A moment later the orator’s pensive melancholy had turned to rage.
“Why not expunge those who made the record?” he thundered, forgetting how many had been “expunged.” “If the proceedings had a guilt so monstrous as to render necessary this novel and extraordinary course, the men themselves who perpetrated the deed—it is they who should be expunged. Men who entered so foul a page upon the journal cannot be worthy of a seat here. Remove us! Turn us out! Expel us from the Senate! Would to God you could! Call in the pretorian guard! Take us—apprehend us—march us off!”[931]
After Rives and Niles had spoken in support of the resolution, Calhoun mournfully rose, and with funereal sadness, not unmixed with scorn, pointed out the resemblance of the proceedings to the degenerate days of Rome. “But why do I waste my breath?” he asked, in conclusion. “I know it is all utterly vain. The day is gone; night approaches, and night is suitable to the dark deed we meditate. There is a sort of destiny in this thing. The act must be performed; and it is an act that will tell on the political history of this country forever.... It is a melancholy evidence of a broken spirit, ready to bow at the feet of power. The former act[932] was such a one as might have been perpetrated in the days of Pompey and Cæsar; but an act like this could never have been consummated by a Roman Senate until the times of Caligula and Nero.”
After Calhoun concluded, unsuccessful efforts to adjourn were made, until Clay announced his intention to speak at length, and his request for delay was granted. Had his supporters realized how far from absolute certainty of success Benton felt, they would have favored, instead of fought, an adjournment. The following day was Saturday, and a careful poll disclosed the disconcerting diversity of opinion as to details which threatened the success of the project, and Benton gladly agreed to a postponement of the discussion until Monday. That night the then famous restaurant of Boulanger found all the Jacksonian Senators seated about the banquet board. The clever host had loaded the table with his choicest offerings, and as soon as the statesmen had reached the mellow, accommodating mood, they settled down to the real purpose of the feast. Realizing that he lacked the deftness and finesse required for ironing out all differences as to details, Benton had assigned the work of conciliation to Silas Wright, Allen of Ohio, and Linn of Missouri. Even so, it “required all the moderation, tact, and skill of the prime movers to obtain and maintain the union upon details, on the success of which the measure depended.”[933] But when, at midnight, the Senators dispersed, all conflicting views had been reconciled, and for the first time an actual majority was pledged to a single programme. It was decided to call the resolution up on Monday, and to keep it constantly before the Senate, without adjournment, until the “deed” was done.
To prevent any of his flock from wandering afield in search of refreshments, Benton had made ample preparations, and a tourist, wandering into Benton’s committee room at four o’clock on Monday afternoon, would have assumed, in view of the vast quantities of cold ham, turkey, rounds of beef, pickles, wines, and coffee, that he had stumbled into a senatorial café. That day, Clay appeared in the Senate ostentatiously garbed in black as though in mourning for the murdered Constitution. So ugly was his mood that he even refused snuff offered by a Democratic Senator he knew was going to vote to expunge. The galleries were packed to witness the drama, or melodrama, and impatiently sat through the preliminary work of the Senate. At length the hour came for the consideration of the resolution, and all eyes turned to Clay, who thoroughly enjoyed his rôle in the play. As his tall form slowly rose, there was a rustling in the galleries as the spectators shifted their position to get a better view of the great enemy of Jackson. On his feet, he stood a moment in silence, as though weighed down by the importance of his task, if not by its hopelessness. Then he began in subdued tones, albeit his silvery voice was heard distinctly over the chamber. Such a hardened observer of historical incidents as Sargent describes the scene as “grand, impressive, and imposing,” and “even solemn,” as though “some terrible rite was to be performed, some bloody sacrifice to be made upon the altar of Moloch.”[934]
“What object?” he demanded. Was it necessary because of the President? “In one hand,” he continued, “he holds the purse, and in the other he brandishes the sword of the country. Myriads of dependents and partisans, scattered all over the land, are ever ready to sing hosannas to him, and to laud to the skies whatever he does. He has swept over the Government during the last eight years like a tropical tornado. Every department exhibits traces of the ravages of the storm.... What object of his ambition is unsatisfied? When, disabled from age any longer to hold the scepter of power, he designates his successor, and transmits it to his favorite, what more does he want? Must we blot, deface, and mutilate the records of the country, to punish the presumptuousness of expressing any opinion contrary to his own?
“What object?” demanded Clay. “Do you intend to thrust your hands into our hearts and pluck out the deeply rooted convictions which are there? Or is it your design merely to stigmatize us? Standing securely upon our conscious rectitude, and bearing aloft the Constitution of our country, your puny efforts are impotent; and we defy all your power.
“What object?” reiterated the orator. “To please the President? He would reject, with scorn and contempt as unworthy of his fame, your black scratches and your baby lines in the fair records of his country. Black lines. Black lines.... And hereafter, when we shall lose the forms of our free institutions, all that now remain to us, some future American monarch, in gratitude to those by whose means he has been enabled, upon the ruins of civil liberty, to erect a throne, and to commemorate especially this expunging resolution, may institute a new order of knighthood, and confer on it the appropriate name of the ‘Knights of the Black Lines.’”
But why continue, he inquired, as he closed his fierce philippic. “Proceed then with your noble work.... And when you have perpetrated it, go home to the people, and tell them what glorious honors you have achieved for our common country. Tell them that you have extinguished one of the brightest and purest lights that ever burned on the altar of civil liberty. Tell them that you have silenced one of the noblest batteries that ever thundered in defense of the Constitution, and bravely spiked the cannon. Tell them that henceforth, no matter what daring or outrageous act any President may perform, you have forever hermetically sealed the mouth of the Senate. Tell them that he may fearlessly assume what powers he pleases, snatch from its lawful custody the public purse, and command a military detachment to enter the halls of the Capitol, overawe Congress, trample down the Constitution, and raze every bulwark of freedom; but that the Senate must stand mute, in silent submission, and not dare to raise its opposing voice.”
Such the theatrical strain of a speech which the schoolboys of well-regulated Whig families were to declaim for the delight of their elders for a generation, and to call forth a fulsome note from the sober-minded Kent.