minister’s brilliant daughter, Madame de Staël. He crammed eighty-eight years full of remarkable activities, as ambassador to Russia, France, Great Britain, and Holland, as member of Congress, and as a weighty yet captivating and vivacious writer on banks, public credit, currency, and those subjects, ever rising, like cream, on the public pans, which are skimmed by the most skilfully handled ladles.

Turning the page, we meet the thought-bearing faces of Rembrandt Peale, born in 1778, and below, that of his brother artist, Washington Allston, the American Paul Veronese, who, Peale’s junior by a year, ceased his earthly work in 1853, seven years before him. The serenity of congenial pursuits gilds their portraitures, and lingers like an aureola around their heads. Upon Allston’s face there seems spread a listening look, as if straining to catch far-off notes, mingled with that gentle hush and composure, as if stilled by that music so subtily described by Wordsworth, which