There were a few veteran office-holders at Washington, whose ancestors had been appointed under Federal rule, but who had managed to veer around into Jackson Democracy. Mr. Webster, in speaking one day of a Philadelphia family which had thus kept in place, said that they reminded him of Simeon Alleyn, Vicar of Bray, in Old England, who steered his bark safely through four conflicting successive reigns. A bland gentleman, he was first a Papist, then a Protestant, next a Papist, and lastly a Protestant again. "He must have been at times," said Mr. Webster, "terribly confused between gowns and robes, and," continued the Senator, "I can fancy him listening at his window to the ballad written on him, as trolled forth by some graceless varlets:
"'To teach my flock I never missed;
Kings were by God appointed,
And they are damned who dare resist
Or touch the Lord's anointed;
And this in law I will maintain
Until my dying day, sir,
That whosoever king shall reign,
I'll be the Vicar of Bray, sir.'"
Mr. Webster was not only fond of repeating quotations from the old English poets, but also verses from the old Sternhold and Hopkins hymn-book, which he had studied in the Salisbury meeting-house when a boy, and sometimes when alone he would sing, or rather chant, them in his deep voice, without a particle of melody. His favorite verses were the following translation of the xviiith Psalm:
"The Lord descended from above,
And bow'd the heavens high;
And underneath His feet He cast
The darkness of the sky.
"On cherubs and on cherubims
Full royally He rode,
And on the wings of all the winds
Came flying all abroad."
Late in the Jackson Administration, Richard H. Bayard came to Washington as a Senator from Delaware, to fill a vacancy caused by the resignation of Arnold Naudain. He was the son of James Asheton Bayard, originally a stanch Federalist, who had followed his father- in-law, Richard Bassett, as a Senator from Delaware, and whose vote had made Thomas Jefferson President of the United States instead of Aaron Burr. He had afterward been one of the Commission which negotiated the treaty of Ghent, and he educated his sons to succeed him in the Senate, and in turn to qualify a grandson to represent his State in the upper branch of the National Council. No one family has furnished so many United States Senators, and they have all been inspired by the knightly courtesy of the Bayard of the olden time, who was "without fear and without reproach."
The Democratic Bayards were antagonized in Jackson's time by the Whig Claytons, the other Delaware chair in the United States Senate having been occupied since 1829 by John Middleton Clayton. He was an accomplished lawyer, and one of the leaders of the Whig party. Under his direction Delaware was a Whig State, and had it been a larger one, Mr. Clayton would doubtless have been nominated to the Vice-Presidency, if not to the Presidency. He was zealously devoted to his party, and when, later in life, a delegation waited on him to question some of his acts as not in accordance with Whig principles, he rose, and drawing himself up to his full height, exclaimed: "What! unwhig me? Me, who was a Whig when you gentlemen were riding cornstalk horses in your fathers' barnyards?" The delegation asked his pardon for having doubted his party loyalty, and at once withdrew.
James Alfred Pearce, of Maryland, entered the House of Representatives during the Jackson Administration, and was successively re-elected (with the exception of a single term) until he was transferred to the Senate in 1843, and served in that body until his death in 1862. He was another "wheel horse" of the Whig party, although he shrank from political controversy. His home friends, who were very proud of his reputation, brought him forward at one time as a candidate for the Presidency. But he refused to permit his name to be used, on the ground that the burdens of the White House were too costly a price to pay for its honors.
Mr. Pearce was a devoted friend of the Congressional Library, and during his long service on the Committee having it in charge he selected the books purchased. In doing this he excluded all works calculated in his opinion to engender sectional differences, and when the Atlantic Monthly was established he refused to order it for the Library. He was the founder of the Botanic Garden, and the Coast Survey was another object of his especial attention and favor.
Mr. Pearce's care in the choice of books was my no means a notion of his own. From the founding of the Library it was the policy of many of its warmest friends to exclude every publication which would engender and foster sectional differences. They went on the principle of concealing difficulties, rather than of facing them squarely. Very different is the broader policy now maintained in this great library, on whose shelves every copyrighted book of the United States now finds a place.