OUR NEWER NATIONAL ALBUM.
The Second Generation of our Great Men nearer in Time but not in
Affection.—Several sufficient Reasons therefor.—Ingenious Biographers
confusing our Verdicts over old Offenders.—A Latin Quotation to prove
an Original Remark.—Why we should not stick to old Opinions.—Sketches
of Clay, Calhoun, and Webster.—Parallels do not always run at equal
Distances.—Three Fates.—Original Anecdote of Webster.—Of Lewis Cass
and Thomas H. Benton.—Why double-chinned Persons are satisfactory.—The
Plutocrats Girard and Astor; how they made Fortunes, and how
much.—John Marshall as a Judge, and John Trumbull as a Painter.—Albert
Gallatin skims American Cream.—Rembrandt Peale and Washington Allston
described.—Why Felix Grundy, S. S. Prentiss, J. J. Crittenden, Samuel
Houston, D. D. Tompkins, and Others, were like Shoots grafted upon
hardy Native Stocks.—The Senate illuminated by J. M. Berrien, S. L.
Southard, W. C. Preston, etc., Legaré, and Butler.—A full-length
Portrait of Winfield Scott.—Irving delineated.—Drake, Halleck, and
Paulding.—Fenimore Cooper descanted upon.—Science illustrated by
Silliman, Hare, and Rush.—Descriptions of Prescott, Mrs. Sedgwick,
Greenough, and Hawthorne.—How well the Second Set persuaded the
Eighteenth Century over into the Nineteenth.
Between the death of Washington and the middle of the nineteenth century
grew up a second and numerous generation of great men. Although nearer
to us in time, they are not so near to our affections as the elder set.
Most of this younger race some of us have seen; and they have thus lost
a certain historic grandeur and magnified proportion, always lent by
hazy distance to far-off objects. Most of them have been the subjects of
newspaper attack, of conversational controversy, of party assault and
defence equally damaging, and so have become doubtfully, perhaps
disagreeably, familiar. Many of them have been brought into the
jurisdiction of our partisan praises and censures for offences against
our political principles or passing tastes. Some have been despatched
thence with Arizona justice, others by New York equity. Now we have
reluctantly dismissed some with Scotch verdicts of “not proven,” with
lurking suspicions more injurious than a positive Saxon condemnation of
“guilty”; and anon, we have banished others to the penal settlements of
our criminal domain.
Ingenious biographers, taking up characters hitherto surrendered to the
public executioner, asking for reviews of judgments alleged to be hasty,
and setting forth, in an attractive way, features which even criminals
share with the unindicted and facts unstained, perhaps, with the one
great crime which slew their reputations, have recently argued for new
trials with a convincing sophistry that few can resist after dinner, and
which captivates by its audacious novelty. All of us have discovered
what Tacitus long ago so tersely expressed,—our readiness to listen to
scandal, and our proneness to praise ourselves for our leniency to the
maligned:—
“Livor et obtrectatio pronis auribus accipiuntur; quippe adulationi
fœdum crimen servitutis, malignitati falsa species libertatis inest.”
If the puzzled are generally unsafe, the censorious are usually unfair
judges.
Members of the same family, too, are among each other as likely to do
injustice to a fellow-member by their jealous criticisms, as they are
apt before strangers to make themselves and their fellows ridiculous by
undiscriminating praise.
Over many mounds in our national cemetery the time-stains are growing
very dark and the moss thick and undisturbed. As we wander among these
with lips less pressed and stern, with perhaps a feeling of repenting
forgiveness, slow though it be, towards those from whom politically or
otherwise we have differed, and with occasional touches of tenderness,
reluctant though at first they may come, for those who nobly erred, if
err they did, straining for the right but missing it from the dimness of
the light which they carried, let us be sure that in strolling often
amid these head-stones, we shall thereby and thereafter be better
prepared, by turning out our lower selves, to turn over profitably and
pleasantly the pages of our newer National Album which holds a few of
their portraits. If on its first leaves we are confronted by the faces
of those whose lineaments—like Clay’s, Calhoun’s, Webster’s, Grundy’s,
Van Buren’s, Quincy Adams’s, Jackson’s, and others—are associated with
watch-words that touch party animosities that were born in us we know
not how or when, and survive we know not why, we can, at least, learn to
be justly proud of what has floated out from the drift-wood and dirty
foam of ephemeral politics, which now no longer conceal their sturdy and
solid timber growths.
CLAY, CALHOUN, and WEBSTER! How much good ink was thrown uselessly away
in bespattering them with blame or praise for the half-century during
which they actively and industriously braided the public history of
America through their triple biographies. Of this triumvirate, Mr. Clay
was born in 1777, the two others five years later; Mr. Calhoun received
the baptism of death in 1850, two years before his life-long
competitors. They were the three American Fates, holding the distaff,
the thread, and the shears of its history and administration. Utterly
dissimilar in the place and circumstances of their births, educations,
trainings, cultures, and courses, they yet supplied for each other the
only parallels over that wide tract of time through which their
prolonged lives reached.
In the House and in the Senate, sometimes on the same side, but oftener
congenially opposed, yet ever divided from each other by rival
ambitions, they ennobled the scenes in which they spent such large
forces. The American Titans, they tossed heavy bars of logic with such
ease, wrestled with such matching-power and balanced success, that we,
growing up to the gigantic spectacles, almost lose the consciousness of
the unwonted masteries that have so grandly played before us. And yet,
somehow, for all this, comparatively little love gathers in our hearts
as we look at those well-remembered faces; the large, continental visage
of Henry Clay, mapping a hemisphere of vast thoughts and generous though
partisan currents of action; the lofty sternness of John C. Calhoun,
cast in a Cato-like mould, heroic and defiant; and the square-blocked,
cubical, almost repulsive mass, outlined into the head of Daniel
Webster, which looks, or rather is looked at, as if it had for several
centuries capped the pyramid of Cheops, and had been finally taken down
with state ceremonies and transplanted by the Pasha to America, as a
testimony of his conception of our large exceptional growth.
[Illustration:
THE INTELLIGENT JURY.
(p. 468)
]
Sadder than a professed comedy or a prepared funeral oration over a rich
but bad man is the unsatisfied ambition of such tough athletes in the
political arena, who, after a long life of great rough play, break up
into common earth, and form the subjects for Commencement day or prize
compositions in an open grove, where young ladies in white, bound in
blue-belting-ribbons, summon their uneasy ghosts before the dull-eyed
umpires. From what a cold well-depth sprang to the curb of Webster’s
lips those soliloquizing words which, a few days before his death,
overflowed from a disappointed life. Sitting in an open doorway at
Marshfield, propped up by pillows, he looked out upon his favorite herd
of cattle, which were driven up for the last inspection of their
attached owner. As the fine animals passed and turned their large eyes
upon him,—some pausing and looking a fond recollection into his scarcely
wasted face,—he ejaculated, as his thoughts turned backward over the
slights of party and the disappointments of an unsatisfied life: “I love
the honest faces of animals. _They_ look what they mean.”
Arriving in the world the same year with Mr. Webster, Mr. Calhoun, and
each other, LEWIS CASS, portly in presence as in learning, varied
capacity, and many-sided culture, and THOMAS H. BENTON, as solid as the
bullion which a dim tradition mentions as formerly found in these United
States, meet us with that full-orbed spherical satisfaction which
double-chinned persons are fortunate in imparting, if not of feeling
themselves. The “Recollections of Thirty Years in the Senate” would, one
would think, be enough to reduce any mortal to very attenuated
proportions. Fortunate is the memory of any M. C. which is constructed
like a mining-sieve, letting through the superabundant dirt and
retaining only the loosely silted ore.
ANDREW JACKSON and JOHN QUINCY ADAMS, destined to be rivals for the
Presidency in the fifty-seventh and again in the sixty-first years of
their lives, were severally born nine years before the Declaration of
Independence. Their lives were as unlike as their faces. The former
passed his first score of years in the hard struggles for a livelihood,
and mostly amid the scenes made memorable by the cavalry swords of
Marion and Sumter and the pen of William Gilmore Sims; the latter spent
his in the study of what could best round up a capable mind by
discipline and learning, and in the equally advantageous culture derived
from the society of his accomplished mother and experienced father.
While the stormy incidents of an eventful military life in Florida and
Georgia, intercalated with court-martials and official censures, scored
in Jackson’s face the notches which, until his death in 1845, kept
truthful tally with his warm, violent, generous, resentful, and stern
history; over the round, uncreased face of Adams ran the smoothing-iron
of literary tastes and pursuits, keeping down the ruffling disturbances
of a naturally passionate nature, and the ridges which the excitements
from 1824 to 1828, and the antislavery agitations in the latter part of
his life, would have otherwise left. Jackson’s virtues deserve signal
praise, and Adams’s vices emphatic censure; since the former grew up
under circumstances as unfavorable to their existence as a young ladies’
seminary for modesty, or a New York sheriff’s office for integrity; and
the latter amid forces as unassailing as a prayer-meeting to piety or
sleep to pure thoughts.
Types of American character in many respects are the originals of the
two thin-faced portraits to which we next turn,—types in their foreign
birth, their obscure social belongings, and their shrewd and successful
business ventures,—STEPHEN GIRARD, coming into life in 1750, at
Bordeaux, France, as acid as the claret of his native city, and
commanding, like it, very profitable prices by transportation to this
country, a sailor’s son, and until his nineteenth year himself a sailor;
and JOHN JACOB ASTOR, his junior by thirteen years, offspring of a
poverty-worried peasant, ushered first into a cabin at Waldorf, near
Heidelberg, where black bread and small hopped beer were all that
incessant labor could procure. The former lived eighty-one, the latter
eighty-five years upon our planet; and by faithfully gathering up from
its surface, water and land, from its ships, stores, and offices, and
from its furred and unfurred animals, the gains which persistent early
rising, industry, and ceaseless penny-turning accumulate, left fortunes,
the first of nine, the last of twenty millions of dollars.
“Sic itur ad Astra.”
The Astral-lamp Library, obtained by funds bequeathed by a benefaction,
like Girard’s College, appreciative of what its donor had himself
missed, sheds its genial light on many a poor scholar’s desk. If each
legacy has been somewhat diverted from its testamentary direction,
perhaps the best excuse may be found in the reason why married women
were not allowed to have their wills after death, because they had them
so much while living.
JOHN MARSHALL, to whose unmistakably pure-minded face we turn in safe
admiration, was one of those types of leadership, one of those
representatives of schools, who, violently liked or disliked when
living, has by the touch of death been canonized among the white-robed
of the nation. An incarnation, when alive, of Federalism, his ermine has
become so white under the fulling of time and by contrast with robes
since worn, and his grasp of the judicial balances was, as is now seen,
so firm, so unimpassioned and unshaken by a nervous partisanship, that
he has already passed into the very small list of judges, whose lofty
character, stainless purity, large judicial capacities and force, are
like solid cool rocks amid the ever-shifting scenes and temperatures of
a varied landscape.
An artist’s head sits manifestly on the shoulders of JOHN TRUMBULL, born
in 1756, a year after John Marshall, and living eight years beyond him.
At his death in 1843, he left but few as aged. His busy pencil dropped
in 1775 for the musket, and, resumed in 1777, has perpetuated in
fifty-seven historical pictures, with the fidelity and love of personal
friendship, the portraitures of most of the leading actors in the first
period of our national story. He was President of the Academy of Fine
Arts, from its formation, in 1816, until it gave place, in 1825, to the
Academy of Design. His dress, it will be observed, was formally and
scrupulously in the mode; his address was as dressy as his wristbands
and frills. Quick-eyed mothers would at once, as he took his seat, warn
the children, always attracted towards clean vestments, “not to dirty
the gentleman’s clothes.”
In 1761 ALBERT GALLATIN was born. Related to Neckar, he seems to have
borrowed at the same time much of the financial ability of the French
minister, and the ready wit, graceful imagination, and forceful
word-power of the minister’s brilliant daughter, Madame de Staël. He
crammed eighty-eight years full of remarkable activities, as ambassador
to Russia, France, Great Britain, and Holland, as member of Congress,
and as a weighty yet captivating and vivacious writer on banks, public
credit, currency, and those subjects, ever rising, like cream, on the
public pans, which are skimmed by the most skilfully handled ladles.
Turning the page, we meet the thought-bearing faces of REMBRANDT PEALE,
born in 1778, and below, that of his brother artist, WASHINGTON ALLSTON,
the American Paul Veronese, who, Peale’s junior by a year, ceased his
earthly work in 1853, seven years before him. The serenity of congenial
pursuits gilds their portraitures, and lingers like an aureola around
their heads. Upon Allston’s face there seems spread a listening look, as
if straining to catch far-off notes, mingled with that gentle hush and
composure, as if stilled by that music so subtily described by
Wordsworth, which
“Born of murmuring sound, had passed into his face.”
A tree does not show more markedly than man the results of ancestral
care, wealth, and leisurely culture. Numerous are the faces and
histories scattered all through our national album, which are signalized
by a curious mixture of original forest wildness and park growths newly
begun, cultivated shoots grafted upon hardy native stocks, and giving
off large unsymmetrically shaped fruits,—fruits less sour than the
natural, but less genial, plump, mellow, and blooming than the
full-nursed growth. Of these were, in oratory, FELIX GRUNDY, whose
exposed youth shot up on the wilderness frontier of Kentucky, where
“death was in almost every bush, and an ambuscade in every thicket,” and
who attained, in Tennessee, a large altitude and breadth; SARGEANT S.
PRENTISS, transplanted from among the pines of Maine to the coarse
richness of a Mississippi soil, and through whose waving tops swept
sometimes the storm of invective, sometimes the æolian strains of
tenderest, soul-trembling breathings; JOHN J. CRITTENDEN, a farmer’s
boy, born in 1785, whose prickly logic sheathed, like a burr, the
smooth-meated chestnut; and, among statesmen, Samuel Houston of Texas,
shaggy-barked, yet with much tasselling wealth of flower at the top;
DANIEL D. TOMPKINS of New York, and a large number of others, strong
saplings, pushing up in brave defiance of adversities, some wrought into
bureaus, others inlaying cabinets,—American woods, some still sappy and
cross-grained, but making as good state furniture as an untechnical
taste has hitherto been content to demand or use.
Glancing through our book,—in which we treasure only the portraits of
the departed,—we dwell with satisfaction upon a group of high-toned,
conscientious, Christian statesmen, who honored public office in their
persons, and shed upon the Senate a light so effulgent, that the many
opaque substances, so often thrust into it, have not been able wholly to
absorb: JOHN MACPHERSON BERRIEN, born in 1781; THEODORE FRELINGHUYSEN
and SAMUEL L. SOUTHARD, in 1787; and WILLIAM C. PRESTON in 1794; with
whom are worthily associated HUGH S. LEGARÉ, whose fine face brought its
welcome into every company, as his radiant mind sparkled and
scintillated over every subject; and BENJAMIN F. BUTLER of New York,
whose clear-cut physiognomy, like an antique on a fine stone, shows
handsomely in every setting.
WINFIELD SCOTT came into life in 1786, and so crystallized about himself
each of the three wars in which he was the principal magnet,—the
maritime contest of 1812, the Mexican war in 1847, and the opening of
the Rebellion in 1861,—that his calm front and majestic presence would
readily single him out as the model figure for our American Mars. Like a
great elm in the Berkshire valley he stands, massive in strength of
trunk, spreading out in varied branches of learning, special study, and
active experience, and dropping his pendulous, wide-circuiting limbs and
generous foliage over a broad expanse of rich meadow. Under this vast,
wide-reaching, many-dropping banyan-tree history seems to gather in a
sleepy, contented calm.
Dearly do we all love to pause over the beautifully bordered page which
holds the genial, sunny-faced visage of WASHINGTON IRVING. He was four
years old when Washington delivered his first Inaugural. Through all the
nineteenth century he shines, like a blessed presence, until his
eclipse, in 1859. How our landscapes, the lives of our best and
worthiest, the graceful legends of our rivers, mountains, prairies, and
historical sites,—barren, voiceless, and dumb before, warm into life,
and stretch out their living hands in tender entreaty, instinct and
round with charms of persuasive beauty, as, like the prophet over the
child, he stretches himself over them!
Of some of his associates and compeers, still happily spared to us, we
cannot speak; for the living are too numerous to be enumerated, and too
near to be sketched; but of JOSEPH RODMAN DRAKE, whose brief twenty-five
years of life exhaled such beautiful and deathless creations as the
Culprit Fay; of FITZ-GREENE HALLECK, his companion and fellow-laborer,
whose rare humor stole into delicious song, as sprites are said to play
hide-and-seek in buttercups and honeysuckles; and of JAMES R. PAULDING,
linked in literary work as by family ties with Irving, and whose
diversified genius gives him a large, if not a choice place in our
Walhalla,—of all these kindly faces we delight to keep copies in our
album.
Like Irving, fortunate in the enjoyment of a wide European reputation,
but less fortunate than he in securing the undivided hearts of his
countrymen,—whose early history, aboriginal legends, forest scenery, and
naval characters he has so well tapestried in novels, essay, biography,
and history,—JAMES FENIMORE COOPER, born in 1789, has, by his sea tales,
caused many a mother’s heart to yearn after her runaway boy, and by his
land stories, garnered up many of our best sheaves of fiction into a
national stack. As we gaze on his large, square, massive forehead, we
forget his sharply feathered arrows, aimed at our national faults, which
generally, of course, missed the conscience and touched only the liver.
Remembering “The Pioneers,” “The Last of the Mohicans,” “The Spy,”
“Pilot,” and “Red Rover,” we fall to blessing the creations which stalk
over our rough fences, and brush away our raw villages, uproarious with
faces of civilized red-men, and so endeavor to get by, as boys do a
haunted place at nightfall, the recollection of those twenty-two libel
suits, whose damages he found, like most plaintiffs in that species of
legal fiction, to end in the payment of the costs out of his own pocket.
Others there are, too, whose physiognomies recall to us pleasantly the
explorers in science, workers amid Nature’s secrets, earlier than those
who now push their daring way into her very robing-room: BENJAMIN
SILLIMAN, the elder, who came in 1779, and through a long life lectured
so many into the pleasant idea that they knew something of geology and
chemistry, and through his “Journal of Science,” established in 1818,
gathered up the mental products of his fellow-harvesters; ROBERT HARE,
two years younger, who, at the age of twenty, invented the compound
blow-pipe, and up to his death, in 1858, continued his discoveries,
until he left, by his spiritual explorations, his scientific brethren
behind him; and BENJAMIN RUSH, born in 1780, who by his tasteful style,
made boluses less distasteful, and even gave the muses such a draught
that they became delirious over his medical pages.
WILLIAM H. PRESCOTT, reserved until nearly the close of the eighteenth
century ere he was born, and becoming blind in outward vision at the age
of eighteen, so clarified his inner sight and quickened it to the
perception of new beauties, and so perfected himself by the grace,
gentleness, and cheerful gayety of a happy nature, that Peru, Mexico,
the times of Ferdinand, Isabella, and Philip II., filtrated through
them, glow in splendor and are inwrought and outwrought in such delicacy
of color and such noble boldness as to make him stand out in singularly
beautiful proportions to thousands of loving eyes, that have never
rested, and will now never rest, upon his fine classic head.
Stop we a moment to admire the intellectual features of CATHERINE M.
SEDGWICK, born in 1798, whose wise essays and wiser fictions lie upon so
many tables; the calm head of HORATIO GREENOUGH, who produced his first
work, the “Chanting Cherubs,” upon a commission from Fenimore Cooper,
brought out the earliest American group in marble, and became a very
Medusa, turning many Americans into stone; and finally the grand, quaint
physiognomy of NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, given to us in 1804, and just
withdrawn, whose genial tales and humorous descriptions will keep his
memory as odorous as woodbines around the porches of houses
seven-gabled, mossed, newly Gothic, or indifferently green-shuttered,
and up to their eaves in white paint.
Unwillingly we close the list; for many are worthy to be added, who have
laid their aching brains away, and more who are coining from their
living thoughts a mintage more national than greenbacks and not half so
soiled.
All but two who are named in this our newer album were born in the last
century, and drew over its wealth with them and piled it up on our side.
Few of them lived less than three, and several more than fourscore
years; showing that the possession of intellect often preserves their
owners to a longevity as great as office or a life estate.