To slavery in the United States a moral blow was dealt by the cane of Preston S. Brooks, aimed May 22, 1856, at the undefended head of Senator Sumner, which had a few days before opened to express in emphatic words its owner’s ideas about African barbarism in America. This appropriate practical illustration of the argument was visible everywhere, and became more potent than any books from or in behalf of the running Brooks.
The cane given to the chivalrous Carolinian was a poor straw which did not show the way the winds blew.
Still another blow was given by the Dred Scott opinion of a majority of the Supreme Court, which advised the people in choice legal terms that the dike was rightfully cut; that men with dark skins had no rights which those with light ones need pay any attention to; and that uncolored owners might take ebony bipeds along with their quadrupeds into any State in any part of the Union without getting them out of an unpaid state.
This Africanization brought out a new party,—called the Republican,—for keeping the Territories free. Several political missionaries, benevolently inclined towards our continent, started on trips into the interior of America, bent, like Dr. Livingstone, on exploring regions almost surrendered, like Africa, to the descendants of Ham. The result was the discovery of a race, deemed almost extinct, who actually believed that colored men might live unowned, and that Territories, where slavery did not exist, would get along better without than with it.
This party discovered John C. Fremont, and set him up as a candidate. Of course some people thought that his election would fracture the Union, which, they believed, was held together by gum-bo.
The undiked waters would not float Mr. Douglas up to a two-thirds vote for the Presidential nomination. Mr. Buchanan, buoyed up by Southern corks, reached the dock. The Know-Nothings took up the polite Fillmore, and gratified him with a present of the neat but useless eight votes of Maryland.
CHAPTER XVII.
COTTON-SEEDS SPROUT; OR, BUCHANAN’S ADMINISTRATION.
1857–1861.
The new Missionary Party and its Growth.—Character of Mr. Buchanan, and his Want of Same.—Description of curious Drawers in his Cabinet.—The Uses of Isaac Toucey.—The Lecompton Constitution, and how it fell together.—African Order of the Woolly Fleece.—The Mormon Magic-Lantern, and its Shows.—What Minnesota brought into the Union; and how a Long-fellow raised a Fall.—The War of the Illinois Giants.—Abraham Lincoln described.—Self-made Men; their Self-ishness and Unsymmetrical Characters.—Mr. Lincoln’s Growth and Character illustrated.—Mr. Douglas delineated.—Presidential Bonfires, Tar-Barrels, and Oratory.—A Spectre in Virginia; his Body swinging, his Soul marching on.—A live Coal on the Southern Heart.—What the Democratic Convention was asked to solve, and what it re-solved. Heads I win, Tails I don’t lose.—Breckenridge as a rare Prize-Taker.—The Missionary Party makes a Nomination.—New Lights and Shadows.—An original Recipe for threatened Political Apoplexy.—A sudden Convention in South Carolina.—Its mysterious Origin and Dark Ways.—A Chaotic Message.—Of different Secession Ordinances; and Want of Federal Ordnance.—Political Strikers described.—General Cass and a Broken Heart.—John B. Floyd skedaddles, chased by an Indictment.—General Anderson.—Fort Sumter breaks the Cabinet.—The Confederate Government and Flag made.—Their Composition.—History and Character of J. Davis.—Where Mr. Buchanan went March 4, 1861.
The votes for Fremont were 1,341,264, against 1,838,169 for James Buchanan, and showed how successful the missionaries had been, and the rapid growth of the tribe recently discovered and distinctly un-extinct.
Unlike his predecessor, Mr. Buchanan was not so much the representative of a past age, as the gristled type of unboned nothings. He was unorganized chaos, without any personal will to bring it into useful form, swinging through a blind menstruum of thin party air, lit up only by small fire-flies, that left a deeper darkness behind their quickly quenched and shifting sparks. His Cabinet was of course a bureau with no two drawers alike. Its principal one, Lewis Cass, was of rosewood, well seasoned, beautifully grained and polished. The money-drawer, Mr. Cobb, was of bird’s-eye maple, with eyes enough in it to see all ways. Lower down was one of lignum vitæ, hard and tough, John B. Floyd, with a knot-hole in the rear part by which access was had to the drawer above, full of metallic corn shelled off the Treasury cob. Below this was one of soft pine, full of treacherous, punky spots, Jacob Thompson, of and from the Interior. And still lower, Isaac Toucey, brought on from Hartford, Connecticut, looking like a Dismal Swamp cedar, quite unfit for navy purposes, or in fact for aught but the flanges of a dredging-machine, working up stagnant fever-and-ague channels.