This was the first sprouting of the carefully engrafted scion of slavery upon the stock of State rights.
Again, the Kentucky compromiser was ready with a harmonizing remedy, which scaled the tariff rates for the next ten years, and then planed them all down to the horizontal level of twenty per cent. South Carolina, lying, like Achilles, near her ships, professed to be appeased. Mr. Calhoun was saved his hempen elevation.
The year following, 1833, Horace Greeley started in New York “The Morning Post,” the first daily paper ever projected, which lived only three weeks, and wondered why it ever lived at all;
“Whose all of life, a morning ray,
Blushed into dawn then passed away.”
The Sacs, Foxes, and Winnebagoes, with tomahawks in their talons, and led by Black Hawk, swooped in hovering circles around the white chickens of Illinois; but were brought down by those practised marksmen, Generals Scott and Atkinson. The old Hawk was captured and shown through the United States in his drooping feathers. In Georgia, on the other hand, the whites were the aggressors, seeking to push the Creeks and Cherokees from their coveted possessions. The Indians fled to the Supreme Court of the United States, which bade Georgia restore the poor Naboths to their vineyards. The Ahab sovereignty of that State resisted. The President refused to interfere. The nullification by Georgia of a decree of the Supreme Court, restoring Indians to their rights, was, in the eyes of the old Indian fighter, quite a different matter from the nullification by Calhoun-led South Carolina of an act of Congress. So far from being a hair-splitter, the General could not even see whole shocks, if the poll was long, straight, and black. In 1835 arose another Seminole war in Florida, caused by an attempt on the part of the government to remove that powerful tribe, under a mock treaty, somewhere, nowhere, anywhere, so that it was west of the Mississippi, and away from present cupidity. On the public debt, now dwarfed to $291,089, this war was like an April shower. Florida had the satisfaction, for the third time in sixteen years, of increasing the obligations of the United States for, if not to, her. In this peninsular campaign, we obtained three celebrities to knob the flat surface of our history,—Generals Zachariah Taylor, Jessup, and Gaines,—gains compared with which the loss of life and lucre are not to be mentioned, except to stiffen our virtues by reproaching their suggestion.
The red tribes began sensibly to experience the truth of that sad tradition, which depicts their fate under the figure of a spirited bull, Manitou, which, chased from Cordillera to higher peak, across plain and river, ever westward, stands frequently on his reluctant retreat at bay, and tosses in vain from his frontlet the burning spears whose arrowy flames the waters of the Pacific only can quench.
After a pause of sixteen years, Arkansas, in 1836, strode, bowie-knife in belt, into the American camp. With Little Rock for its capital, it bids fair for the honor of sheltering the Pope when flung off from the Tarpeian at Rome. Its Saul-like Legarès, having been struck down by miraculous lights since 1861, we shall probably see, becoming zealous Pauls, mending apostolic nets on the Red River, and preaching to the ignorant worshippers of unknown gods, in the Athens of New England and the Corinth of New York.
At threescore and ten, Old Hickory was transplanted to the Hermitage. The merits and demerits of his administration, his political principles and his personal character, constitute still the Flanders of American parties, over which much hard swearing and fighting are still vigorously carried on. The rough-nutted tree has been well shaken by friend and foe; and its shaggy fruit we leave to be cracked, at family firesides, to season insipid pauses and to flavor uneffervescing drowsiness.
