The questions with which the President and his cabinet have had to deal, without following them in the order either of time or importance, may be classified as the Mormon question, the Financial question, the Filibuster question, and the Kansas question. All these required, for a proper adjustment of them, firmness rather than ability,—a clear perception of the principles of right, rather than abstruse policy,—and vigor of execution, rather than profound diplomatic skill. Yet we do not perceive that our government has displayed, in regard to the treatment of any of these questions, either firmness or ability. It has employed policy enough and diplomacy enough, but the policy has been incoherent and the diplomacy shallow. At the end of the first year of its rule, the most striking result of its general management is the open defection of many of its most powerful friends, and the increased earnestness and energy of all its foes.
The difficulty with the Mormons originated, before the accession of the present administration, in a hasty and improper extension of the Federal authority over a people whose customs and religious opinions were utterly incompatible with those of our own people. The inhabitants of Utah were averse from the outset to the kind of government provided for them at Washington. Having adopted a form of society more like that of Congo and Dahomey than of the United States, and having accepted too literally the prevalent dogma, that every community has the right to form its own institutions for itself,—they preferred the polygamy of barbarism to the monogamy of civilization, and the rod of the priest-prophet Brigham or the seal of Elder Pratt to the sceptre of Governor Steptoe or the sword of Colonel Johnston. Under these circumstances, the duty of the government of the United States was to relinquish its pretensions to supremacy over a nation opposed to its rule, or to maintain that supremacy, if it were necessary, with a strong and unflinching hand. Mr. Buchanan, on his own principles of popular sovereignty, as far as we can understand them, ought, logically, to have adopted the former course, but (as the interests of Slavery were not involved) he elected to pursue the latter; and he has pursued it with an impotence which has cost the nation already many millions of dollars, and which has involved the "army of Utah" in inextricable embarrassments, allowing them to be shut up in the snows of the mountains before they could strike a blow or reach the first object of their expedition. Not very well appointed in the beginning, this little force was despatched to the Plains when it was too late in the season; a part of it was needlessly delayed in assisting to choke down freedom in Kansas; and when it attained the hills which guard the passages to the valley of the Salt Lake, it found the canons obstructed by snow, and the roads impassable. The supplies required for its subsistence were scattered in useless profusion from Leavenworth to Fort Laramie, and assistance and action were alike hopeless until the arrival of the spring.[A]
[Footnote: A: More recently the energy and wisdom of Col. Johnston have repaired some of the mischief produced by the dilatoriness of his superiors.]
The same feebleness, which left the poor soldier to perish in the desert, has brought an overflowing treasury nearly to default. Mr. Buchanan, in his Message, discussed the existing financial crisis with much sounding phrase and very decided emphasis. He rebuked the action of the banks, which had presumed to issue notes to the amount of more than three times that of their specie, in a tone of lofty and indignant virtue. He commended them to the strictest vigilance and to the exemplary discipline of the State legislatures, while descanting at large upon the safety, the economy, the beauty, and the glory of a sound hard-money currency. When he entered upon his office, he found the Treasury replete with eagles and dimes; it was so flush, that, in the joy of his heart, he ordered the debts of the United States to be redeemed at a premium of sixteen per cent.; and he and his followers were disposed to jubilate over the singular spectacle, that, while all other institutions were failing, the Treasury of the United States was firm and resplendent in its large possession of gold. It was deemed a rare wisdom and success, indeed, which could utter a note of triumph in the midst of so universal a cry of despair; it was deemed a rare piece of liberality, that the government should come to the aid of society in an hour of such dark distress. The stocks of the United States, which had been originally sold at a small advance, were bought back on a very large advance; the usurers and the stock-jobbers received sixteen per cent. for what they had bought at a premium of but two or three per cent.; and an unparalleled glory shone around the easy vomitories of the Treasury. The foresight and the sagacity of the proceeding were marvellous! In less than a quarter by the moon, the coffers of the government were empty,—the very clerks in its employ went about the streets borrowing money to pay their board-bills,—and the grand-master of the vaults, Mr. Cobb, counting his fingers in despair over the vacant prospect, was compelled, in the extremity of his distress, to fill his limp sacks with paper. Of the nineteen millions of gold which in September distended the public purse, little or nothing remained in December, while in its place were paper bills,—founded, not upon a basis of one-third specie, but upon a basis of—We promise to pay! It was a sad application of the high-sounding doctrines of the Message,—a dreadful descent for a pure hard-money government,—and a lamentable conversion of the pompous swagger of October into the shivering collapse of January!
It may be said, that, by this pre-purchase of its own stocks, running at an interest of six per cent., the government has saved the amount of interest which would else have accrued between the time of the purchase and the time of ultimate redemption. And this is true to some extent,—and it would show an admirable economy, if the Treasury had had no other use for its money. A government, like an individual, having a large balance of superfluous cash on hand, can do no better with it than to pay off its debts; but to do this, when there was every prospect of a Mormon war to raise the expenditure, little prospect of retrenchment in any branch of service, and a daily diminishing revenue at all points,—it was purely a piece of folly, a want of ordinary forecast, to get rid of the cash in hand. Mr. Buchanan and Mr. Cobb were guilty of this folly, and, for the sake of the poor éclat of coming to the relief of the money-market, (which was no great relief, after all,) they sacrificed the hard-money pretensions of the government, and sunk its character to the level of that of the needy "kiteflier" in Wall Street. Their true course, in the existing condition and aspect of affairs, was to retain their capital, and to institute a most rigid economy, a most searching reduction, in every branch of the public service. We have, however, yet to learn whether any such economy and reduction have been effected.
All this was simply weakness; but in turning from the conduct of the Finances by the administration, to consider its management of Filibusterism, we pass from the consideration of acts of mere debility to the consideration of acts which have a color of duplicity in them. On the Filibusters, as on the Finances, the First Annual Message of the President was outspoken and forcible. It characterized the past and proposed doings of William Walker and his crew, as the common sense and common conscience of the world had already characterised them, as nothing short of piracy and murder. Recognizing the obligations of fraternity and peace as the rule of right in international relations, it pledged the utmost vigilance and energy of the Federal powers against every semblance of freebootery. In pursuance of this promise, orders were issued to the various civil and naval authorities, (orders not very clear, it is true, but clear enough to bear but one meaning in honest and simple minds,) to the effect that they should maintain a sharp watch, and execute a summary arrest of every person suspected of or discovered in unlawful enterprises. The authorities on land, to whom it was easy to hold secret communication with Washington, were found to have very blind eyes and very slippery hands. General Walker and his confederates were taken at New Orleans, but they passed through the courts far more rapidly than goods are apt to pass through the custom-houses. Under a merely nominal recognizance, he sailed away with flying colors, and amid the plaudits of an admiring crowd, among whom, it is to be presumed, the authorities took care to be only not too conspicuous.
But the authorities on the sea, who could not so readily get a cue from Wellington, with the directness, in construing orders, which is the habit of the military mind, took their instructions at the word. Commanded to intercept all marauders and pirates, they kept a look-out for Walker. He eluded the guns of Captain Chatard, but Commodore Paulding seized him in the very act of invading a friendly soil. Hoisting him on board of a war-ship, he returned him in pressing haste to the President. Commodore Paulding, who had read the Message, and read the instructions of Secretary Cass, doubtless supposed that black meant black, and white, white. Perhaps, also, in the unsophisticated pride with which he contemplated the promptitude and decision of his action, in saving an innocent people from a sanguinary ruffian, and in maintaining the honor of his country unsullied, dim visions crossed his mind of a letter of thanks from the President, and of the vote of a sword by Congress. Alas for such hopes! Commodore Paulding was clearly not a politician; he did not know that black meant white and white meant black,—nor that the present of a filibuster, which he sent to the President, was the present of something worse than an elephant. It was the present of a herd of elephants,—of a sea of troubles. Mr. Buchanan's fine denunciations of freebooters had only been fine words for the public ear; secretly he cherished a penchant for freebooters, or rather for the friends of freebooters; and, under those circumstances, to be presented, by his own agent, with the very chief of the freebooters, as a criminal and a scamp, was the most unheard-of simplicity of understanding, and the most astounding literalness of obedience, in any subordinate. What to do was the question. He had menaced Chatard with a cashiering for allowing Walker to escape; and here was Paulding, who did not allow him to escape,—so he menaced Paulding likewise; and by way of capping the climax of absurdities, he set Walker himself at large, to go about the country clamoring to be sent back, at the expense of the government, to the scenes of his late innocent occupations and virtuous designs, whence he had been ruthlessly torn by an over-officious sailor.
The history of the farce is both argument and comment. Walker was either a citizen of the United States, levying war upon a friendly foreign state, and as such amenable to the penalties of our neutrality laws,—or he was a citizen of Nicaragua, as he pretended to be, abusing our protection to organize warlike enterprises against his fellow-citizens, and as such also amenable to our neutrality laws. In either capacity, and however taken, he should have been severely dealt with by the President. But, unfortunately, Mr. Buchanan, not left to his own instincts of right, is surrounded by assistants who have other than great public motives for their conduct. Walker's schemes were not individual schemes, were not simple projects of piracy and plunder, got up on his own responsibility and for his own ends. Connected with important collateral issues, they received the sympathy and support of others more potent than himself. He was, in a word, the instrument of the propagandist slave-holders, the fear of whom is ever before a President's eyes. As the old barbarian Arbogastes used to say to the later Roman emperors, whom he helped to elevate, "The power which made you is the power which can break you," so these modern masters of the throne dictate and guide its policy. Mr. Buchanan was their man as much as Walker was, and, however grand his speeches before the public, he must do their bidding when things came to the trial.
But this allusion brings us, by an obvious transition, to the last and most important question submitted to the administration,—the question of Kansas,—in the management of which, we think, it will be found that all the before-noted deficiencies of the government have been combined with a criminal disregard of settled principles and almost universal convictions. In reference to Kansas, as in reference to the other topics, the President began with fair and seductive promises. He did not, it is true, either in his Message or anywhere else, that we know of, narrate the actual history of the long contest which has divided that Territory, but he did hold up for the future the brightest hopes of an honest and equitable adjustment of all the past difficulties. He selected and commissioned Robert J. Walker, as Governor, for the express purpose of "pacifying Kansas." Pretending to overlook the past causes of trouble, he announced that everything would now be set right by new elections, in which the whole people should have full opportunity of declaring their will. Mr. Walker went to Kansas with a full determination to carry out this amiable promise of the President. Both he and his secretary, Mr. Stanton, labored strenuously to convince the people of the Territory of his honest purposes, and, by dint of persuasions, pledges, assurances, and oaths, at length succeeded in procuring a pretty general exercise of the franchise. The result was a signal overthrow of the minority which had so long ruled by fraud and violence; and the sincerity of the President is tested by the fact, avouched by both Walker and Stanton, that, from the moment of the success of the Free-State party, he was wroth towards his servants. Stanton was removed and Walker compelled to resign, though their only offence was a laborious prosecution of the President's own policy. Ever since then, he has strained every nerve, and at this moment is straining every nerve, to defeat the well-known legally demonstrated wish of the majority. In the face of his own plighted word, and of the emphatic assurances of his agents, sanctioned by himself, he insists upon imposing on them officers whom they detest and an instrument of government which they spurn. These people of Kansas,—who were to be "pacified,"—to be conciliated,—to be guarantied a just administration,—are denounced in the most virulent and abusive terms as refractory, and are threatened with the coercion of a military force, because they are unwilling to submit to outrage!
The excuse offered by the President for this perfidious course is the Lecompton Constitution, which he professes to consider a legal instrument, framed by a legal Convention, and approved by a legal election of the people,—and which is therefore not to be set aside except by the same sovereign power by which it was created. It would be a good excuse, if it were not a transparent and monstrous quibble from beginning to end. The Lecompton Constitution has no one element of legality in it; from the Whereas, to the signatures, it is an imposture;—for neither had the Legislature, that called the Convention in which it was made, lawful authority to do so,—nor was that Convention lawfully constituted,—nor was the alleged adoption of it by the people more than a trick.