And now the official times wag prosperously with the General. His friends are everywhere dominant, his enemies everywhere in retreat. Also his hair, from iron gray, fades to milk-white.
Since nothing peculiar presses upon him in the way of opposition, the General falls ill. He makes little of this, however; and cures himself with tobacco, coffee, calomel, and lancets, while outraged doctors groan. Likewise, he burns midnight oil in planning with Wizard Lewis the elevation of Vice-President Van Buren, who he is resolved shall have the presidency after him.
While thus the General lays his Van Buren plans, misguided admirers bombard him with such marks of their regard as a phaëton built of unbarked hickory, and a cheese weighing fourteen hundred pounds. The latter sturdy confection is trundled into the White House kitchen, from which coign of vantage it sends on high a perfume so utterly urgent that none may stay in the White House until it is removed. Following its going, the executive windows are thrown open throughout a wind-swept afternoon, to the end that the last suffocating reminder of that cheese shall be eliminated.
The General's hours as President are drawing to a close. His hopes touching a successor carry through triumphantly, and Vice-President Van Buren is selected to follow him. Neither Machiavelli Clay for the Whigs, nor Statesman Calhoun among the Democrats, has the courage to offer his own name to the people.
Statesman Calhoun, aiming to subtract as much as he may from the fortunes of nominee Van Buren, produces a bolting ticket, headed by one Mangum; and, for Mangum, Palmetto-rattlesnake South Carolina—still in a tearful pout—wastes its lonely arrow in the air. It was, it will be, ever thus with South Carolina, who might do herself a good, and come to some true notion of her own peevish inconsequence, if she would but take a long, hard look in the glass. She is as one who attends the fairs, but so over-esteems herself as to defeat every bargain she might make. Her best chances are cast away, a cheap sacrifice to vanity, since no one will either buy her or sell her at the figure she sets on herself. Thus, too, will it continue. Her frayed prospects, already behind a fashion, are to wax more shopworn and more threadbare as the years unfold.
Nominee Van Buren is elected to succeed the General in the White House, and every friend of the latter votes for the little polite man of Kinderhook. The General is delighted, since the elevation of nominee Van Buren provides for a continuation of his darling policies.
Wizard Lewis is delighted, because the new situation permits the return of himself and his beloved General to their homes by the Cumberland. Nor does it detract from the satisfaction of either that, with the presidential coming of the Kinderhook one, the final door of political hope is barred fast in the faces of Machiavelli Clay and Statesman Calhoun; for both the General and Wizard Lewis hate these two as though that hatred were a religious rite.