"Lord save me," he breathed. "If I stay here long I'll have but one hope, to own a plantation and a home like this—"
Toombs sat on Lee's right and Douglas on his left. Mr. and Mrs. Pryor occupied the places of honor beside Mrs. Lee.
The Colonel's keen eye studied Douglas with untiring patience. To his rising star, the man who loved the Union, was drawn as by a magnet. Toombs, the Whig, belonged to his own Party, the aristocracy of brains and the inheritors of the right to leadership. He was studying Toombs with growing misgivings. He dreaded the radicalism within the heart of the Southern Whig.
His eye rested on Sam, serving the food as assistant butler in Ben's absence. In the kink of his hair, the bulge of his smiling lips, the spread of his nostrils, the whites of his rolling eyes, he saw the Slave. He saw the mystery, the brooding horror, the baffling uncertainty, the insoluble problem of such a man within a democracy of self-governing freemen. He stood bowing and smiling over his guests, in shape a man. And yet in racial development a million years behind the wit and intelligence of the two leaders at his side.
Over this dusky figure, from the dawn of American history our fathers had wrangled and compromised. More than once he had threatened to divide or destroy the Union. Reason and the compromises of great minds had saved us. In Sam he saw this grinning skeleton at his feast.
He could depend on the genius of Douglas when the supreme crisis came. He felt the quality of his mind tonight. But could Douglas control the mob impulse of the North where such appeals as Uncle Tom's Cabin had gripped the souls of millions and reason no longer ruled life?
There was the rub.
There was no question of the genius of Douglas. The question was could any leadership count if the mob, not the man, became our real ruler? The task of Douglas was to hold the fanatic of the North while he soothed the passions of the radical of the South. Henry Clay had succeeded. But Uncle Tom's Cabin had not been written in his day.
Toombs was becoming a firebrand. His eloquence was doing in the South what Mrs. Stowe's novel was doing in the North—preparing the soil for revolution—planting gunpowder under the foundations of society.
Could these forces yet be controlled or were they already beyond control?