These are all the good qualities I can make out his title to. I suppose there are some ten thousand men in Massachusetts that are his equals in all these qualities, as honest, as able, and as patriotic as he. It is hardly worth while to worship those qualities in a President which are not rare in farmers, and traders, and butchers and mechanics.
There are two things which seem to me decidedly wrong in his public career. His partisans at the North claimed that he was hostile to slavery. I never could find any reason for that opinion: at the South his friends insisted that he was the decided friend of slavery. When his opinion was asked on this matter, he remained steadily and pertinaciously silent. To me this does not seem honest or manly.
Then he was a slaveholder, not by compulsion, as some pretend they hold men in bondage, not by inheritance. He was a slaveholder from choice, and only three years ago bought one hundred and fourteen human beings and kept them as his slaves. This fact must be considered in estimating the character and value of the man. I know that Money is the popular god of America; that slaveholding is one of the canonical forms of worshipping that god, sanctioned by the Constitution and the laws and the legislature of the land, by its literature and by its churches. I know men in Boston, who would have no more scruple in buying and selling a black man as a slave, or a white man if they could catch and keep him, than they would have of buying a cow at Brighton. There are men in Massachusetts that have grown rich by the slave-trade. It does not hurt their reputation; it is no impeachment of their religious character. Now I do not expect a frontier colonel, busy in fighting Indians half his life, dogging them with Cuban bloodhounds, to be more enlightened on such a matter than merchants, manufacturers, lawyers, ministers and professors of theology in New England. It may be that he had the same opinion as Professor Stuart, that slavery was allowed in the New Testament and sanctioned in the Old Testament; such a good thing that Paul and James said never a word against it. We should not judge such a man as you would judge a Unitarian Minister in Boston or Doctors of Divinity at Andover. Born as he was, bred as he had been, living in a camp, sustained by the public opinion of the Press, the State and the Church, it would not be surprising if it had never occurred to him that it was wrong to steal men. But the fact is to be taken into the account in determining the elevation of his character.
It is now plain that he found the office of President a heavy burden; that it cost him his life. It seems to me the conduct of some of our public men towards him was ungenerous, not to say unjust and shameful. An honest man, he looked for honest foes and honest friends; but his hardest battles were fought after he had ceased to be a soldier.
Well, he has gone to his rest and his recompense. To his family the affliction is sudden, painful and terrible. What vicissitudes in their life—from the obscurity of their former home to the glaring publicity of that high station; then in so brief a time the honored and well-beloved head is silent and cold forever! The nation may well drop its tears of sympathy for those whom its election has robbed of a father and a husband; the ghastly honors of the office are poor recompense for the desolation it has brought into a quiet and once happy home.
He has gone to his reward. He leaves the government in the hands of an obscure man, whom the nation knows very little of, whom no one would ever have thought of making President; a man selected certainly for no eminence of faculty, intellectual or moral. There is some cause to fear, perhaps some little for hope.[10] Two very important questions are now before the nation: Shall we extend over the territory conquered from Mexico the awful blight which now mildews the material welfare of the South, and curses with a threefold ban the intellect, the conscience and the religion of the land? Shall Congress pass that infamous fugitive slave measure, known as Mr. Mason's bill, with Mr. Webster's indorsement on it? I know not how his death will affect these things. Who knows the intentions of the late President? or those of his successor? He has power to bless, he may use it only to curse the land. Let us wait and see. The fact that the "Great Compromiser" now represents the Administration in the Senate, the rumor of the appointment of the Senator of Boston to the highest place in the Cabinet, are things of ill omen for freedom, and bid us fear the worst. However, it may be that this event will affect the politicians more than the people.
Last Tuesday night General Taylor ceased to be mortal. His soul went home to God. He that fought against the Mexican and the Indian has gone to meet the God of the red man as well as the white. He who claimed to own the body and the soul of more than a hundred of his fellow creatures, enriched by the unrequited toil, which they unwillingly gave him when stung by the lash of his hireling overseers, has gone home to the Father of negro slaves, who is no respecter of persons; gone where the servant is free from his master. Black and white, conqueror and vanquished, the bond and the free, alike come up before the Infinite Father, whose perfect justice is perfect love; and there the question is, "What hast thou done with the talent committed unto thee?" The same question is asked of the President; the same of the slave; yea, it will one day be asked of you and me!
"An old man, wearied with the storms of State," now only asks a little earth for charity. Costly heathen pageants there will be in these streets to his memory, and politicians will, I suppose, hold their drunken and profane debauch over his grave, as over the tomb of that far-famed friend of freedom who died two years ago. But he has ceased to be mortal. The memory of his battle-fields faded from before his dying sight. Power rests no longer in his hands; victory perches on another banner. His ear is still, and his heart is cold. How hollow sounds the voice of former flattery! His riches go to other men; his slaves will be called by his name no more; the scourge that goads them to unpaid toil is now owned by another man. His fame goes back to such as gave; the accident of an accident succeeds him in the presidential chair; only the man, not the officer, goes home to God, with what of goodness and piety he had won. His manhood is all that he can carry out of the world; elected or rejected, a conqueror or conquered, it is now the same to him; and it may be the humblest female slave who only earned the bread which her master only ate, and got an enforced concubinage for pay, takes rank in heaven far before the man whom the nation honored with its highest trust, and for whom the official Senate and low-browed Church send out their hollow groans.
"The glories of our birth and State
Are shadows, not substantial things.
There is no armor against fate:
Death lays his icy hand on kings.
Sceptre and crown
Must tumble down,
And in the dust be equal made,
With the poor crooked scythe and spade.
"Some men with swords may reap the field,
And plant fresh laurels where they kill;
But their strong arms at last must yield,
They tame but one another still.
Early or late
They stoop to fate,
And must give up their murmuring breath,
When they, pale captives, creep to death.