THE UNION PIERCED; OR, PIERCE’S TURN.
1853–1857.
Reference, by Believers in the Transmigration of Souls, to Mr. Pierce
for its Proof.—His real and apparent Age.—The Slave Colossal Figure
bestrides the Presidential Harbor.—How the New President rode in
between its Legs, and cast out a curious Anchor.—An Antediluvian
Cabinet.—Still Times expected.—Sudden Freshet.—Douglas breaks the
Missouri Dike.—Bitter Waters over the Land.—Alarm among the Elderly
Gentlemen, and how quieted by J. Davis.—Alarm North and South not
quieted.—The African Outlook towards the North Pole.—The Power of
Douglas illustrated from his Scotch Namesake and Proverb.—What
Warriors rushed to our Flanders.—The Blow on the Head of Sumner and
Slavery from Brooks’s Cane.—The Dred Scott Essays.—American
Africanization.—An Exploring Party in the Interior.—Discovery of an
Extinct Race, and of Fremont.—Undiked Waters not strong enough to
float Douglas into a Nomination.—Buchanan in the Dock.—The
Know-Nothings make a neat little Present to a Polite Gentleman.
Believers in the doctrine of transmigration of souls point to Franklin
Pierce for its triumphant demonstration. Although by ordinary reckoning
but forty-nine years old when, in March, 1853, he came out of New
Hampshire to be President of the United States, he must have lived—so
they assert—somewhere through several previous existences and brought
along with him the last time the cherished notions of the first.
Certainly he was as much of an anachronism as a two-handled plough,
dragged by a yoke of oxen, contrasted with a steam one driving its hot
shares through dissolving acres, an undecked Roman trireme rowed against
an iron-breasted monitor armed with the heaviest modern gun, or an
old-fashioned scythe in comparison with a mower.
His ideas of government were scant for a good-sized town, and of slavery
so patriarchal, that a Red River planter might have taken several
lessons from him with great profit.
Slavery at that time, like the colossal statue of Apollo at Rhodes,
stood with its two feet widely apart. Its right was planted in the
commercial cities of the North, covered with a huge stocking of Northern
manufacture; its left, spread out like Sambo’s, all over the Gulf
States, was carefully enwrapped with raw cotton. Between its wide-spread
legs Mr. Pierce, like an ancient mariner, sailed into the harbor, and
cast out an anchor, forged at Baltimore, or it may be at Nineveh, with
an inscription on its best fluke, “No agitation about slavery.” It might
as well have been inscribed, “No more thinking.”
He asked several elderly gentlemen to help him have a good quiet time:
William L. Marcy, with the portfolio of State; James Guthrie, incubating
the snug little Treasury nest; Jefferson Davis, with the appropriate
red-lettered War rifle; Caleb Cushing, holding the Attorney-General’s
fool’s-cap brief; Robert McClelland, bringing an oaken inlaid table for
the Interior; and James Campbell, an old-fashioned letter-weigher.
They expected to have a good antediluvian time of it, as Mr. Clay’s
compromise carry-all had transported into the wilderness the bad-looking
lot which had broken into the peace of the gentlemanly Fillmore. Mr.
Buchanan was sent away to England, and some restless engineers somewhere
toward the Pacific,—a pleasant-sounding place far away out West,—to get
up a report on a railroad which might amuse the young people to read in
the long winter evenings.
Suddenly, however, all of these serene prospects were clouded. The great
shield, constructed by the Democratic Convention to hang in front of the
venerable President, and to prevent agitation, was found, in spite of
its solid-looking face, to be pierced on the inside by impertinent
little teredos, whose ceaseless boring had already begun to weaken its
resisting power. Other mariners wished to sail in between the
cotton-covered feet. And in January, 1854, one of these Presidential
seamen, from Illinois, named Stephen A. Douglas, leaped ashore on a
bluff point just outside the harbor, exclaiming with great lung power
that “every Territory had a right to do as it chose about slavery.” This
declaration from a Democratic friend startled the elderly party not a
little; but when that friend rose to a higher pitch and shouted that the
Missouri Compromise line of 1821 which kept slavery from all territory
north of 36° 30´, was unconstitutional, and leaping upon the solid old
dike, with bill and blow, crashed through it, letting out the bitter
waters of strife to flood with its pent-up strength all the wide land,
the antediluvian party started to their feet in great alarm. When,
however, Mr. Davis whispered to the President that this was only undoing
a modern wrong, and restoring ancient rights, that venerable gentleman
folded his arms and sat down contented.
Looking out upon the freshet, the bewildered Africans seemed to feel
that their only refuge was the north pole, now that even the wilds of
Kansas and Nebraska furnished only markets for their higher-priced
bodies. For a time the “little Douglas” appeared to look as large as the
colossus itself. He seemed to be as powerful in American politics as the
family of his Scottish namesake, which after intermarrying eleven times
with the royal stocks of England and Scotland, became so resistless as
to start the proverb, “No man may touch a Douglas, nor a Douglas man,
for if he do he is sure to come by the waur” (worse).
But the broad-wasting flood, poured out from the cleft dike, soon sent
an alarm throughout the North, and inspired terror among even the
conscientious of the South. To protect slavery—however repugnant—where
it existed in the old States was felt very universally in the North to
be a duty imposed by law, equity, and good neighborhood; but to batter
down a barrier which had been erected by both North and South, every
timber in which had been paid for by a price given and accepted, shook
nearly all consciences into sad action. Wherever the waters swept there
were land-slides from Democratic grounds. The shield against agitation
now crumbled like the stricken dike.
Kansas became another Flanders, where pikes, knives, and pistols were
carried at the plough, into private houses, through villages, and into
conventions. They were ever-present adjectives to the noun “man.” As in
the tropics, whirlwinds rush in towards the sun’s hot path, so towards
Kansas from Missouri swept advocates of slavery with bullets for the
settler and brands for his dwelling; from New England long-haired men
and short-haired women, ready all, some anxious, to be offered up for
the cause of freedom; from the Middle and Western States sharp,
bayonet-faced, earnest crusaders to rescue the threatened sacred ground
and to throw down the bronze statues and statutes. On the path of these
hot streams backward soon lay the scorched and burnt relics of slavery
in Kansas.
To slavery in the United States a moral blow was dealt by the cane of
Preston S. Brooks, aimed May 22, 1856, at the undefended head of Senator
Sumner, which had a few days before opened to express in emphatic words
its owner’s ideas about African barbarism in America. This appropriate
practical illustration of the argument was visible everywhere, and
became more potent than any books from or in behalf of the running
Brooks.
The cane given to the chivalrous Carolinian was a poor straw which did
not show the way the winds blew.
Still another blow was given by the Dred Scott opinion of a majority of
the Supreme Court, which advised the people in choice legal terms that
the dike was rightfully cut; that men with dark skins had no rights
which those with light ones need pay any attention to; and that
uncolored owners might take ebony bipeds along with their quadrupeds
into any State in any part of the Union without getting them out of an
unpaid state.
This Africanization brought out a new party,—called the Republican,—for
keeping the Territories free. Several political missionaries,
benevolently inclined towards our continent, started on trips into the
interior of America, bent, like Dr. Livingstone, on exploring regions
almost surrendered, like Africa, to the descendants of Ham. The result
was the discovery of a race, deemed almost extinct, who actually
believed that colored men might live unowned, and that Territories,
where slavery did not exist, would get along better without than with
it.
This party discovered John C. Fremont, and set him up as a candidate. Of
course some people thought that his election would fracture the Union,
which, they believed, was held together by gum-bo.
The undiked waters would not float Mr. Douglas up to a two-thirds vote
for the Presidential nomination. Mr. Buchanan, buoyed up by Southern
corks, reached the dock. The Know-Nothings took up the polite Fillmore,
and gratified him with a present of the neat but useless eight votes of
Maryland.