Mother Clayton had been long schooled in the questions which vexed the matter of slavery. She thought Douglas showed great courage in these words, but she was not satisfied with them. She felt that the South had not been protected in its rights and that Douglas owed it to the South to stand with the southern Senators. His position was not definite enough to suit her. He should say that slavery went into the territories by law, or was kept out by law. Douglas' thesis might be judicial but it laid him open to doubts.
This was our talk as we walked away from the Capitol. Dorothy was fatigued by the experience. She was interested, but the debate exhausted her. What she wished more than anything was peace for the whole country.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
I had had a delirium in the serious illness through which Zoe had nursed me, in which a blue fly crawling up the windowpane, sliding down the windowpane, buzzing in the corner of the frame where it could neither climb nor get through nor think of returning into the room—in which this fly took on the semblance of Napoleon. My imagination was then full of Napoleon; and my father had suffered because of him at the battle of Waterloo. And as I sat in the gallery of the Senate, Webster, Calhoun, Hale, Cass, and Douglas reminded me of this hallucination. They seemed to me like flies at the windowpane of Texas and California and Oregon, beating their wings against the dark glass of the future. They were like insects, caught in the rich gluten of circumstances and buzzing as they sought to make their way.
This winter sad news came to me of the death of my dear grandmother, whom I had planned all along to see again. Now it could not be. My life had been hurried forward with such varied events, and with all the rapidity of America's development. I had worked with great industry in putting the farm on a paying basis. I had run at high speed in Chicago. I was still living fast in plans and activities. Douglas was full of the subject of railroad extension, and I was drawn into that. He was trying to formulate a plan for the Illinois Central railroad; and my interests in Chicago drew me to that plan. He was also talking of founding a university in Chicago. These were the subjects of our many talks. Our visits took place at his house or at mine, as he rarely went with me to the places of amusement which I frequented.
A theatrical company had come to Washington from New York which was playing in repertoire, Jack Sheppard, Don César de Bazan, His Last Legs, London Assurance, Old Heads and Young Hearts, and some other dramas. Dorothy and Mrs. Douglas were devotees of the theater. I enjoyed Richelieu and Macbeth, and I had seen Forrest as Sir Charles Overreach and Claude Melnotte; but for many of the plays I did not care. Douglas was indifferent to the theater. He was himself too much of a player on the stage of American affairs to be illusioned by any mimic representation.
On a night when Dorothy and I were dining with Douglas and Mrs. Douglas, Dorothy and Mrs. Douglas conceived the idea of going off to see the play of Charlotte Temple; for we had overflowed the lesser talk at the dinner table by our discussion of railroads. Accordingly they left us, and Douglas and I settled down to an intimate evening, of which we were beginning to have many. We set a quart bottle of whisky between us, drinking from it from time to time as the evening progressed. Both of us had a fair capacity. And without either of us becoming more than well stimulated, we nearly consumed the bottle by the time Mrs. Douglas and Dorothy returned.
This evening I studied Douglas with more than usual care. I had been struck at dinner by his great devotion to Mrs. Douglas. He treated her with a high-bred chivalry, a constant kindness. I was really trying to get at the emotional side of his nature as to things that did not relate, for example, to an ocean-bound republic. After all, his attitude toward men was one of guarded friendship. He attached men to himself with ardor and loyalty. In turn he gave loyalty and a certain ardor too. But he was really analytical of men. He was suspicious of disinterested friendship. He saw selfish considerations as the social bond. Hence he had less and less patience with New England. The radicals who talked God and benevolence and fraternalism were anathema to him. They had nothing to lose; therefore, they could chant a goodness as to the loss of others; they could praise self-sacrifice, having nothing themselves to sacrifice. As for human love, what was it but the feeling evoked by consideration? Pay a man well and he will love you. Give him good working conditions and he will tolerate the service. Put him to the test by short pay or bad conditions and he will hate you. All of this pointed to the love of men and women. I tried to draw him out on this. I do not know what the lack of his mind was, whether of subtlety or imagination. At any rate it was a realm of thought to which his face was a blank, and to which his mind seemed to have no reaction.
He turned now to the Oregon settlement. He was still furious over it, still indignant at Polk. He had stood for 54:40 as the northern boundary; he was chagrined at the 49th parallel. Why had Polk fulminated first for 54:40 and faded off to the 49th parallel? England! He hated my mother country with a deep and rancorous hatred. Coming from Vermont he had taken into his bones a poison for the British atrocities of the Revolution; he loathed England for her conduct of the War of 1812, the ruthless burning of Washington, with all its priceless records of the early days of the republic. He was eager, restive to fight England. England's invulnerableness tantalized him; her habitual luck infuriated him. Her ownership of the right thing at the right place and time mystified him. Concretely now there were the Mosquito Islands off the coast of Honduras which England claimed to own, but Douglas thought without any right. He was advocating the cutting of a canal across Nicaragua. What would England do? She would try to use the Mosquito Islands as a basis of agreement for joint control with the United States of the canal—in spite of the Monroe Doctrine. Why would not all statesmen rise with him in the assertion of a title to the whole of North America? Was America in the business of pirating around the shores of Europe to pick up islands, or promontories like Gibraltar? Not at all. Then why should England be tolerated in this Western Hemisphere? What divided the American imagination? The old loyalists and royalists who had become the Federalists under Hamilton, who were now the Whigs with the same banking scheme, the same old tariff, the same old hatred of democratic government, the same hypocrisy, the same disingenuous and devious policies. There was but one American party, one pure-blooded party, good for the East and the West, friendly to every just thing that the East desired, understanding the West; that was the Democratic party! It stood for America. It envisioned the needs of the greatness of America. It had fought the war against England and Mexico. It had created the American domain. And now these old defeated and crooked monarchists who had stood in the way of America's progress were seizing upon a moral issue, upon slavery, with which to befool a democratic electorate naturally responsive to the arguments of liberty. They had opposed the Mexican War; they had brought up the slavery question at every important juncture to confound counsels and perplex otherwise easy solutions. But what one of them would give back Texas, New Mexico, California, to Mexico? Would Webster? Would Hale? No, not one of them would do this.