On the 11th of March, 1850, Mr. Seward, unmindful of his pledges to William Ballard Preston, made a violent Abolition speech in the Senate. The Georgia school-master has outwitted the Secretary of the Navy. Charles Francis Adams, in his memorial address at Albany on Mr. Seward, stated that he was aware of the “agreement,” as he called it, between the Auburn statesman and Taylor’s Administration, but he must have been ignorant of its real terms, for a descendant of two Presidents would scarcely have regarded the violation of voluntary pledges as a fit topic for glowing eulogy.
And now in that month of March, 1850, William H. Seward was at the height of power. In all human probability he would be next President of the United States. Short-lived triumph. The summer of his glory was soon overcast with stormy portents. Within four little months Zachary Taylor lay dead in the White House, and Fillmore, Seward’s dearest foe, was President. The downfall of the Whig party soon followed, and Mr. Seward and Winfield Scott sat amid its ruins. It was about this time that Daniel Webster said to his friend Peter Harvey of Boston: “One of the convictions of my mind, and it is very strong, is that the people of the United States will never entrust their destinies, and the administration of their government, to the hands of William H. Seward and his associates.”[30]
But Mr. Webster, perhaps, underestimated the character of Mr. Seward. In 1856, upon the election of Nathaniel P. Banks as Speaker of the House of Representatives, the distinguished New York Senator became titular primate of a new and more powerful organization than the Whig party ever had been in its palmiest days. England is governed by Cabinet Ministers with seats in Parliament; the United States by standing Committees of the Senate and House of Representatives, by whom legislation is initiated, secretly formulated, and then carried through both Houses by aid of caucus management, and under the whip and spur of imperious majorities. This vast energy Mr. Seward now commanded through Speaker Banks in the House of Representatives. He had admirable lieutenants. Banks was a fair Speaker in his rulings, and not a sticker over non-essentials, but in everything that seriously affected the welfare of the Republican party, he was an aggressive and tenacious partisan. The astute Thurlow Weed was even a shrewder politician than Mr. Seward himself; and Horace Greeley, adopting the maxim of Daniel O’Connell—that agitation is the life of every cause—employed his unrivaled editorial pen in the anti-slavery crusade, now fairly inaugurated throughout the Northern States. Yet with all his great advantages and skill as an organizer, Mr. Seward could not have carried the Republican party to victory, had not some of the leaders of the Democratic party, during the last five years of their ascendency at Washington, wilfully neglected their opportunities, and given to their more vigilant opponents the vantage ground in the collision of forces on the floor of Congress.
During the latter days of the Pierce administration, and the whole of that of Buchanan, measures of great national importance were defeated through the culpable negligence of a few Southern Democrats. Northern Representatives who stood by the South in defense of its constitutional rights, bitterly complained of this neglect on the part of those who were so deeply interested. These Northern men, like Mr. Kelly and Horace F. Clark, had to brave a false but growing public opinion at the North, on account of their heroic devotion to what they deemed the line of duty, especially on the great Territorial questions, over which the Union was being shaken to its foundations. They had, therefore, the right to expect corresponding earnestness on the part of all their fellow Democrats of the South. To hold to Jeffersonian, strict construction opinions was then becoming extremely unpopular at the North, and involved sacrifices that threatened to blight their political prospects. To maintain similar opinions at the South was a wholly different matter. Everybody there believed in the State-rights doctrine, and public men were carried smoothly on with the current in defending measures of administration.
Mr. Kelly observed some things which he could not but regard with pain during the Thirty-fourth and Thirty-fifth Congresses, for they were pregnant with ill-omens for the country, and to a man of his perspicacious brain they must have foreboded those disasters to the Democratic party which ere long overtook it. There was an incapacity for affairs on the part of a few Southern Representatives, and a proneness to intemperance among quite a number of otherwise excellent men from the same section. It was a bad symptom of the distempered state of the Democratic party to find many of its Representatives frequently, and inexcusably, absent from their seats when test votes were about to be taken, fraught with vital interest to the South, and decisive of great national policies. The fault was more grievous, when the absentees, as was often the case, would have been able to change the result by being present and voting. This was attributable in some measure to inexperience, and want of training for public life. Some there were who were addicted to pleasure parties, frequently went home to their families, and entertained fanciful ideas respecting the duties devolving on gentlemen in society. That they were honorable men who would not stoop to disreputable conduct, no one who knew them can for a moment doubt. Indeed their integrity bore refreshing contrast to the looser morality so often to be encountered in a later political generation. The trouble simply was that these men were impracticables, and out of place in the Halls of Congress during the stormy days of 1855-60. They talked politics in the parlor and bar-room, and neglected their duties in the House and Senate. John Randolph, in his Hudibrastic vein, scores a similar class that flourished in Virginia in 1831: “We hug our lousy cloaks around us, take another chaw of tubbacker, float the room with nastiness, or ruin the grate and fire-irons, where they happen not to be rusty, and try conclusions upon constitutional points.”[31]
But a still greater evil was intemperance. The Hole-in-the-Wall, in the House of Representatives, was the downward path to irretrievable ruin, where many a noble fellow of genius and promise drowned his faculties in rum, when his country most needed his services. While the Democrats and Republicans were in a deadly struggle on the floor of the House over questions involving the destinies of the Union, and the lives and fortunes of millions of human beings, the tipplers were in the bar-room drinking, or on the sofas of the lobby dozing in their cups. A vote is wanting to carry an imperiled measure to victory,—the inebriate is lifted into a sitting posture, dragged to the floor, and bid to vote aye, or no, provided he is there to mumble out the word. Too often he is absent, having been carried off to his lodgings in a state of drunken imbecility. John Quincy Adams[32], in his Memoirs, inveighs savagely against this melancholy vice, as the besetting sin of an earlier day; and Alexander H. Stephens, in his private letters to his brother, Judge Linton Stephens, pours out indignant lamentations over the same disgraceful spectacle at the period under review.
“One vote against us,” writes Mr. Stephens to his brother, August 23, 1856, on the loss of an important bill. “Seven more Southern men absent than Northern. If our men had stayed, we should have been triumphant to-day. On several votes we lost two to three Southern men who were too drunk to be brought in.”[33] Again, February 5, 1858, he says: “I have been more provoked at the course of Southern men on this Kansas question from the beginning than upon any other subject in my public career. I mean their culpable negligence.”[34] He informs his brother that thirteen Southern Democrats were absent March 11, 1858, when an important vote was taken, and the Republicans prevailed. “Had the thirteen been present we should have saved the question. How shamefully the South is represented! Some of the Southern men were too drunk to be got into the House. * * Have we any future but miserable petty squabbles, parties, factions, and fragments of organizations, led on by contemptible drunken demagogues?”[35]
The next day he writes again: “As usual we lost the question by the absence of two Southern votes. Luck seems to be against us. We had all our other men there to-day except those paired. Some were so drunk they had to be kept out until they were wanted to say ‘aye,’ or ‘no,’ as the case might be.”[36] Two years later, after the celebrated Charleston Democratic National Convention had broken up in a row, and the Douglas wing had adjourned to meet in Baltimore, and the Breckenridge wing in Richmond, Mr. Stephens seems to hint that drunkenness had something to do with that most fatal step the Democrats ever took. “I am sorry,” he says in a letter to Professor Johnston, “things are as they are; sorry as I should be to see the paroxyms of a dear friend in a fit of delirium tremens.”[37] Mr. Kelly, who was a delegate to the Charleston Convention, returned home mortified and sad. “The drunkenness down there,” said he to the author of this memoir, “was shameful. Men whose minds are inflamed with whiskey are not able to govern themselves, much less the country. Alas! for the poor Democratic party. The disruption means defeat, and unless the Douglas men and Anti-Douglas men come together and nominate a single ticket, the Republicans will carry the election.”
Mr. Kelly, during his two terms in Congress, witnessed the demoralizing scenes to which Mr. Stephens refers in his letters. Kelly was often amused in spite of himself when he went out to the lobby to shake up some poor inebriated gentleman, and lead him to the floor to give an important vote. The grotesqueness and difficulties of the task, and the absurd figure cut by the tipsy Solon, always excited his risibilities, although he tried to keep a straight face during the trip to and fro. His account of some of these scenes, never mentioned except among intimate friends, was rich in comic touches and facial contortions. His mimicry of the scenes was irresistible. But he, too, equally with Mr. Stephens, saw what it would all lead to, and felt that the Democratic party was in a bad way.
Another element of Democratic weakness was the over-readiness of those called Fire-eaters to appeal to the code duello, or other forms of personal rencontre. This was made by an unfriendly press to bear the appearance of a species of terrorism, and was to some extent a revival of the bullying and domineering so common among the Federalists in Congress in their treatment of Democrats during the Administration of John Adams. Writing in 1809 of “the brow-beatings and insults,” to which the Federalists subjected the Democrats in the days of the elder Adams, Mr. Jefferson says: “No person who was not a witness of the scenes of that gloomy period can form any idea of the afflicting persecutions and personal indignities we had to brook. They saved our country, however.”[38] The inexcusable assault of Preston S. Brooks on Charles Sumner in the Senate Chamber, May 22, 1856, had had its exact counterpart on the floor of the House of Representatives, February 15, 1798, when Roger Griswold, a member of Congress from Connecticut, with a stout hickory club, made a furious assault during the sitting of the House upon the celebrated Matthew Lyon, one of the Representatives from Vermont. Griswold was a Federalist, and Lyon a Democrat. But in the latter case the assault was made by Brooks, a Democrat, upon Sumner, a Republican. The Federalists condoned the offense of Griswold, and by the decisive majority of 73 to 21 refused to expel him from Congress. Even a resolution to censure him was lost.[39] The Republicans of 1856, political legatees of the Federalists of 1798, did not show the same forbearance in the case of Brooks. A resolution of expulsions received 121 affirmative, and 94 negative votes in the House, not enough to expel a member under the two-thirds rule required by the Constitution, but more than enough, remembering the palliation of Griswold’s offense, to prove that all such votes reflect the partisan prejudices rather than the impartial judgment of members.