all those who were allowed to have any leading part in it belonged
exclusively to that class of men who are known as party managers, and
who, like the director of a theatre or a circus, look upon the mass of
mankind as creatures to be influenced by a taking title, by amplitude
of posters, and by a thrilling sensation or two, no matter how coarse?
As for the title, nothing could be better than that of the "Devoted
Unionists,"--and were not the actors, no less than the scenery and
decorations, for the most part entirely new,--at least in that
particular play? Advertisement they did not lack, with the whole
Democratic press and the Department of State at their service, not to
speak of the real clown being allowed to exhibit himself at short
intervals upon the highest platform in this or any other country. And
if we ask for sensation, never were so many performers exhibited
together in their grand act of riding two horses at once, or leaping
through a hoop with nothing more substantial to resist them than the
tissue-paper of former professions, nay, of recent pledges. And yet the
skill of the managers had something greater still behind, in
Massachusetts linked arm in arm with South Carolina. To be sure, a
thoughtful mind might find something like a false syllogism in pairing
off a Commonwealth whose greatest sin it has been to lead the van in
freedom of opinion, and in those public methods of enlightenment which
make it a safeguard of popular government, with an Oligarchy whose
leadership has been in precisely the opposite direction, as if both had
equally sinned against American ideas. But such incongruities are
trifles no greater than those of costume so common on every stage; and
perhaps the only person to be pitied in the exhibition was Governor
Orr, who had once uttered a hope that his own State might one day walk
abreast with the daughter of Puritan forethought in the nobler
procession of prosperous industry, and who must have felt a slight
shock of surprise, if nothing more, at the form in which Massachusetts
had chosen to incarnate herself on that particular occasion. We cannot
congratulate the Convention on the name of its chairman, for there is
something ominously suggestive in it. But, on the other hand it is to
be remembered that Mr. Doolittle has a remarkably powerful voice, which
is certainly one element in the manufacture of sound opinions. A little
too much latitude was allowed to Mr. Raymond in the Address, though on
the whole perhaps it was prudent to make that document so long as to
insure it against being read. In their treatment of Mr. Vallandigham
the managers were prudent. He was allowed to appear just enough not
quite to alienate his party, on whom the new movement counts largely
for support, and just not enough to compromise the Convention with the
new recruits it had made among those who would follow the name
Conservative into anything short of downright anarchy. The Convention,
it must be confessed, had a rather hard problem to solve,--nothing less
than to make their patent reconciliation cement out of fire and
gunpowder, both useful things in themselves, but liable in concert to
bring about some odd results in the way of harmonious action. It is
generally thought wiser to keep them apart, and accordingly Mr.
Vallandigham was excluded from the Convention altogether, and the
Southern delegates were not allowed any share in the Address or
Resolutions. Indeed, as the Northern members were there to see what
they could make, and the Southern to find out how much they could save,
and whatever could be made or saved was to come out of the North, it
was more prudent to leave all matters of policy in the hands of those
who were supposed to understand best the weak side of the intended
victim. The South was really playing the game, and is to have the
lion's share of the winnings; but it is only as a disinterested
bystander, who looks over the cards of one of the parties, and guides
his confederate by hints so adroitly managed as not to alarm the
pigeon. The Convention avoided the reef where the wreck of the Chicago
lies bleaching; but we are not so sure that they did not ground
themselves fast upon the equally dangerous mud-bank that lies on the
opposite side of the honest channel. At Chicago they were so precisely
frank as to arouse indignation; at Philadelphia they are so careful of
generalities that they make us doubtful, if not suspicious. Does the
expectation or even the mere hope of pudding make the utterance as
thick as if the mouth were already full of it? As to the greater part
of the Resolutions, they were political truisms in which everybody
would agree as so harmless that the Convention might almost as well
have resolved the multiplication table article by article. The Address
was far less explicit; and where there is so very much meal, it is
perhaps not altogether uncharitable to suspect that there may be
something under it. There is surely a suspicious bulge here and there,
that has the look of the old Democratic cat. But, after all, of what
consequence are the principles of the party, when President Johnson
covers them all when he puts on his hat, and may change them between
dinner and tea, as he has done several times already? The real
principle of the party, its seminal and vital principle alike, is the
power of the President, and its policy is every moment at the mercy of
his discretion. That power has too often been the plaything of whim,
and that discretion the victim of ill-temper or vanity, for us to have
any other feeling left than regret for the one and distrust of the
other.
The new party does not seem to have drawn to itself any great accession
of strength from the Republican side, or indeed to have made many
converts that were not already theirs in fact, though not in name. It
was joined, of course, at once by the little platoon of gentlemen
calling themselves, for some mystical reason, Conservatives, who have
for some time been acting with the Democratic faction, carefully
keeping their handkerchiefs to their noses all the while. But these
involuntary Catos are sure, as if by instinct, to choose that side
which is doomed not to please the gods, and their adhesion is as good
as a warranty of defeat. During the President's progress they must
often have been driven to their handkerchiefs again. It was a great
blunder of Mr. Seward to allow him to assume the apostolate of the new
creed in person, for every word he has uttered must have convinced
many, even of those unwilling to make the admission, that a doctrine
could hardly be sound which had its origin and derives its power from a
source so impure. For so much of Mr. Johnson's harangues as is not
positively shocking, we know of no parallel so close as in his Imperial
Majesty Kobes I.:--
"Er ruehmte dass er nie studirt
Auf Universitaeten
Und Reden sprachi aus sich selbst heraus,
Ganz ohne Facultaeten."
And when we consider his power of tears; when we remember Mr. Reverdy
Johnson and Mr. Andrew Johnson confronting each other like two augurs,
the one trying not to laugh while he saw the other trying to cry; when
we recall the touching scene at Canandaigua, where the President was
overpowered by hearing the pathetic announcement that Stephen A.
Douglas had for two years attended the academy in what will doubtless
henceforward be dubbed that "classic locality," we cannot help thinking
of
"In seinem schoenen Auge glaenzt
Die Thraene, die Stereotype."
Indeed, if the exhibition of himself were not so profoundly sad, when
we think of the high place he occupies and the great man he succeeded
in it, nothing could well be so comic as some of the incidents of Mr.
Johnson's tour. No satirist could have conceived anything so
bewitchingly absurd as the cheers which greeted the name of Simeon at
the dinner in New York, whether we suppose the audience to have thought
him some eminent member of their party of whom they had never heard, or
whom they had forgotten as thoroughly as they had Mr. Douglas, or if we
consider that they were involuntarily giving vent to their delight at
the pleasing prospect opened by their "illustrious guest's" allusion to
his speedy departure. Nor could anything have been imagined beforehand
so ludicrously ominous as Mr. Seward's fears lest the platform should
break down under them at Niagara. They were groundless fears, it is
true, for the Johnson platform gave way irreparably on the 22d of
February; but they at least luckily prevented Nicholas Bottom Cromwell
from uttering his after-dinner threat against the people's immediate
representatives, against the very body whose vote supplies the funds of
his party, and whose money, it seems, is constitutional, even if its
own existence as a Congress be not. We pity Mr. Seward in his new
office of bear-leader. How he must hate his Bruin when it turns out
that his tricks do not even please the crowd!
But the ostensible object of this indecent orgy seems to us almost as
discreditable as the purpose it veiled so thinly. Who was Stephen A.
Douglas, that the President, with his Cabinet and the two highest
officers of the army and navy, should add their official dignity to the
raising of his monument, and make the whole country an accomplice in
consecrating his memory? His name is not associated with a single
measure of national importance, unless upon the wrong side. So far was
he from being a statesman that, even on the lower ground of politics,
both his principles and his expression of them were tainted with the
reek of vulgar associations. A man of naturally great abilities he
certainly was, but wholly without that instinct for the higher
atmosphere of thought or ethics which alone makes them of value to any
but their possessor, and without which they are more often dangerous
than serviceable to the commonwealth. He habitually courted those
weaknesses in the people which tend to degrade them into a populace,
instead of appealing to the virtues that grow by use, and whose mere
acknowledgment in a man in some sort ennobles him. And by doing this he
proved that he despised the very masses whose sweet breaths he wooed,
and had no faith in the system under which alone such a one as he could
have been able to climb so high. He never deserted the South to take
side with the country till the South had both betrayed and deserted
him. If such a man were the fairest outcome of Democracy, then is it
indeed a wretched failure. But for the factitious importance given to
his name by the necessity of furnishing the President with a pretext
for stumping the West in the interest of Congress, Mr. Douglas would be
wellnigh as utterly forgotten as Cass or Tyler, or Buchanan or
Fillmore; nor should we have alluded to him now but that the recent
pilgrimage has made his name once more public property, and because we
think it a common misfortune when such men are made into saints, though
for any one's advantage but their own. We certainly have no wish to
play the part of _advocatus diaboli_ on such an occasion, even were it
necessary at a canonization where the office of Pontifex Maximus is so
appropriately filled by Mr. Johnson.
In speaking of the late unhappy exposure of the unseemly side of
democratic institutions, we have been far from desirous of insisting on
Mr. Seward's share in it. We endeavored to account for it at first by
supposing that the Secretary of State, seeing into the hands of how
vain and weak a man the reins of administration had fallen, was
willing, by flattering his vanity, to control his weakness for the
public good. But we are forced against our will to give up any such
theory, and to confess that Mr. Seward's nature has been "subdued to
what it works in." We see it with sincere sorrow, and are far from
adding our voice to the popular outcry against a man the long and
honorable services of whose prime we are not willing to forget in the
decline of his abilities and that dry-rot of the mind's nobler temper
which so often results from the possession of power. Long contact with
the meaner qualities of men, to whose infection place and patronage are
so unhappily exposed, could not fail of forcing to a disproportionate
growth any germs of that cynicism always latent in temperaments so
exclusively intellectual and unmitigated by any kindly lenitive of
humor. Timid by nature, the war which he had prophesied, but had not
foreseen, and which invigorated bolder men, unbraced him; and while the
spendthrift verbosity of his despatches was the nightmare of foreign
ministries, his uncertain and temporizing counsels were the perpetual
discouragement of his party at home. More than any minister with whose
official correspondence we are acquainted, he carried the principle of
paper money into diplomacy, and bewildered Earl Russell and M. Drouyn
de Lhuys with a horrible doubt as to the real value of the verbal
currency they were obliged to receive. But, unfortunately, his own
countrymen were also unprovided with a price-current of the latest
quotation in phrases, and the same gift of groping and inconclusive
generalities which perhaps was useful as a bewilderment to would-be
hostile governments abroad was often equally effective in disheartening
the defenders of nationality at home. We cannot join with those who
accuse Mr. Seward of betraying his party, for we think ourselves
justified by recent events in believing that he has always looked upon
parties as the mere ladders of ambitious men; and when his own broke
under him at Chicago in 1860, he forthwith began to cast about for
another, the rounds of which might be firmer under his feet. He is not
the first, and we fear will not be the last, of our public men who have
thought to climb into the White House by a back window, and have come
ignominiously to the ground in attempting it. Mr. Seward's view of the
matter probably is that the Republican party deserted him six years
ago, and that he was thus absolved of all obligations to it. But might
there not have been such a thing as fidelity to its principles? Or was
Mr. Seward drawn insensibly into the acceptance of them by the drift of
political necessity, and did he take them up as if they were but the
hand that had been dealt him in the game, not from any conviction of
their moral permanence and power, perhaps with no perception of it, but
from a mere intellectual persuasion of the use that might be made of
them politically and for the nonce by a skilful gamester? We should be
very unwilling to admit such a theory of his character; but surely what
we have just seen would seem to justify it, for we can hardly conceive
that any one should suddenly descend from real statesmanship to the use
of such catch-rabble devices as those with which he has lately
disgusted the country. A small politician cannot be made out of a great
statesman, for there is an oppugnancy of nature between the two things,
and we may fairly suspect the former winnings of a man who has been
once caught with loaded dice in his pocket. However firm may be Mr.
Seward's faith in the new doctrine of Johnsonian infallibility, surely
he need not have made himself a partner in its vulgarity. And yet he
has attempted to vie with the Jack-pudding tricks of the unrivalled
performer whose man-of-business he is, in attempting a _populacity_
(we must coin a new word for a new thing) for which he was exquisitely
unfitted. What more stiffly awkward than his essays at easy
familiarity? What more painfully remote from drollery than his efforts
to be droll? In the case of a man who descends so far as Mr. Seward,
such feats can be characterized by no other word so aptly as by
tumbling. The thing would be sad enough in any prominent man, but in
him it becomes a public shame, for in the eyes of the world it is the
nation that tumbles in its Prime Minister. The Secretary of State's
place may be dependent on the President, but the dignity of it belongs
to the country, and neither of them has any right to trifle with it.
Mr. Seward might stand on his head in front of what Jenkins calls his
"park gate," at Auburn, and we should be the last to question his
perfect right as a private citizen to amuse himself in his own way, but
in a great officer of the government such pranks are no longer
harmless. They are a national scandal, and not merely so, but a
national detriment, inasmuch as they serve to foster in foreign
statesman a profound misapprehension of the American people and of the
motives which influence them in questions of public policy. Never was
so great a wrong done to democracy, nor so great an insult offered to
it, as in this professional circuit of the presidential Punch and his
ministerial showman.
Fortunately, the exhibitions of this unlucky pair, and their passing
round the hat without catching even the greasy pence they courted,
have very little to do with the great question to be decided at the
next elections, except in so far as we may be justified in suspecting
their purity of motive who could consent to such impurity of means,
and the soundness of their judgment in great things who in small ones
show such want of sagacity. The crowds they have drawn are no index of
popular approval. We remember seeing the prodigious nose of Mr. Tyler
(for the person behind it had been added by nature merely as the handle
to so fine a hatchet) drawn by six white horses through the streets,
and followed by an eager multitude, nine tenths of whom thought the
man belonging to it a traitor to the party which had chosen him. But
then the effigy at least of a grandiose, if not a great man, sat beside
him, and the display was saved from contempt by the massive shape of
Webster, beneath which he showed like a swallow against a thunder-cloud.
Even Mr. Fillmore, to whom the Fugitive Slave Law denies the complete
boon of an otherwise justly earned oblivion, had some dignity given to
his administration by the presence of Everett. But in this late
advertising-tour of a policy in want of a party, Cleon and Agoracritus
seem to have joined partnership, and the manners of the man match those
of the master. Mr. Johnson cannot so much as hope for the success in
escaping memory achieved by the last of those small Virginians whom the
traditionary fame of a State once fertile in statesmen lifted to four
years of imperial pillory, where his own littleness seemed to heighten
rather than lower the grandeur of his station; his name will not be
associated with the accomplishment of a great wrong against humanity,
let us hope not with the futile attempt at one; but he will be
indignantly remembered as the first, and we trust the last, of our
chief magistrates who believed in the brutality of the people, and gave
to the White House the ill-savor of a corner-grocery. _He_ a tribune of
the people? A lord of misrule, an abbot of unreason, much rather!
No one can object more strongly than we to the mixing of politics with
personal character; but they are here inextricably entangled together,
and we hold it to be the duty of every journal in the country to join
in condemning a spectacle which silence might seem to justify as a
common event in our politics. We turn gladly from the vulgarity of the
President and his minister to consider the force of their arguments.
Mr. Johnson seems to claim that he has not betrayed the trust to which
he was elected, mainly because the Union party have always affirmed
that the rebellious States could not secede, and therefore _ex vi
termini_ are still in the Union. The corollary drawn from this is,
that they have therefore a manifest right to immediate representation
in Congress. What we have always understood the Union party as meaning
to affirm was, that a State had no right to secede; and it was upon
that question, which is a very different thing from the other, that the
whole controversy hinged. To assert that a State or States could not
secede, if they were strong enough, would be an absurdity. In point of
fact, all but three of the Slave States did secede, and for four years
it would have been treason throughout their whole territory, and death
on the nearest tree, to assert the contrary. The law forbids a man to
steal, but he may steal, nevertheless; and then, if he had Mr.
Johnson's power as a logician, he might claim to escape all penalty by
pleading that when the law said _should not_ it meant _could
not_, and therefore he _had not_. If a four years' war, if a
half million lives, and if a debt which is counted by the thousand
million are not satisfactory proofs that somebody did contrive to
secede practically, whatever the theoretic right may have been, then
nothing that ought not to be done ever has been done. We do not,
however, consider the question as to whether the Rebel States were
constitutionally, or in the opinion of any political organization, out
of the Union or not as of the least practical importance; for we have
never known an instance in which any party has retreated into the
thickets and swamps of constitutional interpretation, where it had the
least chance of maintaining its ground in the open field of common
sense or against the pressure of popular will. The practical fact is,
that the will of the majority, or the national necessity for the time
being, has always been constitutional; which is only as much as to say
that the Convention of 1787 was not wholly made up of inspired
prophets, who could provide beforehand for every possible contingency.
The doctrine of a strict and even pettifogging interpretation of the
Constitution had its rise among men who looked upon that instrument as
a treaty, and at a time when the conception of a national power which
should receive that of the States into its stream as tributary was
something which had entered the head of only here and there a dreamer.
The theorists of the Virginia school would have dammed up and diverted
the force of each State into a narrow channel of its own, with its
little saw-mill and its little grist-mill for local needs, instead of
letting it follow the slopes of the continental water-shed to swell the
volume of one great current ample for the larger uses and needful for
the higher civilization of all. That there should always be a school
who interpret the Constitution by its letter is a good thing, as
interposing a check to hasty or partial action, and gaining time for
ample discussion; but that in the end we should be governed by its
spirit, living and operative in the energies of an advancing people, is
a still better thing; since the levels and shore-lines of politics are
no more stationary than those of continents, and the ship of state
would in time be left aground far inland, to long in vain for that open
sea which is the only pathway to fortune and to glory.
Equally idle with the claim that the Union party is foreclosed from now
dealing with the Rebel States as seceded, because four years ago it
declared that they had no right to secede, is the assertion that the
object of the war was proclaimed to be for the restoration of the Union
and the Constitution as they were. Even were we to admit that 1861 is
the same thing as 1866, the question comes back again to precisely the
point that is at issue between the President and Congress, namely, What
is the wisest way of restoring the Union? for which both profess
themselves equally anxious. As for the Constitution, we cannot have
that as it was, but only as its framers hoped it would be, with its one
weak and wicked element excluded. But as to Union, are we in favor of a
Union in form or in fact? of a Union on the map and in our national
style merely, or one of ideas, interests, and aspirations? If we cannot
have the latter, the former is a delusion and a snare; and the strength
of the nation would be continually called away from prosperous toil to
be wasted in holding a wolf by the ears, which would still be a wolf,
and known by all our enemies for such, though we called heaven and
earth to witness, in no matter how many messages or resolves, that the
innocent creature was a lamb. That somebody has a right to dictate some
kind of terms is admitted by Mr. Johnson's own repeated action in the
matter; but who that somebody should be, whether a single man, of whose
discretion even his own partisans are daily becoming more doubtful, or
the immediate representatives of that large majority of the States and
of the people who for the last five years have been forced against
their will to represent and to be the United States, is certainly too
grave an affair to be settled by that single man himself.
We have seen to what extremes the party calling itself Conservative has
hinted its willingness to go, under the plea of restored Union, but
with the object of regained power. At Philadelphia, they went as far as
they publicly dared in insinuating that the South would be justified in
another rebellion, and their journals have more than once prompted the
President to violent measures, which would as certainly be his ruin as
they would lead to incalculable public disaster. The President himself
has openly announced something like a design of forcibly suppressing a
Congress elected by the same votes and secured by the same guaranties
that elected him to his place and secure him in it,--a Congress whose
validity he has acknowledged by sending in his messages to it, by
signing its bills, and by drawing his pay under its vote; and yet
thinking men are not to be allowed to doubt the propriety of leaving
the gravest measure that ever yet came up for settlement by the country
to a party and a man so reckless as these have shown themselves to be.
Mr. Johnson talks of the danger of centralization, and repeats the old
despotic fallacy of many tyrants being worse than one,--a fallacy
originally invented, and ever since repeated, as a slur upon democracy,
but which is a palpable absurdity when the people who are to be
tyrannized over have the right of displacing their tyrants every two
years. The true many-headed tyrant is the Mob, that part of the
deliberative body of a nation which Mr. Johnson, with his Southern
notions of popular government, has been vainly seeking, that he might
pay court to it, from the seaboard to St. Louis, but which hardly
exists, we are thankful to say, as a constituent body, in any part of
the Northern States outside the city of New York.