“They should have punishment for all that,” cried I.
“Sir, they shall be punished,” retorted the General. “And as for Calhoun, he most of all shall suffer. Mark you this: That man shall never be president. More, he may yet win Gilderoy's elevation at a rope's end.” This last in wrathful whisper like a warning of death.
There was spreading reason to talk on Calhoun and his policies. South Carolina, ever arrogant, was moving to snap rebellious thumb and finger in the National face. The legislature of that insolent commonwealth had done its treason part; Nullification and its counterpart, Secession, were already agreed on; men were being enrolled and arms collected, while medals found Charleston coinage bearing the words, “John C. Calhoun, First President of the Southern Confederacy.”
And the restless spirit to animate it all was no other than Calhoun himself. He was then among his henchmen of the Palmettoes, directing even the very phrases wherewith to deck their traitorous fulminations. So much the General knew, not alone from what Peg read daily in the papers, but by the weeded word of ones whom, safe and prudent, we dispatched to find the truth.
And yet, in the last, I was sure Calhoun would never mean rebellion and a severance of his state from the common bonds. On such terms he could not succeed the General for the presidency, which was his invincible ambition. What Calhoun hoped was, by a deafening din of threat on his people's part of secession and rebellion, and every whatnot of stark treason besides, to browbeat the General to his will of Nullification; and thus by the one stroke to so fix himself in the van of victorious sentiment that no one might stay his march of White House conquest. And in good truth, thus argued the General.
“But he should beware,” said the General. “Calhoun and his cohorts shall not steal a march on the old soldier. They must not go too far. A conspiracy to do treason exists, and Calhoun is at its head. But the mere conspiracy is not enough. Marshall lays it down how folk can not think treason, can not talk treason, and that treason to be treason must be acted. There must be the overt act; and though it be but the act of one, it attaches to every member of the conspiracy and becomes the treason of all. If one man so much as snap a South Carolina flint, that is an act to fall within the law, and the treason is the treason of Calhoun. I say, he should take heed for himself; whether he know it or no, the man walks among pitfalls.”
“But you should be prepared,” I said.
“We will go upon the work at once,” returned the General. “Winfield Scott shall proceed to Charleston; the fleet shall convene in the bay; Castle Pinckney shall have a hundred thousand stand of arms; and we will write to our old Indian fighters, Crockett and Coffee and Houston and Dale and Overton and the rest, to lie ready with one hundred thousand riflemen in Tennessee and North Carolina to overwhelm these rebellionists at the dropping of a handkerchief.”
This converse, I recall, came off one afternoon when the General was in more healthful fettle than stood common during those days of fear for his life. Peg sat with us; indeed, it was news she gave us from a Charleston paper to bring down all this talk.
Peg, silent yet interested, listened while the General laid out his purposes.