As I gazed at the group—waiting, they were, for the opening of the banquet hall—I met many a great face. Among those about the stair-head and in the rooms beyond were Colonel Johnson of Kentucky, tall of form, grave of eye, he who slew Tecumseh; Benton, big, pompous, wise but with a bottomless conceit; the lean Rufus Choate, eloquent and sound; Corwin, round, humorous, with a face of ruddy fun; White, the dignified, in the Senate from my own state of Tennessee; Hill, gray and lame, the General's friend in New Hampshire; Noah, my Hebrew with red hair; Van Buren, Peg's “good little secretary” of state; Vaughn, the British minister; the quickeyed Amos Kendall, with Blair by his side; the recreant Duff Green, now wholly for Calhoun; Calhoun himself, pale, scholarly and fine; Huygens, that ministerial tubby personage, gin-bleary and dull; Krudener, the Russian; Eaton, easy, florid, urbane; Branch and Berrien and Barry and Ingham and the reckless Marcy.
The dinner was spread. The decorations were studied in their democracy. Hundreds of candles from many-armed iron branches blazed about the plain walls of the room and made the light of day. For the rest, the hall was hung with flags. The stars and stripes, to be a centerpiece, was draped about a portrait of Jefferson just to the rear of the place where Lee of Virginia, who was to preside, would sit. Extending around the four sides of the room were festooned the flags of the several states.
With peculiar ostentation, and next to the national colors, flowed the banner of South Carolina, with its palmetto and rattlesnake—Calhoun's emblem.
“Do you see it?” said the General in a low tone, as we approached our places, “do you see Calhoun's flag? That serpent may rattle but it must not strike.”
“And if it strike?”
“If it strike, it dies.”
Profusion and elegance were displayed in the arrangements, with none of that long-drawn foolishness of courses so dear to Whigs and Federals and other imitators of an English nobility. Black servants came and went to shift one's plate and knife, or to aid in carving at the call of a guest. At hopeful intervals along the tables reposed huge sirloins and smoking rounds of beef; there were quail pies and chickens fried and turkeys roasted; there stood pies of venison and rabbit and pot-pies of squirrels; soups and fishes and vegetables; boiled hams and giant dishes of earthenware holding baked pork and beans; roast suckling pigs and each with a crab-apple in its mouth. There were corn breads and flour breads and pancakes rolled with jellies; sideboards upheld puddings—Indian, rice and plum—quaking custards, and scores of kindred dainties. Everywhere bristled ranks and double ranks of bottles and decanters, and a widest range of drinks, from whisky to wine of the cape, were at one's call. There, too, stood wooden bowls of salads on side tables, supported of weighty cheeses; and to close in the flanks were pies, mince and pumpkin and apple, with final coffee, and slim long pipes with tobacco of Trinidad for folk who would smoke.
Before we were seated, and while we stood to our places, the sentiment was proposed:
“The memory of Thomas Jefferson.” The toast was drunk in silence; all could agree on Jefferson; and then with clatter of knife and fork, the thirsty clink of glasses, and the murmurous hum of conversation over all, the work of the night commenced.
As the moments roved on, Nullification and Secession became so much the open objects of many present, and were withal so loosely in the common air, that sundry gentlemen—more timorous than loyal, perhaps—made excuses and withdrew.