When Men Grew Tall, or The Story of Andrew Jackson

by Alfred Henry Lewis

THE General is reading his book, when in walks Wizard Lewis. The latter necromancer casually alludes to Statesman Calhoun, and his pet infamy of “Nullification.” At this the General's honest rage begins to mount.

“You bear witness, Major,” he cries—“you bear witness how Calhoun is trying me! But by the living heavens, I'll uphold the law!” Then, shaking the ponderous tome at Wizard Lewis, his finger marking the place—“Here! I've been reading what old John Marshall said in the case of Aaron Burr. He makes treason in its definition as plain as a pikestaff. A man can't think treason; he can't talk treason; he can only act treason. It requires an act—an overt act! Calhoun is safe while he only talks or conspires. But let one of his followers perform one act of opposition to the law, even if it be no more than hand on sword hilt or just the snapping of a fireless flint against an empty rifle-pan, and I have him. There would be the overt act demanded by old Marshall; and he goes on to say that the overt act, once committed, attaches to all of the conspirators and becomes the act of each. I shall keep my ear as well as my eye, Major, on Calhoun's State of South Carolina; and, at the first crackling of a treasonable twig beneath a traitorous foot, into a felon's cell goes he. Then we shall see what a hempen noose will do for him and his 'Nullification.'”

The General, the better to deliver this long oration, gets up and walks the floor. Having concluded, down he drops into his chair again, and to grubbing at old John Marshall.

The General and Wizard Lewis decide that a perfect White House silence concerning “Nullification” is the proper course. The General will sit mute, and never by so much as the arching of a bushy brow intimate what he will do, should Statesman Calhoun push his treason to that last extreme—that overt act of opposition to the Federal law and its enforcement, demanded by the great Chief Justice. And so, while arises all this turmoil of treason in the Senate and South Carolina, the White House is as voiceless as a tomb.

While the General is silent, he is in no sort idle. He makes secret preparations to bruise the head of the serpent of secession with a heel of steel. He sends General Scott to South Carolina. Into Castle Pinckney he conveys thousands of rifles. One by one his warships drop into Charleston harbor, until, with broadsides trained upon the town, scores of them ride at ominous anchor.

The General gets word to his ever-reliable Coffee. In those well-nigh twenty years which have come and gone since the English were swept up in fire at New Orleans, the hunting-shirt men in the General's country of Tennessee have increased and multiplied. Their numbers are such that at the end of twenty days the energetic Coffee stands ready to cataract twenty-five thousand of them into South Carolina at the lifting of the General's bony finger, and follow these in forty days with twenty-five thousand more. Not content with his fifty thousand hunting-shirt men from Tennessee, the General arranges for an equal force from North Carolina and Georgia.

If ever a people stood within the shadow of doom it is our treason-forging ones of South Carolina in these days of Nullification, Columbia Conventions, Minute Men, and Blue Cockades.

Some of them are not so dim of eye but what they perceive as much, and begin to catch their breath. Still a wrong, once it be set rolling like a stone down hill, is difficult to overtake and stop. So, while the heart of would-be Treason beats a little faster, and its cheek turns a little whiter, as inklings of what the wordless General is doing begin to creep about among Palmetto-rattlesnake coteries, the work of making ready for black revolt proceeds.

In Washington, that grim silence of the White House grows oppressive. There be prudent ones, among the nullifying adherents of Statesman Calhoun, who are willing to play the part of traitor if no peril attend the rôle. They are highly averse to the character if it promise to thrust their sensitive necks into gallows danger. The questions everywhere on the whispering lips of these timid treason mongers are:

“What is the Jackson intention? What will the President do? Will he look upon Nullification as merely some minor sin of politics? Or, will he treat it as stark treason, and fall back on courts and hangman's ropes?”