Chapter XVIII: Our Newer National Album

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.

THE INTELLIGENT JURY.
(p. 468)
]

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.

“Sic itur ad Astra.”

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

“Born of murmuring sound, had passed into his face.”

A tree does not show more markedly than man the results of ancestral care, wealth, and leisurely culture. Numerous are the faces and histories scattered all through our national album, which are signalized by a curious mixture of original forest wildness and park growths newly begun, cultivated shoots grafted upon hardy native stocks, and giving off large unsymmetrically shaped fruits,—fruits less sour than the natural, but less genial, plump, mellow, and blooming than the full-nursed growth. Of these were, in oratory, FELIX GRUNDY, whose exposed youth shot up on the wilderness frontier of Kentucky, where “death was in almost every bush, and an ambuscade in every thicket,” and who attained, in Tennessee, a large altitude and breadth; SARGEANT S. PRENTISS, transplanted from among the pines of Maine to the coarse richness of a Mississippi soil, and through whose waving tops swept sometimes the storm of invective, sometimes the æolian strains of tenderest, soul-trembling breathings; JOHN J. CRITTENDEN, a farmer’s boy, born in 1785, whose prickly logic sheathed, like a burr, the smooth-meated chestnut; and, among statesmen, Samuel Houston of Texas, shaggy-barked, yet with much tasselling wealth of flower at the top; DANIEL D. TOMPKINS of New York, and a large number of others, strong saplings, pushing up in brave defiance of adversities, some wrought into bureaus, others inlaying cabinets,—American woods, some still sappy and cross-grained, but making as good state furniture as an untechnical taste has hitherto been content to demand or use.

Glancing through our book,—in which we treasure only the portraits of the departed,—we dwell with satisfaction upon a group of high-toned, conscientious, Christian statesmen, who honored public office in their persons, and shed upon the Senate a light so effulgent, that the many opaque substances, so often thrust into it, have not been able wholly to absorb: JOHN MACPHERSON BERRIEN, born in 1781; THEODORE FRELINGHUYSEN and SAMUEL L. SOUTHARD, in 1787; and WILLIAM C. PRESTON in 1794; with whom are worthily associated HUGH S. LEGARÉ, whose fine face brought its welcome into every company, as his radiant mind sparkled and scintillated over every subject; and BENJAMIN F. BUTLER of New York, whose clear-cut physiognomy, like an antique on a fine stone, shows handsomely in every setting.

WINFIELD SCOTT came into life in 1786, and so crystallized about himself each of the three wars in which he was the principal magnet,—the maritime contest of 1812, the Mexican war in 1847, and the opening of the Rebellion in 1861,—that his calm front and majestic presence would readily single him out as the model figure for our American Mars. Like a great elm in the Berkshire valley he stands, massive in strength of trunk, spreading out in varied branches of learning, special study, and active experience, and dropping his pendulous, wide-circuiting limbs and generous foliage over a broad expanse of rich meadow. Under this vast, wide-reaching, many-dropping banyan-tree history seems to gather in a sleepy, contented calm.

Dearly do we all love to pause over the beautifully bordered page which holds the genial, sunny-faced visage of WASHINGTON IRVING. He was four years old when Washington delivered his first Inaugural. Through all the nineteenth century he shines, like a blessed presence, until his eclipse, in 1859. How our landscapes, the lives of our best and worthiest, the graceful legends of our rivers, mountains, prairies, and historical sites,—barren, voiceless, and dumb before, warm into life, and stretch out their living hands in tender entreaty, instinct and round with charms of persuasive beauty, as, like the prophet over the child, he stretches himself over them!

Of some of his associates and compeers, still happily spared to us, we cannot speak; for the living are too numerous to be enumerated, and too near to be sketched; but of JOSEPH RODMAN DRAKE, whose brief twenty-five years of life exhaled such beautiful and deathless creations as the Culprit Fay; of FITZ-GREENE HALLECK, his companion and fellow-laborer, whose rare humor stole into delicious song, as sprites are said to play hide-and-seek in buttercups and honeysuckles; and of JAMES R. PAULDING, linked in literary work as by family ties with Irving, and whose diversified genius gives him a large, if not a choice place in our Walhalla,—of all these kindly faces we delight to keep copies in our album.

Like Irving, fortunate in the enjoyment of a wide European reputation, but less fortunate than he in securing the undivided hearts of his countrymen,—whose early history, aboriginal legends, forest scenery, and naval characters he has so well tapestried in novels, essay, biography, and history,—JAMES FENIMORE COOPER, born in 1789, has, by his sea tales, caused many a mother’s heart to yearn after her runaway boy, and by his land stories, garnered up many of our best sheaves of fiction into a national stack. As we gaze on his large, square, massive forehead, we forget his sharply feathered arrows, aimed at our national faults, which generally, of course, missed the conscience and touched only the liver. Remembering “The Pioneers,” “The Last of the Mohicans,” “The Spy,” “Pilot,” and “Red Rover,” we fall to blessing the creations which stalk over our rough fences, and brush away our raw villages, uproarious with faces of civilized red-men, and so endeavor to get by, as boys do a haunted place at nightfall, the recollection of those twenty-two libel suits, whose damages he found, like most plaintiffs in that species of legal fiction, to end in the payment of the costs out of his own pocket.

Others there are, too, whose physiognomies recall to us pleasantly the explorers in science, workers amid Nature’s secrets, earlier than those who now push their daring way into her very robing-room: BENJAMIN SILLIMAN, the elder, who came in 1779, and through a long life lectured so many into the pleasant idea that they knew something of geology and chemistry, and through his “Journal of Science,” established in 1818, gathered up the mental products of his fellow-harvesters; ROBERT HARE, two years younger, who, at the age of twenty, invented the compound blow-pipe, and up to his death, in 1858, continued his discoveries, until he left, by his spiritual explorations, his scientific brethren behind him; and BENJAMIN RUSH, born in 1780, who by his tasteful style, made boluses less distasteful, and even gave the muses such a draught that they became delirious over his medical pages.

WILLIAM H. PRESCOTT, reserved until nearly the close of the eighteenth century ere he was born, and becoming blind in outward vision at the age of eighteen, so clarified his inner sight and quickened it to the perception of new beauties, and so perfected himself by the grace, gentleness, and cheerful gayety of a happy nature, that Peru, Mexico, the times of Ferdinand, Isabella, and Philip II., filtrated through them, glow in splendor and are inwrought and outwrought in such delicacy of color and such noble boldness as to make him stand out in singularly beautiful proportions to thousands of loving eyes, that have never rested, and will now never rest, upon his fine classic head.

Stop we a moment to admire the intellectual features of CATHERINE M. SEDGWICK, born in 1798, whose wise essays and wiser fictions lie upon so many tables; the calm head of HORATIO GREENOUGH, who produced his first work, the “Chanting Cherubs,” upon a commission from Fenimore Cooper, brought out the earliest American group in marble, and became a very Medusa, turning many Americans into stone; and finally the grand, quaint physiognomy of NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, given to us in 1804, and just withdrawn, whose genial tales and humorous descriptions will keep his memory as odorous as woodbines around the porches of houses seven-gabled, mossed, newly Gothic, or indifferently green-shuttered, and up to their eaves in white paint.

Unwillingly we close the list; for many are worthy to be added, who have laid their aching brains away, and more who are coining from their living thoughts a mintage more national than greenbacks and not half so soiled.

All but two who are named in this our newer album were born in the last century, and drew over its wealth with them and piled it up on our side. Few of them lived less than three, and several more than fourscore years; showing that the possession of intellect often preserves their owners to a longevity as great as office or a life estate.