Reference, by Believers in the Transmigration of Souls, to Mr. Pierce for its Proof.—His real and apparent Age.—The Slave Colossal Figure bestrides the Presidential Harbor.—How the New President rode in between its Legs, and cast out a curious Anchor.—An Antediluvian Cabinet.—Still Times expected.—Sudden Freshet.—Douglas breaks the Missouri Dike.—Bitter Waters over the Land.—Alarm among the Elderly Gentlemen, and how quieted by J. Davis.—Alarm North and South not quieted.—The African Outlook towards the North Pole.—The Power of Douglas illustrated from his Scotch Namesake and Proverb.—What Warriors rushed to our Flanders.—The Blow on the Head of Sumner and Slavery from Brooks’s Cane.—The Dred Scott Essays.—American Africanization.—An Exploring Party in the Interior.—Discovery of an Extinct Race, and of Fremont.—Undiked Waters not strong enough to float Douglas into a Nomination.—Buchanan in the Dock.—The Know-Nothings make a neat little Present to a Polite Gentleman.
Believers in the doctrine of transmigration of souls point to Franklin Pierce for its triumphant demonstration. Although by ordinary reckoning but forty-nine years old when, in March, 1853, he came out of New Hampshire to be President of the United States, he must have lived—so they assert—somewhere through several previous existences and brought along with him the last time the cherished notions of the first. Certainly he was as much of an anachronism as a two-handled plough, dragged by a yoke of oxen, contrasted with a steam one driving its hot shares through dissolving acres, an undecked Roman trireme rowed against an iron-breasted monitor armed with the heaviest modern gun, or an old-fashioned scythe in comparison with a mower.
His ideas of government were scant for a good-sized town, and of slavery so patriarchal, that a Red River planter might have taken several lessons from him with great profit.
Slavery at that time, like the colossal statue of Apollo at Rhodes, stood with its two feet widely apart. Its right was planted in the commercial cities of the North, covered with a huge stocking of Northern manufacture; its left, spread out like Sambo’s, all over the Gulf States, was carefully enwrapped with raw cotton. Between its wide-spread legs Mr. Pierce, like an ancient mariner, sailed into the harbor, and cast out an anchor, forged at Baltimore, or it may be at Nineveh, with an inscription on its best fluke, “No agitation about slavery.” It might as well have been inscribed, “No more thinking.”
He asked several elderly gentlemen to help him have a good quiet time: William L. Marcy, with the portfolio of State; James Guthrie, incubating the snug little Treasury nest; Jefferson Davis, with the appropriate red-lettered War rifle; Caleb Cushing, holding the Attorney-General’s fool’s-cap brief; Robert McClelland, bringing an oaken inlaid table for the Interior; and James Campbell, an old-fashioned letter-weigher.
They expected to have a good antediluvian time of it, as Mr. Clay’s compromise carry-all had transported into the wilderness the bad-looking lot which had broken into the peace of the gentlemanly Fillmore. Mr. Buchanan was sent away to England, and some restless engineers somewhere toward the Pacific,—a pleasant-sounding place far away out West,—to get up a report on a railroad which might amuse the young people to read in the long winter evenings.
Suddenly, however, all of these serene prospects were clouded. The great shield, constructed by the Democratic Convention to hang in front of the venerable President, and to prevent agitation, was found, in spite of its solid-looking face, to be pierced on the inside by impertinent little teredos, whose ceaseless boring had already begun to weaken its resisting power. Other mariners wished to sail in between the cotton-covered feet. And in January, 1854, one of these Presidential seamen, from Illinois, named Stephen A. Douglas, leaped ashore on a bluff point just outside the harbor, exclaiming with great lung power that “every Territory had a right to do as it chose about slavery.” This declaration from a Democratic friend startled the elderly party not a little; but when that friend rose to a higher pitch and shouted that the Missouri Compromise line of 1821 which kept slavery from all territory north of 36° 30´, was unconstitutional, and leaping upon the solid old dike, with bill and blow, crashed through it, letting out the bitter waters of strife to flood with its pent-up strength all the wide land, the antediluvian party started to their feet in great alarm. When, however, Mr. Davis whispered to the President that this was only undoing a modern wrong, and restoring ancient rights, that venerable gentleman folded his arms and sat down contented.
Looking out upon the freshet, the bewildered Africans seemed to feel that their only refuge was the north pole, now that even the wilds of Kansas and Nebraska furnished only markets for their higher-priced bodies. For a time the “little Douglas” appeared to look as large as the colossus itself. He seemed to be as powerful in American politics as the family of his Scottish namesake, which after intermarrying eleven times with the royal stocks of England and Scotland, became so resistless as to start the proverb, “No man may touch a Douglas, nor a Douglas man, for if he do he is sure to come by the waur” (worse).
But the broad-wasting flood, poured out from the cleft dike, soon sent an alarm throughout the North, and inspired terror among even the conscientious of the South. To protect slavery—however repugnant—where it existed in the old States was felt very universally in the North to be a duty imposed by law, equity, and good neighborhood; but to batter down a barrier which had been erected by both North and South, every timber in which had been paid for by a price given and accepted, shook nearly all consciences into sad action. Wherever the waters swept there were land-slides from Democratic grounds. The shield against agitation now crumbled like the stricken dike.
Kansas became another Flanders, where pikes, knives, and pistols were carried at the plough, into private houses, through villages, and into conventions. They were ever-present adjectives to the noun “man.” As in the tropics, whirlwinds rush in towards the sun’s hot path, so towards Kansas from Missouri swept advocates of slavery with bullets for the settler and brands for his dwelling; from New England long-haired men and short-haired women, ready all, some anxious, to be offered up for the cause of freedom; from the Middle and Western States sharp, bayonet-faced, earnest crusaders to rescue the threatened sacred ground and to throw down the bronze statues and statutes. On the path of these hot streams backward soon lay the scorched and burnt relics of slavery in Kansas.