For all the plain sureness of that toast, the would-be rebellionists now crave a surer sign. A member of Congress from South Carolina, polite and insinuating, calls on the General.
“Mr. President,” says the insinuating signseeking one, suavely deferential, “to-morrow I go back to my home. Have you any message for the good folk of South Carolina?”
“Yes,” returns the General grimly, his hard blue eyes upon the insinuating one, while his heavy brows are lowered in that falcon-trick of menace—“yes; I have a message for the 'good folk of South Carolina.' You may say to the 'good folk of South Carolina' that if one of them so much as lift finger in defiance of the laws of this government, I shall come down there. And I'll hang the first man I lay hands on, to the first tree I can reach.”
CHAPTER XXIV—THE ROUT OF TREASON
DEMOCRACY goes not without its defects, and there be times when that very freedom wherewith it invests the citizen spreads a snare to his feet. For a chief fault, Democracy is apt to mislead ambitious ones, dominated of ego and a want of patriotism in even parts. Such are prone to run liberty into license in following forth the appetites of their own selfishness, and forget where the frontiers of loyalty leave off and those of black treason begin.
In a democracy, for your clambering narrowist to turn traitor is never a far-fetched task. Being free to speak as he politically will and, per incident, think as he politically will, he finds it no mighty journey to the perilous assumption that he may act as he politically will. Knowing his duty to guard the temple, he argues therefrom his right to deface it. Treason fades into a mere abstraction—a crime curious in this, that it is impossible of concrete commission.
Statesman Calhoun is among these ill-guided ones of topsy-turvy patriotism. Blurred by ambition, soured of disappointment, license and liberty have grown with him to be unconscious synonyms. The laws against treason carry only a remonstrance, never a warning, and—as he reads them—but deplore that civic villainy, while threatening nothing of grief for what dark souls shall be guilty of it. In this frame the General's stark sentiment, “The Federal Union! It must be preserved!” and that subsequent hanging promise which, by the mouth of the suave insinuating one, he sends to “the good folk of South Carolina,” go beyond surprise with Statesman Calhoun, and provide a shock. It is as though, walking in a trance of treason, he knocks his head against the White House wall; his awakening is rudely, painfully complete. That dream of a separate nation, with himself at its head, gives way to hangman visions of rope and gallows tree; and, from bending his energies to methods by which he may take South Carolina out of the Union, he gives himself wholly to the more tremulous enterprise of keeping himself out of jail.
Some hint of that recent literature, which the General found so interesting, gets abroad, and many go reading the lucid dictum of old Marshall. Treason as a crime becomes better understood; and—by Statesman Calhoun at least—better feared. Moved of these fears, Statesman Calhoun sends message after message into his restless Palmetto-rattlesnake State of South Carolina commanding, nay imploring, a present suspension of “Nullification.” His Palmetto-rattlesnake adherents, while not understanding the danger which fringes them about, have already found enough that is alarming in the very air; and, for their own safety as much as his, are heedful to regard that prayer for a “Nullification” passivity. The South Carolina shouting ceases; the Minute Men rest on their traitorous arms; the manufacture of blue cockades is abandoned; while the Columbia convention devotes itself to innocuous adjournments from innocent day to day.