Arriving in the world the same year with Mr. Webster, Mr. Calhoun, and each other, Lewis Cass, portly in presence as in learning, varied capacity, and many-sided culture, and Thomas H. Benton, as solid as the bullion which a dim tradition mentions as formerly found in these United States, meet us with that full-orbed spherical satisfaction which double-chinned persons are fortunate in imparting, if not of feeling themselves. The “Recollections of Thirty Years in the Senate” would, one would think, be enough to reduce any mortal to very attenuated proportions. Fortunate is the memory of any M. C. which is constructed like a mining-sieve, letting through the superabundant dirt and retaining only the loosely silted ore.
Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams, destined to be rivals for the Presidency in the fifty-seventh and again in the sixty-first years of their lives, were severally born nine years before the Declaration of Independence. Their lives were as unlike as their faces. The former passed his first score of years in the hard struggles for a livelihood, and mostly amid the scenes made memorable by the cavalry swords of Marion and Sumter and the pen of William Gilmore Sims; the latter spent his in the study of what could best round up a capable mind by discipline and learning, and in the equally advantageous culture derived from the society of his accomplished mother and experienced father. While the stormy incidents of an eventful military life in Florida and Georgia, intercalated with court-martials and official censures, scored in Jackson’s face the notches which, until his death in 1845, kept truthful tally with his warm, violent, generous, resentful, and stern history; over the round, uncreased face of Adams ran the smoothing-iron of literary tastes and pursuits, keeping down the ruffling disturbances of a naturally passionate nature, and the ridges which the excitements from 1824 to 1828, and the antislavery agitations in the latter part of his life, would have otherwise left. Jackson’s virtues deserve signal praise, and Adams’s vices emphatic censure; since the former grew up under circumstances as unfavorable to their existence as a young ladies’ seminary for modesty, or a New York sheriff’s office for integrity; and the latter amid forces as unassailing as a prayer-meeting to piety or sleep to pure thoughts.
Types of American character in many respects are the originals of the two thin-faced portraits to which we next turn,—types in their foreign birth, their obscure social belongings, and their shrewd and successful business ventures,—Stephen Girard, coming into life in 1750, at Bordeaux, France, as acid as the claret of his native city, and commanding, like it, very profitable prices by transportation to this country, a sailor’s son, and until his nineteenth year himself a sailor; and John Jacob Astor, his junior by thirteen years, offspring of a poverty-worried peasant, ushered first into a cabin at Waldorf, near Heidelberg, where black bread and small hopped beer were all that incessant labor could procure. The former lived eighty-one, the latter eighty-five years upon our planet; and by faithfully gathering up from its surface, water and land, from its ships, stores, and offices, and from its furred and unfurred animals, the gains which persistent early rising, industry, and ceaseless penny-turning accumulate, left fortunes, the first of nine, the last of twenty millions of dollars.
“Sic itur ad Astra.”
The Astral-lamp Library, obtained by funds bequeathed by a benefaction, like Girard’s College, appreciative of what its donor had himself missed, sheds its genial light on many a poor scholar’s desk. If each legacy has been somewhat diverted from its testamentary direction, perhaps the best excuse may be found in the reason why married women were not allowed to have their wills after death, because they had them so much while living.
John Marshall, to whose unmistakably pure-minded face we turn in safe admiration, was one of those types of leadership, one of those representatives of schools, who, violently liked or disliked when living, has by the touch of death been canonized among the white-robed of the nation. An incarnation, when alive, of Federalism, his ermine has become so white under the fulling of time and by contrast with robes since worn, and his grasp of the judicial balances was, as is now seen, so firm, so unimpassioned and unshaken by a nervous partisanship, that he has already passed into the very small list of judges, whose lofty character, stainless purity, large judicial capacities and force, are like solid cool rocks amid the ever-shifting scenes and temperatures of a varied landscape.
An artist’s head sits manifestly on the shoulders of John Trumbull, born in 1756, a year after John Marshall, and living eight years beyond him. At his death in 1843, he left but few as aged. His busy pencil dropped in 1775 for the musket, and, resumed in 1777, has perpetuated in fifty-seven historical pictures, with the fidelity and love of personal friendship, the portraitures of most of the leading actors in the first period of our national story. He was President of the Academy of Fine Arts, from its formation, in 1816, until it gave place, in 1825, to the Academy of Design. His dress, it will be observed, was formally and scrupulously in the mode; his address was as dressy as his wristbands and frills. Quick-eyed mothers would at once, as he took his seat, warn the children, always attracted towards clean vestments, “not to dirty the gentleman’s clothes.”
In 1761 Albert Gallatin was born. Related to Neckar, he seems to have borrowed at the same time much of the financial ability of the French minister, and the ready wit, graceful imagination, and forceful word-power of the minister’s brilliant daughter, Madame de Staël. He crammed eighty-eight years full of remarkable activities, as ambassador to Russia, France, Great Britain, and Holland, as member of Congress, and as a weighty yet captivating and vivacious writer on banks, public credit, currency, and those subjects, ever rising, like cream, on the public pans, which are skimmed by the most skilfully handled ladles.
Turning the page, we meet the thought-bearing faces of Rembrandt Peale, born in 1778, and below, that of his brother artist, Washington Allston, the American Paul Veronese, who, Peale’s junior by a year, ceased his earthly work in 1853, seven years before him. The serenity of congenial pursuits gilds their portraitures, and lingers like an aureola around their heads. Upon Allston’s face there seems spread a listening look, as if straining to catch far-off notes, mingled with that gentle hush and composure, as if stilled by that music so subtily described by Wordsworth, which
“Born of murmuring sound, had passed into his face.”