the times. One of the most favorable is the determination of the South
to use the powers of government to extend slavery. At this day, we
exhibit a fact worse than Christendom has elsewhere to disclose; the
fact that one sixth part of our population are mere property; not men,
but things. England has a proletary population, the lowest in Europe; we
have three million of proletaries lower than the "pauper laborers" of
England, which the whig protectionists hold up to us in terror. The
South wishes to increase the number of slaves, to spread this blot, this
blight and baneful scourge of civilization over new territory.
Hot-headed men of the South declare that, unless it is done, they will
divide the Union; famous men of the North "cave in," and verify their
own statements about "dough-faces" and "dough-souls." All this is
preaching anti-slavery to the thinking men of the North; to the sober
men of all parties, who prefer Conscience to cotton. The present session
of Congress has done much to overturn slavery. "Whom the gods destroy
they first make mad."
FOOTNOTES:
[4] Mr. Silgestroem.
[5] Annal. Lib. XIV. cap. 42, _et seq._
[6] Executive Documents: House of Representatives, No. 17, p. 3.
[7] Since the delivery of the above, Mr. Webster has introduced his
bill, providing a trial by jury for fugitive slaves. If I understand it,
Mr. Webster does not offer it as a substitute for the Judiciary Bill on
the subject, does not introduce it as an amendment to that or to any
thing else. Nay, he does not formally introduce it--only lays it before
the Senate, with the desire that it may be printed! The effect it is
designed to produce, it is very easy to see. The retainers can now
say--See! Mr. Webster himself wishes to provide a trial by jury for
fugitives! Some of the provisions of the bill are remarkable, but they
need not be dwelt on here.
[8] While this is passing through the press, I learn that several
wealthy citizens of Boston are at this moment owners of several hundreds
of slaves. I think they would lose reputation among their fellows if
they should set them free.
[9] It has since appeared that several of those persons were at the
time, and still are, holders of slaves. Their conduct need excite no
surprise.
III.
A DISCOURSE OCCASIONED BY THE DEATH OF THE LATE PRESIDENT
TAYLOR.--PREACHED AT THE MELODEON, JULY 14, 1850.
Last Sunday, on a day near the national anniversary, something was said
of the relation which the American citizen bears to the State, and of
the duties and rights which belong to that relation. Since then an event
has occurred which suggests another topic of a public nature, and so I
invite your attention to a discourse of the general position and duties
of an American ruler, and in special of the late President Taylor. It is
no pleasant task to rise to speak so often on such themes as this, but
let us see what warning or guidance we can gather from this occasion.
* * * * *
In order that a man should be competent to become a complete political
ruler and head of the American people, he ought to be distinguished
above other men in three particulars.
First, he ought to have just political ideas in advance of the people,
ideas not yet organized into institutions in the State. Then he will be
a leader in ideas.
Next, he ought to have a superior power of organizing those ideas, of
putting them into institutions in the State. Then he will be a leader in
the matter of organizing ideas.
Then he ought to have a superior power of administering the institutions
after they are made. Then he will be a leader in the matter of
administering institutions.
An eminent degree of these three qualities constitutes genius for
statesmanship, genius, too, of a very high order. A man who really and
efficiently leads in politics must possess some or all of these
qualities; without them, or any of them, he can only seem to lead. He
and the people both may think he is the leader, and call him so; but he
that shall lead others aright, must himself be on the right road and in
advance of them. To perform the functions of a leader of men, the man
must be eminently just also, true to the Everlasting Right, the Law of
God; otherwise he can never possess in the highest degree, or in a
competent degree, the power of ideas, of organization, of
administration. A man eminently just, and possessing these three
qualities is a leader by nature; if he is also put into the conventional
position of leader, then he bears the same relation to the people,
which the captain of a ship, skilful and competent, would bear to the
ship's company who were joint owners with him, and had elected him to
his office, expecting that he would serve them as captain while he held
the office of captain.
The complete and perfect leader must be able to originate just political
ideas, to organize them justly, to administer the organization with
justice. But these three powers are seldom united in the same man; so,
practically, the business of leading, and therefore of ruling, is
commonly distributed amongst many persons; not concentrated in one man's
hands. I think we have as yet had no statesman in America who has
enjoyed each and all of these three talents in an eminent degree. No man
is so rich as mankind. Any one of them is a great gift, entitling the
man to distinction; but the talent for administration is not very rare.
It is not difficult to find a man of good administrative ability with no
power to invent, none to organize the inventions of other men. How many
men can work all day with oxen yoked to a plough; how few could invent a
plough or tame wild cattle. It is not hard to find men capable of
managing political machinery, of holding the national plough and
conducting the national team, when both are in the field, and there is
the old furrow to serve as guide. That is all we commonly look for in an
American politician. He is to follow the old constitutional furrow, and
hold the old plough, and scatter a little democratic or whig seed,
furnished by his party, not forgetting to give them the handsel of the
crop. That is all we commonly look for in an American politician,
leaving it for some bright but obscure man in the mass of the people to
discover a new idea, and to devise the mode of its organization. Then
the politician, perched aloft on his high place and conspicuous, holds
the string of the kite which some unknown men have thought out, made up,
and hoisted with great labor; he appears to be the great man because he
sits and holds the string, administering the kite, and men look up and
say, "See there, what a great man he is! Is not this the foremost man of
the age?"
In this way the business of ruling the nation is made a matter of mere
routine, not of invention or construction. The ruler is to tend the
public mill; not to make it, or to mend it; not to devise new and better
mills, not even to improve the old one. We may be thankful if he does
not abuse and leave it worse than he found it. He is not to gather the
dam, only to shut the gate at the right time, and at the right time open
it; to take sufficient toll of all comers, and now and then make a
report of the grinding, or of what he sees fit to communicate to the
owners of the mill. As it is a part of the written Constitution of the
land that all money bills shall originate with the House of
Representatives, so it is a part of the unwritten custom that political
ideas in advance of the people shall not originate with the nominal
rulers of the nation, but elsewhere. One good thing results from this:
we are not much governed, but much let alone. The American form of
government has some great merits; this I esteem the greatest; that it
lets the people alone so much. In forming ourselves into a State, we
agreed with one another not to meddle and make politically with
individuals so much as other nations had done.
It is a long time since we have had a man of large genius for politics
at the head of affairs in America. I think we could not mention more
than one who had any genius for just political ideas in advance of the
people. Skilful administrators we have had in great abundance in
politics as in other matters. Nature herself seems democratic in her
action here, and all our great movements appear to be brought about by
natural power diffused amongst many men of talent, not by natural power
condensed into a single man of genius. So long as this is the case, the
present method of letting alone is the best one. The American nation has
marched on without much pioneering on the part of its official rulers,
no one of them for a long time being much in advance of the million; and
while it is so it is certainly best that the million are very much left
to themselves. But if we could have a man as much in advance of the
people in all these three qualities, and especially in the chief
quality--as the skilful projector of a cotton mill is in advance of the
girls who tend the looms, in all that relates to the projection of a
cotton mill,--then we should know what it was to have a real leader, a
ruler who could be the schoolmaster of the nation, not ruling over our
bodies by fear, but in the spirit of love, setting us lessons which we
could not have devised, nor even understand without his help; one who
preserves all the good of the old, and adds thereto much new good not
seen before, and so instructs and helps forward the people. But as the
good God has not sent such a man, and he is not to be made by men, only
found, nor in the least helped in any of those three qualities by all
the praise we can pour on him; so it comes to pass that an ordinary
ruler is a person of no very great consequence. His importance is
official and not personal, and as only the person dies, not the office,
the death of such an one is not commonly an affair of much significance.
Suppose after Mr. Tyler or Mr. Polk had taken the oath of office, he had
appointed a common clerk, a man of routine and experience, as his
factotum, with power to affix the presidential name to necessary
documents, and then had quietly and in silence departed from this life,
how much would the nation have lost? A new and just political idea; an
organization thereof? No such thing. If the public press had kept the
secret, we should not have found out their death till this time. The
obscure clerk could tend the mill as well as his famous master who would
not be missed.
Louis XIV. said, "The State! That is I." He was the State. So when the
ruler dies, the State is in peril. If the King of Prussia, the Emperor
of Russia or Austria, or the Pope of Rome were to die, there would be a
revolution, and nobody knows what would come of it; for there the ruler
is master of the people, who are subjects, not citizens, and the old
master dying, it is not easy to yoke the people to the chariot of a new
one. Here the people are the State; and though the power of General
Taylor was practically greater than that of any monarch in Europe, save
Nicholas, William, and Ferdinand, yet at his death all the power passes
into the hands of his successor, with no noise, no tumult, not even the
appearance of a street constable. I think that was a sublime sight--the
rule over twenty millions of people, jealous of their rights, silently,
by due course of law, passes into the hands of another man at dead of
night, and the next morning the nation is just as safe, just as quiet
and secure as before, no fear of change perplexing them. That was a
sublime sight--one of the fair things which comes of a democracy. Here
the ruler is servant, and the people master; so the death of a
President, like Mr. Van Buren, or any of his successors, Harrison or
Tyler or Polk, would really have been a very unimportant event; not so
momentous as the death of one of the ablest doctors in Boston, for
should the physician die, your chance of life is diminished by that
fact. If Dr. Channing had died at the age of forty, before he wrote his
best works, his death would have been a greater calamity than that of
any or all of the four Presidents just named, as soon as their inaugural
address was delivered; for Dr. Channing had some truths to tell, which
there was nobody else to deliver at that time. No President since
Jefferson, I think, has done the nation so much good as the opening of
the Erie Canal in New York, or the chief railroads in Massachusetts, or
the building up of any one of the half dozen large manufacturing towns
in New England. Mr. Cunard, in establishing his line of Atlantic
steamers, did more for America than any President for five-and-twenty
years. The discovery of the properties of sulphuric ether, the devising
of the magnetic telegraph, was of more advantage to this nation, than
the service of any President for a long time. I think I could mention a
few men in Boston, any one of whom has been of more service than four or
five Presidents; and, accordingly, the death of any one of those would
be a greater calamity than the demise of all those Presidents the day
after election. With us the President is only one spoke in the wheel,
and if that is broken we always have a spare spoke on hand, and the
wheel is so made that without stopping the mill, the new spoke drops
into the place of the old one and no one knows the change till told
thereof. If Mr. Polk had really been the ablest man in the land, a
creator and an organizer, his death would have been a public calamity,
and the whole nation would have felt it, as Boston or New York would
feel the loss of one of its ablest manufacturers or merchants, lawyers
or doctors. That would deprive us of the services of a man which could
not be supplied. We have always spare men of routine, but not spare men
of genius. Dr. Channing has been missed ever since his death, and the
churches of Boston, poor enough before, are the poorer for his absence.
So has John Quincy Adams, old as he was, been missed in the House of
Representatives. The enemy of freedom may well rejoice that his voice is
still. But who misses General Harrison or Mr. Polk? What interest
languishes in consequence of their departure? What idea, what right,
lost thereby a defender? If Sir Robert Peel were to die, the British
nation would feel the loss.
We attach a false importance to the death of a President. Great
calamities were apprehended at the death of General Harrison. But what
came? Whigs went out of office and democrats went into office. Had
Jefferson died before the Declaration of Independence, or Washington any
time after it, or before the termination of his official service, or
John Adams before the end of the war, that would have been a great
calamity; for I know not where we should have found another Jefferson,
to see so distinctly, and write down so plain the great American idea,
or another Washington to command an army without money, without
provisions, without hats and shoes, as that man did. The death of Samuel
Adams, in 1760, would have been a terrible misfortune to America. But
the death of General Harrison only made a change in the Cabinet, not in
the country; it affected the politicians more than the people.
We are surrounded in the world with nations ruled by kings, who are the
masters of the people; hard masters too! When they die the people mourn,
not always very wisely, not always sincerely, but always with ceremony.
The mourning for George IV. and William IV. in England, I doubt not, was
more splendid and imposing than that for Edward the Confessor and Oliver
Cromwell; and that for Louis XV. outdid that for Henry IV. In a
monarchy, men always officially mourn their king, whether it be King
Log, or King Snake, or King Christian; we follow the example of those
States. If some of the men, whose death would be the greatest calamity,
should die, the newspapers would not go into mourning; we should not
have a day of fasting set apart; no minister would think it "An
inscrutable providence;" only a few plain country people would come
together and take up the dust, disenchanted of the genius which gave it
power over other and animated clay, to lay it down in the ground. There
would be no Catafalques in the street; but the upper mountain-tops would
miss that early sun which kissed their foreheads, while all below the
world was wrapped in drowsy mist, and the whole race of man would be
losers by the fading out of so much poetry, or truth, or justice, love
and faith.
* * * * *
The office of President of the United States is undeniably one of great
importance. If you put in it a great man, one with ability to invent, to
organize and to administer, he has a better opportunity to serve mankind
than most kings of Europe. I know of no position in the world more
desirable for a really great man, a man with a genius for statesmanship,
a million-minded man, than to take this young, daring, hopeful nation,
so full of promise, so ready for work, and lead them forward in the way
of political righteousness, giving us ideas, persuading us to build
institutions thereof, and make the high thought of a man of genius the
common life of a mighty nation, young as yet and capable of taking any
lesson of national nobility which the most gifted man can devise; to be
the ruler, not over Russian serfs, but American freemen, citizens, not
subjects; to be the schoolmaster for twenty millions, and they such
promising pupils, loving hard lessons; and the men that set them, the
most enterprising race of persons in the world, who have already
learned something of Christianity and the idea of personal freedom,--why
that is a noble ambition. I do not wonder that a man of great powers
should covet this great position, and feel a noble dissatisfaction and
unrest until he found himself there, gravitating towards it as naturally
as the Mississippi to the ocean. Put in it such men as I point to, one
with the intellect of a Webster, the conscience of a Channing, the
philanthropy of much humbler men; let him aim at the welfare of the
nation and mankind; let him have just political ideas in advance of the
nation, and, in virtue thereof, ability to solve the terrible social and
political questions of this age; careless of his popularity and
reputation, but careful of his conscience and his character, let him
devote himself to the work of leading this people, and what an office is
that of President of the United States in the middle of the nineteenth
century! He would make this nation a society for mutual improvement
twenty millions strong; not King Log, not King Stork, but King Good-man,
King Christian if you will, he would do us a service, dignifying an
office which was itself a dignity.
But if it be so noble for such a man, working with such an aim, for such
an end; when a little man is in that office, with no ideas in advance of
the people, and incapable of understanding such as have them; with no
ability to organize the political ideas not yet organized, and applied
to life; a man of routine; not ruling for the nation, but the ruler of a
party and for a party, his ambition only to serve the party; an ordinary
man, surrounding himself with other ordinary men; with ordinary habits,
ordinary aims, ordinary means, and aiming at the ordinary ends of an
adventurer; careless of his conscience and character, but careful of his
party-popularity and temporary reputation,--why the office becomes
painful to think of; and the officer, his state is not kingly, it is
vulgar and mean, and low! So the lighthouse on the rocks of Boston
harbor, is a pleasant thing to see and to imagine, with its great lamp
looking far out to sea, and shining all night long, a star of special
providence; seen afar off, when stormy skies shut other stars from
sight, it assures the mariner of his whereabouts, guides the whaler and
the Indiaman safe into port and peace, bringing wealth to the merchant,
and a husband to the lingering wife, almost a widow in the cheating
sea's delay and her own heart-sickness from hope so long deferred. But
take away the great lamp, leaving all else; put in its place a little
tallow candle of twenty to the pound, whose thin glitter could not be
seen a mile off, spite of the burnished reflectors at its side, and
which requires constant picking and trimming to keep the flame alive,
and at its best estate flickers with every flutter of the summer
wind,--what would the lighthouse be to look upon or to imagine? What a
candlestick for what a candle! Praise it as much as you will; flatter
it in the newspapers; vote it "adequate" and the "tallest beacon in the
world;" call it the "Pharos of America;" it is all in vain; at the best,
it can only attract moths and mosquitoes on a serene night; and when the
storm thunders on that sepulchral rock, it is no light at all; and the
whaler may be split asunder, and the Indiaman go to the grave, and the
wealth of the merchant be scattered as playthings for the sea, and the
bones of the mariner may blanch the bottom of the deep, for all the aid
which that thin dazzle can furnish, spite of its lofty tower and loftier
praise!
To rule a bank, a factory, or a railroad, when the officer is chosen for
business and not charity, to command a packet-ship or a steamboat, you
will get a man of real talent in his line of work; one that has some
history, who has made his proof-shot, and shown that he has some mettle
in him. But to such a pass has the business of ruling a nation arrived,
that, of all the sovereigns of Christian Europe, it is said not more
than two, Nicholas of Russia, and Oscar of Sweden, would have been
distinguished if born in private stations. The most practical and
commercial nation in the world, possessing at this moment a power more
eminently great than that of the Roman empire in its palmy time, has for
a ruler a quite ordinary woman, who contributes neither ideas nor
organizations, and probably could not administer wisely the affairs of a
single shire in the island. In this respect, the highest stations of
political life seem to have become as barren as the Dead Sea. In
selecting our rulers in America, it is long since we have had a man of
large powers, even of the sort which the majority of men appreciate in a
contemporary. I have sometimes thought men were selected who were
thought not strong enough to hurt us much, forgetting that a weak man
may sometimes hurt us as much more than a strong one would.
* * * * *
After all this preliminary, let me now say something of the late
President Taylor, only further premising that I am here to tell the
truth about him, so far as I know it, and nothing more or less. I am not
responsible for the facts of the case, only for the correct statement
thereof. There have been men who were not disposed to do him justice;
there were men enough to flatter and overpraise him while alive, and
there will probably be enough of such now that he is dead. Much official
panegyric has there been already, and much more is in prospect. I think
I need not be called on for any contribution of that sort. I wish to
weigh him in an even balance, neither praising nor blaming without
cause. To eulogize is one thing; to deal justly, another and quite
different.
* * * * *
ZACHARY TAYLOR was born on the 24th of November, 1784, in Orange county,
Virginia. His father, Richard Taylor, was a soldier during a part of
the Revolutionary War, had a colonel's commission in 1779, and appears
to have been a valuable officer and a worthy man. In 1785 he removed to
Kentucky, where he resided until his death. He was a farmer, a man of
property and influence in Kentucky, then a new country. He was one of
the framers of the Constitution of that State; several times in the
Legislature, and the first collector of the port of Louisville, then a
port of entry.