The cotton-seeds, so widely planted by Douglas, J. Davis, Brooks, Taney, A. H. Stephens, and others, during the preceding four years, now sprouted up in vigorous shoots. A Constitution, hastily shaken together by self-made delegates, mostly from Missouri, riding in foamy haste to Lecompton, was tied with a very black cord and sent to Washington, to be indorsed as a good thing for Kansas. Mr. Douglas struck it with his dike-cleaver; but Mr. J. Davis, J. M. Mason, John Slidell,—booted Knights of the African Order of the Woolly Fleece,—re-tied the severed strings and lifted it through the halls of Congress.
A Mormon Family out for a Walk.
(p. 451)
Meanwhile, the Mormons in Utah, getting up a sort of magic-lantern show of a rebellion,—outlining on the rocky walls of the Salt Lake basin, the shadowy procession of females looking defiantly at United States cannon and canons,—caused a momentary diversion from the new and growing question of a single Union.
The next year, 1858, Minnesota, first penetrated by La Salle in 1680, a year before William Penn stood, for the first time, on the future site of Philadelphia, was brought in as a State, giving us St. Paul as a northwestern Cuba for consumptives, Fort Snelling for gamblers in public lands, and the rather low Falls of Minnehaha to be raised by a Long-fellow into a lofty iridescence, whose rainbow strands have been woven into heavenly fabrics in so many delighted households, American, European, and Asiatic. On paper it is poetically higher by many feet, iambic and trochean, than Niagara, or even the Falls of the Yosemite.
The same year witnessed in Illinois the war of the giants for the vacant Senatorship. The two Anaks were the dike-breaker and one Abraham Lincoln, then forty-nine years old, whose various residences in different States, in Kentucky, his birthplace, in Indiana and Illinois, had taught him the value of the Union; and whose arm, sinewy with labor, and made more vigorous by his largely pumping heart, dealt blows which resounded sharply and broadly beyond the prairie fields which saw the encounter.
A self-made man is too common an object in America to excite or deserve special attention; and most self-made men, so called, are distressingly selfish, unsymmetrical, and one-sided,—poor jobs abandoned by all creators but themselves. Even if they did not proclaim their self-structure to all, every one would at once recognize it by its disjointed architecture. Mr. Lincoln was an exception. More strictly speaking, he was rather a growth than a creation. In his steadily increasing gentle greatness, he reminds one of those slender rills which hesitatingly creep out from some modest, unvisited nook in the Alleghanies, noiselessly finds its way many unnoticed miles, until it begins to glint between cleared farmsteads, and swells slowly into a broad stream, whose brawny shoulders turn with ease mills and factories along its beneficent course. Then gathering volume, depth, and power, it upbears barges, into which whole districts have emptied their rich cornucopias, and pleasure-boats, gay with genial tourists; while along its great triumphal sea-ward march villages, towns, and cities clap their hands with admiring joy. Mr. Douglas is the same low-born rill, which soon, however, swells into the hurrying torrent, clattering over jagged rocks, between bold, mountain-ribbed canyons, jarring the earth with its audacious plunges, shaking defiantly its foamed way through gaps and rent gashes, until it hurls its massed waters over fields which it sweeps with disastrous grandeur.
Although the popular vote in Illinois was in Mr. Lincoln’s favor, the legislative ballots were for his contestant. The new questions now illuminated newspapers, platforms, and domestic hearthstones.
Bonfires, colored lights, and pyrotechnic displays of oratory soon lit up the whole Union, and through the varied flames ever interplayed the figure of the African.
Suddenly, in the autumn of 1859, through the lurid light was thrust a gaunt, resolute, earnest-looking form, with a face calm with long excitement, over whose lines ran the savage history of Kansas murders and house-burnings, fatal shots from border rifles at well-loved sons, midnight escapes from Lecompton riders, and years of hunted violence and wrong. From the close-shut jaws,—seldom opened now except for food, for brief prayer before some new raid, or for an imprecation wrenched out by some cruel recollection,—come no sounds. Across the bridge at Harper’s Ferry, through the scared streets of that little garrisoned place, and next into the jail it stalks. Then it flits into court, calmer than the personated Justice, and then, marched between files of soldiers, to fence off a phantom invasion, it mounts the scaffold. An old man, with a grim smile stranded on the iron rim of his lips, swings in Virginia air, and—John Brown’s soul goes marching on.