CHAPTER XIX—THE KILLING EDGE OF SLANDER
WIZARD LEWIS boldly re-begins his work of White House capturing. He becomes busy to the elbows in the General's destinies before Statesman Adams is inaugurated. When the latter names Statesman Clay to be his Secretary of State, Wizard Lewis lays bare the deal which thus exalts the Kentuckian. He raises the cry of “Bargain and Corruption!” and the public takes it up. Statesman Adams and Statesman Clay are pilloried as conspirators who have wronged the General of a Presidency, and the State portfolio in the hands of Statesman Clay is pointed to as proof. The General writes the blooming Rachel, just now at home by the Cumberland:
“The Judas of the West has closed the contract and received the thirty pieces of silver.” Statesman Clay defends himself badly. He declares that he objects to the General's White House ambitions only because he is a “Military Chieftain.” He speaks as though the world knows that a “Military Chieftain” will make a perilous Chief Magistrate. The world knows nothing of the sort; the cry of “Bargain and Corruption” gains head.
In retort to that arraignment of being a “Military Chieftain”—made as if the phrase be merely another name for “buccaneer”—the General writes the old friendly fox, Colonel Burr:
“It is not strange that he (Statesman Clay) should indulge himself in such reasoning, since it comes somewhat to his own personal defense. Our blue-grass Secretary has been ever remarkable for his caution, to give it a no worse name, and has not yet risked himself for his country, or moved from safe repose to repel an invading foe.”
The General is not the only one who comments upon the astounding copartnership in politics and policies between Statesman Adams and Statesman Clay. John Randolph, of Roanoke, remarks concerning it, from his bitter place in the Senate:
“Sir, it is a coming together of the puritan and the blackleg—Blifil and Black George!”
This view seems hugely to excite Statesman Clay, and he challenges the picturesque Randolph to a duel by Little Falls. They meet; but, since both are at pains to miss, no good comes of it.
Wizard Lewis goes teaching the General's merits in every State of the Union. In his White House siege, Wizard Lewis receives his best help from Statesman Adams himself.
The latter publicist is a personage of ice-cold ideas, and lists ingratitude at the top of the virtues. There be folk—descended, doubtless, of ancestors that heated the pincers and turned the thumbikins, and worked the straining rack for the Inquisitions as mere day laborers at torture—who delight in doing mean, hateful, punishing things to their fellow mortals, if they may but call such doing “duty.” They will weep hypocritically while burning a victim, and aver, between sobs, that they pile the fagots and apply the torch only from a “sternest conviction of duty.” The word “duty,” like the venom of a serpent, is ever in their mouths; by it they break hearts, destroy hopes, create blackness, blot out light, forbid happiness, foster grief, and plant pain in breasts innocent of every crime save that of helping them. Statesman Adams—heart as hollow as a bell and quite as brazen—is one of these. He demonstrates his purity by refusing his obligations, and proves himself great by turning his back on his friends. Made up of a multitude of littlenesses, he offers no trait of breadth or bigness as an offset. He is not wise; he is not brave; he is not generous; he is not—even in wrongdoing—original. He will guide by some maxim; or he will permit himself to be posed by a proverb; and, while ever breathlessly respectable, he is never once right. As President he proposes for himself an inhuman goodness, and declares that he will remove no one from office on “account of politics”—a catch phrase which has protected incompetency in place in every age.
Although he is so fond of them, Statesman Adams, in taking the latter snow-white position, overlooks an aphorism that will be vital while time lasts. He forgets that “The President who makes no removals will himself be removed.”
“Strike, lest you be stricken!” murmured Queen Elizabeth, as seizing the pen she signed the warrant of block and axe for Scottish Mary, and it might be well and wise for Statesman Adams to wear in constant mind that illustrious example.
The thought is vain. Statesman Adams ignores his friends, consults his foes, and offers a base picture of the ungrateful that draws the public's honest wrath his way. Wizard Lewis is no one to miss such opportunities to upbuild the General's fortunes at the expense of the enemy; and so the General grows each day stronger, while Statesman Adams—who hopes to succeed himself—owns less and less of strength.
The currents of time flow swiftly now, and four years go by—four years wherein the old friendly far-seeing fox, Colonel Burr, in his Nassau Street burrow, teaches the General's leaders intrigue as a pedagogue teaches the alphabet to his pupils. And day after day the purblind Adams, with the purblind Clay at the elbow of his hopes and fears, sets traps against his own prospects, and does his unwitting best or worst to destroy himself. Then comes the canvass: the General against Statesman Adams, who courts a reelection.
The moment the rival forces march upon the field, the dullest marks the superiority of the General's. With that, Statesman Clay—in the war saddle for Statesman Adams, whose battle is his battle and whose defeat means his downfall—loses his head. He accuses the General of every offense except that of theft, calls him every name save that of coward. The accusations fail; the epithets fall harmless to the ground; the people know, and draw the closer about the General's standards. The latter's popularity rises as might a hurricane, and sweeps away opposition like down of thistles!
Statesman Clay becomes frantic. Possessed as by a demon, he issues instructions to assail the blooming Rachel. His hound-pack obey the call. From that moment the General's marriage is the issue. He is charged with “stealing another's wife,” and every shaft of mendacious villification is shot against the unoffending bosom of the blooming Rachel. Those are fire-swept moments of anguish for the General, who feels the pain the more, since his hands are tied against what saw-handle methods silenced the dead Dickinson one May Kentucky morning in that poplar wood.
The blooming Rachel, for her wronged part, says never a word. She goes the oftener to the little church, but that is all. And yet, while she seems so resigned and patient beneath the slandrous lash, the thong is biting always to her soul's source.
The election takes place, and now the people speak. They set the grinding heel of their anger upon those slanders; they throw down that ladder of lies by which Statesman Adams hopes to climb. Wizard Lewis, Burr-guided, foils Statesman Clay at every point; the General rides down Statesman Adams like a coach and six.
New England is tribal and narrow, with the reeking taint of old Federalism in its veins; it gives itself for Statesman Adams, unredeemed save by a single district in Maine. There, indeed, rises up one electoral vote for the General. It shows in the gray waste of Adams sentiment about it, like a green tree and a fountain against the gray wastes of Sahara. New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland follow in New England's dreary wake for Statesman Adams; while New York gives him sixteen electoral votes out of thirty-six. That offers the round circumference of his Clay-collected strength—an electoral vote of eighty-three!
For the General, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, Kentucky, Ohio, and Illinois go headlong; while New York gives him twenty electoral votes, with Tennessee his own by a popular count of twenty for one. Statesman Clay, as a retort to the slanders he fulminated, beholds his own State of Kentucky reject him, and aid in swelling those one hundred and seventy-eight electoral votes which declare for the General. The world at large, seated by its fireside and sagely thumbing those returns of one hundred and seventy-eight for the General against a meager eighty-three for Statesman Adams, finds therein a stunning rebuke to both the ambitions and the methods of Statesman Clay.
When word of the General's election reaches the blooming Rachel, she smiles wearily and says:
“For the General's sake I'm glad! For myself I never wished it.”
Now that the war of the votes is over and the General victor, mankind relaxes into its customary dinners and parades. The Cumberland good people resolve to outparade all former parades, outdine all former dinners. They engage themselves with tremendous gala preparations. It shall be a time when oxen are eaten whole, and whisky is drunk by the barrel.
The day set apart as sacred to the coming parade, and that dinner yet to be devoured, breaks brightly full of promise. There is never a cloud in the Cumberland sky, never a care on the Cumberland heart. In a moment all is reversed!—light gives way to blackness, happiness to grief! Like a bolt from a heaven smiling, the word descends that the blooming Rachel lies dead. The word is true. The monstrous weight of slander heaped upon it breaks her gentle heart.
They bury the blooming Rachel at the foot of the garden where her best-loved flowers grow. The General is ten years older in a night; the tall form, yesterday as straight as a lance, is bent and broken. The blue eyes, once hawklike, are dimmed with tears. Friends come to press his hand—he chokes and cannot speak! But the awful agony of his soul is written in the sweat drops on his wrung brow.
As the General stands by the grave that is smothering for him all the song and the sweet sunshine of life, the ever-faithful, never-failing Coffee is by his side. The poor General reaches blindly out and takes hold of the rough, big, loyal hand for support. His beloved Coffee, who flanked the Red Stick Creeks for him at the Horseshoe and held his low mud walls against England's boast and best at New Orleans, will not fail him now in this his sternest trial by the graveside of the blooming Rachel.
The General, doubly quiet, doubly stern, issues forth of that ordeal another man. He is as one who lives because it is his duty, and not for love of life. Plainly, his hopes like his heart are buried with the blooming Rachel. In his soul he lays her death to the doors of Statesman Adams and Statesman Clay; throughout the years to follow he will never forget nor forgive. To the end he will cultivate his hatred of them, and tend it as he might a flower. Time cannot remold him in this belief; and a decade later he will say to his friend Lewis, while his eye flashes like some sudden-drawn rapier:
“Major, she was stung to death by slander! It was such adders as John Quincy Adams, such pit-vipers as Henry Clay, that killed her!”