Josiah Quincy was no seeker of office; from first to last he and it were drawn together by the mutual attraction of need and fitness, and it clung to him as most men cling to it. The people often make blunders in their choice; they are apt to mistake presence of speech for presence of mind; they love so to help a man rise from the ranks, that they will spoil a good demagogue to make a bad general; a great many faults may be laid at their door, but they are not fairly to be charged with fickleness. They are constant to whoever is constant to his real self, to the best manhood that is in him, and not to the mere selfishness, the antica lupa so cunning to hide herself in the sheep's fleece even from ourselves. It is true, the contemporary world is apt to be the gull of brilliant parts, and the maker of a lucky poem or picture or statue, the winner of a lucky battle, gets perhaps more than is due to the solid result of his triumph. It is time that fit honor should be paid also to him who shows a genius for public usefulness, for the achievement of character, who shapes his life to a certain classic proportion, and comes off conqueror on those inward fields where something more than mere talent is demanded for victory. The memory of such men should be cherished as the most precious inheritance which one generation can bequeath to the next. However it might be with popular favor, public respect followed Mr. Quincy unwaveringly for seventy years, and it was because he had never forfeited his own. In this, it appears to us, lies the lesson of his life, and his claim upon our grateful recollection. It is this which makes him an example, while the careers of so many of our prominent men are only useful for warning. As regards history, his greatness was narrowly provincial; but if the measure of deeds be the spirit in which they are done, that fidelity to instant duty, which, according to Herbert, makes an action fine, then his length of years should be very precious to us for its lesson. Talleyrand, whose life may be compared with his for the strange vicissitude which it witnessed, carried with him out of the world the respect of no man, least of all his own; and how many of our own public men have we seen whose old age but accumulated a disregard which they would gladly have exchanged for oblivion! In Quincy the public fidelity was loyal to the private, and the withdrawal of his old age was into a sanctuary,—a diminution of publicity with addition of influence.
"Conclude we, then, felicity consists
Not in exterior fortunes....
Sacred felicity doth ne'er extend
Beyond itself....
The swelling of an outward fortune can
Create a prosperous, not a happy man."
THE CONSPIRACY AT WASHINGTON.
The people of the United States now have the mortification of standing before the world in the attitude of a swindled democracy. Their collective will is crossed by the will of one individual, whose only title to such autocracy is in the fact that he has cheated and betrayed those who elected him. There might be some little compensation for this outrage, if the man himself possessed any of those commanding qualities of mind and disposition which ordinarily distinguish usurpers; but it is the peculiarity of Mr. Johnson that the indignation excited by his claims is only equalled by the contempt excited by his character. He is despised even by those he benefits, and his nominal supporters feel ashamed of the trickster and apostate, while condescending to reap the advantages of his faithlessness. No party in the South or in the North thinks of selecting him as its candidate, for the vices and weaknesses which make an excellent accomplice and tool are not those which any party would consider desirable in a leader. Whatever office-seekers, partisans, traitors, and public enemies may find in Mr. Johnson, it is certain that they find in him nothing to respect. He is cursed with that form of moral disease which sometimes renders a man ridiculous, sometimes infamous, but which never renders him respectable,—namely, vanity of will. Other men may be vain of their talents and accomplishments, but he is vain of the personal pronoun itself, utterly regardless of what it covers and includes. Reason, conscience, understanding, have no impersonality to him. When he uses the words, he uses them as synonymes of his determinations, or as decorative terms into which it pleases him to translate the rough vernacular of his wilfulness and caprices. The "Constitution," also, a word constantly profaned by his lips, is not so much, as he uses it, the Constitution of the United States as the moral and mental constitution of Andrew Johnson, which, in his view, is the one primary fact to which all other facts must be subordinate. His gross inconsistencies of opinion and policy, his shameless betrayal of his party, his incapacity to hold himself to his word, his hatred of a cause the moment its defenders cease to flatter him, his habit of administering laws he has vetoed, on the principle that they do not mean what he vetoed them for meaning, his delight in little tricks of low cunning,—in short, all the immoral and unreasonable acts of his administration have their central source in a passionate sense of self-importance, inflaming a mind of extremely limited capacity.
Such a person, whose mere presence in the executive chair of a constitutional country is itself "a high crime and misdemeanor," is of course the natural prey of demagogues, and he now appears to be surrounded by demagogues of the most desperate class. His advisers are conspirators, and they have so wrought on his vulgar and malignant nature that the question of his impeachment has now come to be merged in the more momentous question whether he will submit to be impeached. Constitutionally, there is no limit to the power of Congress in this respect but that which Congress may itself impose. The power is plain, and there can be no revision of the judgment of the Senate by any other power in the government. But Mr. Johnson thinks, or says he thinks, that Congress itself, as at present constituted, is unconstitutional. He believes, or says he believes, that the defeated Rebel States whose representatives Congress now excludes are as much States in the Union, and as much entitled to representation, as New York or Ohio. As he specially represents the defeated Rebel States, it is hardly to be supposed that he will consent to be punished for crimes committed in their behalf by a Congress from which their representatives are excluded; and it is also to be presumed that the measures he is now taking to obstruct the operation of the laws of Congress relating to reconstruction are but preliminary to a design to resist Congress itself.
The madness of such a scheme leads judicious people to disbelieve in its possibility; but in respect to Mr. Johnson it has been found that the only way to prevent the occurrence of mischief is to diffuse extensively among the people the suspicion that it is meditated. Judicious and dispassionate persons are often poor judges of what men of fierce passions and distempered minds will do; for they unconsciously attribute to such men some of their own ideas of honesty, propriety, and regard for the public welfare. The legislators whom Louis Napoleon outwitted were overthrown, because, bad as their opinion of him was, it was not so bad as events proved it ought to have been. In the case of Mr. Johnson, there is not the same excuse for misconception, since his cunning is utterly divorced from sagacity, and he has not the intelligence to conceal what his impulses prompt him to attempt. The kind of man he is would seem to be obvious to the most superficial observer; the natural inference is, therefore, that he will act after his kind; but this is an inference which dispassionate statesmen have hesitated fully to draw. They have been continually surprised at acts which they should have foreseen. They were surprised that, during the months he was left to his own devices and to the counsels of Southern politicians, he matured his policy of reconstruction. They were surprised that he would not abandon his policy rather than break with the Republican party. They were surprised when they learned that he meditated a coup d'état on the assembling of the Fortieth Congress. They were surprised when they found that no law could be made which would bind him according to its intent. They were surprised when, as soon as Congress adjourned, he began to take measures which can have no other intelligible purpose than that of making him master of Congress when it reassembles. And to crown all, though it has been apparent since February, 1866, that he was the enemy of the country, they have still had technical reasons for retaining him as the proper executive of its laws.
It would then seem that, in dealing with such a man as Andrew Johnson, it is the part of wisdom to suspect the worst. Without any special knowledge of the treasonable intrigue now going on in Washington, it is still possible to fathom the President's designs, and to understand the resources on which he relies. In the first place, his conceit makes him believe that he is the first man in the nation, and that he is not only adored at the South, but popular at the North. The slightest sign of reaction in Northern and Western elections he considers a testimony to his individual merit, and an indorsement of his policy. In case he refuses to recognize the present Congress, turns its members by military power out of their seats, and appeals for support to the white population of the Rebel as well as Loyal States, he will count on being sustained by the nation. The Democratic party agrees with him as far as regards the constitutionality of the laws which he will, in the name of the Constitution, be compelled to disregard in order to get possession of the military power of the country; and he thinks that party will support him in resuming those functions as commander-in-chief of which he has been deprived by a "usurping" Congress. The army and navy, with all Republican officers removed, including, of course, General Grant and Admiral Farragut, he thinks will obey his orders. The South, he supposes, will rally round him to a man. The thoroughly Rebel military organization in Maryland, controlled by a Governor after his own heart, will interpose obstacles to the passage of troops from the Northern States to Washington. The Democrats in those States will do all they can to prevent troops from being sent. Before there could be any efficient military organization in the Loyal States brought to bear on his dictatorship, he expects to have a Congress of "the whole nation" around him, of which at least a majority will be defeated Rebels and Copperheads. The whole thing is to be done in the name of the Constitution; and the Proclamation he has issued to all officers of the United States, civil and military, telling them to obey the Constitution (i. e. Mr. Johnson), may be considered the first step in the development of the scheme.
It is needless to say that such a scheme could only find hospitable reception in the head of a spiteful, inflated, and unprincipled egotist, for such an egotist Mr. Johnson assuredly is. It is needless to say that it would break down through the refusal of General Grant to give up his command, and through the refusal of the great body of the army to obey the President; for the danger is not so much the success of the attempt as the convulsion which, the mere attempt would occasion. That the danger is a serious one, provided the October and November elections show a considerable Republican loss, is evident from a consideration of the President's position. He has already gone far enough in his course to exasperate Congress, and unite its Republican members, conservative and radical, in favor of his impeachment. Without going over the long list of delinquencies and usurpations which would justify that measure, it is sufficient to name the recent Proclamation of Amnesty as an act which promises to secure it. That Proclamation is a plain violation of the Constitution as the Constitution is understood by Congress; and it is upon the Congressional interpretation of the Constitution that, in the matter of impeachment, the President must stand or fall. Congress, by giving the power of granting amnesty to Mr. Lincoln, evidently conceived that it was not a power given to him by the Constitution; by taking it away from Mr. Johnson, it as evidently conceived that it could not be exercised by him except by usurpation. In usurping this power, Mr. Johnson must have known that his act belonged, in the opinion of Congress, to the class of "high crimes and misdemeanors," for the commission of which the Constitution expressly provides that Presidents may be impeached; and he must also have known that Congress, in judging of his infractions of the Constitution, would be bound neither by his individual opinion of his constitutional powers nor by the opinion of the Supreme Court, but was at perfect liberty to act on its own interpretation of his constitutional duty. It is not therefore to be supposed that he intended to limit his defiance of Congress to the mere issuing of the Amnesty Proclamation, especially as the principle on which that Proclamation was issued would cover his refusal to carry out the whole Congressional plan of reconstruction. His conviction or assertion that Congress has no right to withhold from him the power to pardon defeated rebels and public enemies by the wholesale, is certainly not greater or more emphatic than his conviction or assertion that, in its plan of reconstruction, Congress has granted to subordinates powers which constitutionally belong to him. If he can exalt his will over Congress in the one case, there is no reason why he should not do it in the other.