Chapter XVII

COTTON-SEEDS SPROUT; OR, BUCHANAN’S ADMINISTRATION.

1857–1861.

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.

A MORMON FAMILY OUT FOR A WALK.
(p. 451)
]

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

Aqua-vitæ 92 parts,
Aqua-pura ½ part,
Saccharum 7½ parts,
———
restored them to par, or 100 proof.

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.

THE SKEDADDLE OF JOHN B. FLOYD.
(p. 461)
]

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.