"Mr. Chairman," quietly remarked Mr. Cutting, "I do not intend upon this floor to answer the remark which the gentleman from Kentucky has thought proper to employ. It belongs to a different region. It is not ere that I will desecrate my lips with undertaking to retort in that manner."
This settled the question, and a duel appeared to be inevitable. The usual correspondence followed, but President Pierce and other potent friends of the would-be belligerents interfered, and the difficult was amicably adjusted, under "the code of honor," without recourse to weapons.
Governor Marcy, President Pierce's Secretary of State, was a great card-player, and Mr. Labouchere tells a good story which happened when he was Secretary of the British Legation at Washington. "I went," said he, "with the British Minister, to a pleasant watering- place in Virginia, where we were to meet Mr. Marcy, the then United States Secretary of State, and a reciprocity treaty between Canada and the United States was to be quietly discussed. Mr. Marcy, the most genial of men, was as cross as a bear. He would agree to nothing. 'What on earth is the matter with your chief?' I said to a secretary who accompanied him. 'He does not have his rubber of whist,' answered the secretary. After this every night the Minister and I played at whist with Mr. Marcy and his secretary, and every night we lost. The stakes were very trifling, but Mr. Marcy felt flattered by beating the Britishers at what he called their own game. His good humor returned, and every morning when the details of the treaty were being discussed we had our revenge, and scored a few points for Canada." A true account of the money designedly lost at Washington by diplomats, heads of departments, and Congressmen would give a deep insight into the secret history of legislation. What Representative could vote against the claim of a man whose money he had been winning, in small sums, it is true, all winter?
General John A. Thomas, of New York, who was Assistant Secretary of State during a part of President Pierce's Administration, was a fine, soldierly looking man, very gentlemanly in his deportment. He was a native of Tennessee, and was for several years an officer in the United States Army, commanding at one time the corps of cadets. He married a Miss Ronalds, who belonged to an old New York family, and he took her with him when he went abroad as Solicitor to the Board of Commissioners appointed by the President to adjust the claims of American citizens upon the British Government. Mr. Buchanan was the American Minister at the Court of St. James, and Mr. Sickles Secretary of Legation. Mrs. Thomas having expressed a wish to be presented at court, Mr. Buchanan assented, and, when the day for presentation arrived, requested Mrs. Thomas to place herself under the charge of Mrs. Sickles, who would accompany her to the palace of St. James. This arrangement Mrs. Thomas decidedly declined, and by so doing gave so much offense to Mr. Buchanan that she was never presented at court at all. Nor did the matter end here. When Mr. Buchanan came to the Presidency he found General Thomas filling the office of Assistant Secretary of State. From this office he immediately ejected him, for the old grudge he bore Mrs. Thomas for refusing to go to court with Mrs. Sickles, as General Thomas declared to his friends. Mr. Buchanan was always very fond of Mr. Sickles and his wife, and it was said that he narrowly escaped being in the Sickles' house when Barton Key was shot down after coming from it.
The Amoskeag Veterans, of Manchester, New Hampshire, a volunteer corps which wore the Continental uniform and marched to the music of drums and fifes, came to Washington to pay their respects to the President, who received them with lavish hospitality. They visited Mount Vernon under escort of a detachment of volunteer officers, and were escorted by the venerable G. W. P. Custis around the old home of his illustrious relative. At a ball given in the evening the "old man eloquent" wore the epaulettes originally fastened on his shoulders by him who was "first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen." The sword given him by General Washington Mr. Custis had presented to his son-in- law, Captain Robert E. Lee, of the Engineer Corps, during the Mexican campaign.
[Facsimile] John Tyler JOHN TYLER was born in Charles County, Virginia, March 29th, 1790; was a Representative in Congress from Virginia, December 17th, 1816, to March 3d, 1821; was United States Senator from Virginia, December 3d, 1827, to February 28th, 1836; was elected Vice-President on the Harrison ticket in 1840; became President, after the death of President Harrison, April 4th, 1841; was a delegate to the Peace Convention of 1861, and its President; was a delegate to the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States, which assembled at Richmond in July, 1861; was elected a Representative from Virginia in the first Confederate Congress, but died at Richmond, Virginia, before taking his seat, January 17th, 1862.
CHAPTER XXXVI. CRYSTALLIZATION OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY.
The repeal of the Missouri Compromise and the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law re-opened the flood-gates of sectional controversy. The Native American organization was used at the North by the leading Abolitionists for the disintegration of the Whigs, and they founded a new political party, with freedom inscribed upon its banners. The Free-Soil Democrats who had rebelled against Southern rule, with the Liberty Whigs, and those who were more openly arrayed against slavery, united, and were victorious at the Congressional elections in the Northern States in the autumn of 1854. "The moral idea became a practical force," and the "Irrepressible Conflict" was commenced. "As Republicans," said Charles Sumner, "we go forth to encounter the oligarchs of slavery."
The great contest was opened by a struggle in the House of Representatives over the Speakership. Nathaniel Prentiss Banks, a Democrat, who had joined the Know-Nothings, was the Northern candidate, although Horace Greeley, with Thurlow Weed and William Schouler as his aides-de-camp, endeavored to elect Lewis D. Campbell, an Ohio American. The Southern Know-Nothings voted at one time for Henry M. Fuller, of Pennsylvania, but they dropped him like a hot potato when they learned that he had accepted a place on the Republican Committee of his State. William Aiken, a large slaveholder in South Carolina, was the favorite Southern candidate, although the vote of the solid South was successively given to several others. Meanwhile, as day after day passed, the President's message was withheld, and all legislation was at a dead-lock. The Sergeant- at-Arms, Colonel Glossbrenner, an ex-member of the House, obtained a loan of twenty thousand dollars from a bank in Pennsylvania, which enabled him to make advances to impecunious members of both parties, and thus to insure his re-election.
Early in January an attempt was made to "sit it out," and all night the excited House seethed like a boiling cauldron; verdant novices were laughed down as they endeavored to make some telling point, while sly old stagers lay in ambush to spring out armed with "points of order." Emasculate conservatives were snubbed by followers of new prophets; belligerent Southrons glared fiercely at phlegmatic Yankees; one or two intoxicated Solons gabbled sillily upon every question, and sober clergymen gaped, as if sleepy and disgusted with political life. Banks, unequaled in his deportment, was as cool as a summer cucumber; Aiken, his principal opponent, was courteous and gentlemanlike to all; Giddings wore a broad-brimmed hat to shield his eyes from the rays of the gas chandelier; Stephens, of Georgia, piped forth his shrill response, and Senator Wilson went busily about "whipping-in." Soon after midnight the South Americans began to relate their individual experience in true camp- meeting style, the old-line Democrats were rampant, the few Whigs were jubilant, and the bone of Catholicism was pretty will picked by those who had been peeping at politics through dark-lanterns, and who were "know-nothings" about what they had done. In short, every imaginable topic of discussion, in order or out of order, was lugged in to kill time.