“No,” returned Noah; “you may enlighten him later, since there comes no call for hurry. I dislike to dodge in and out or play hide and seek with a president; it is not seemly. And the fact that our friend would tolerate, and might even encourage the familiarity on my personal part, offer best reasons why I should avoid it.”
“You make yourself too modest,” said I.
None the less I was touched to admiration with this decent sense of the proprieties on Noah's part. It stood a pity it found imitation by so few.
“What is it to be, then?” I asked.
“You need not be told,” said Noah, “how the President's note to the Vice-President, added to Rhetz's report of the White House views on Nullification, Secession, and kindred hangman topics, has made a flutter. Your Palmetto folk who plot for Nullification fear the President. Being so far right, they then step aside for error; they fall to fond imaginings that, for all his violence of phrase to Rhetz, the President, in return, fears them. They believe, were he to count their power, he would not dare them to any last-ditch opposition. Then, too, the leaders are not wholly satisfied with the Rhetz returns. Thus a situation is framed where some stronger light on the President's intentions, together with the true news of those lengths to which he stands ready to go, and whether an ultimate resort would call for rifles and then the gallows, is deeply to be desired. And these tavern conversations and talks of the corridors have for their object the President's development along the lines exhibited.”
“And this is highly the natural thing,” said I. “Have our anxious ones invented any trap wherewith to catch that word they seek?”
“They will search for it in this wise,” said Noah; “thus canters the plan: They look to a day far ahead, but it will be with them in time. They have settled on Jefferson's birthday to make a test of the President and discover what he would do should South Carolina, with Calhoun, abrogate a tariff and defy government in the port of Charleston. The occasion will be in honor of the Man of Monticello. Jefferson's memory and its graceful illustration will serve as the cause, ostensible, of that banquet; really, the affair is to be twisted for Nullification. There will come a score of toasts; and each to exalt the state at the cost of the nation, and argue treason holy. The speeches will follow of a piece with the toasts. Calhoun and his cohorts will crowd the tables; applause will be extant for every sentiment of disunion; in short, they devise a States Rights gathering where Nullification and the rebellious spawn of it shall gain a broad endorsement.”
“And where does the General come into their machinations?”
“The President will be invited to attend. Should he come, he will be given the Chair's right hand. The Calhoun folk will read his face while their toasts of treason are flaunted. They will ask him for a sentiment. They believe that his courses to come, as he designs them, can not fail to find disclosure. They hope to gain the measure of his apprehensions. When they once have the pattern of the President's hopes and fears, and learn his timid limits, they think those boundaries of safety beyond which Nullification must not push will be determined.”
“Now, if these schemers,” I cried, “own no capital save the General's timidity, they are indeed in bankrupt case.”