The dinner at night was informal. Colonel Lee had invited three personal
friends from Washington. He hoped in the touch of the minds of these
leaders to find some relief from the uneasiness with which the reading
of Mrs. Stowe's book had shadowed his imagination.
The man about whom he was curious was Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois,
the most brilliant figure in the Senate. In the best sense he
represented the national ideal. A Northern man, he had always viewed the
opinions and principles of the South with broad sympathy.
The new Senator from Georgia, on the other hand, had made a sensation in
the house as the radical leader of the South. Lee wondered if he were as
dangerous a man as the conservative members of the Whig party thought.
Toombs had voted the Whig ticket, but his speeches on the rights of the
South on the Slavery issues had set him in a class by himself.
Mr. and Mrs. Pryor had spent the night of the dance at Arlington and had
consented to stay for dinner.
Douglas had captured the young Virginia congressman. And Mrs. Douglas
had become an intimate friend of Mrs. Pryor.
When Douglas entered the library and pressed Lee's hand, the master
of Arlington studied him with keen interest. He was easily the most
impressive figure in American politics. The death of Calhoun and Clay
and the sudden passing of Webster had left but one giant on the floor of
the Senate. They called him the "Little Giant." He was still a giant.
He had sensed the approaching storm of crowd madness and had sought the
age-old method of compromise as the safety valve of the nation.
He had not read history in vain. He knew that all statesmanship is the
record of compromise--that compromise is another name for reason. The
Declaration of Independence was a compromise between the radicalism of
Thomas Jefferson and the conservatism of the colonies. In the original
draft of the Declaration, Jefferson had written a paragraph arraigning
slavery which had been omitted:
"He (the King of Great Britain) has waged cruel war against human nature
itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the
persons of a distant people who never offended him; capturing and
carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable
death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the
opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the _Christian_ King
of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should
be bought and sold, he prostituted his negative for suppressing every
legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And
that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye,
he is now exciting these very people to rise in arms among us, and to
purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the
people on whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes
committed against the liberties of one people with crimes which he urges
them to commit against the lives of another."
This indictment of Slavery and the Slave trade was stricken from the
Declaration of Independence in deference to the opposition of both
Northern and Southern slave owners who held that the struggling young
colonies must have labor at all hazards.
Lee knew that the Constitution also was a compromise of conflicting
interests. But for the spirit of compromise--of reason--this instrument
of human progress could never have been created. The word "Slave" or
"Slavery" does not occur within it, and yet three of its most important
provisions established the institution of chattel slavery as the basis
of industrial life. The statesmen who wrote the Constitution did not
wish these clauses embodied in it. Yet the Union could not have been
established without them. Our leaders reasoned, and reasoned wisely,
that Slavery must perish in the progress of human society, and,
therefore, they accepted the compromise.
There has never been a statesman in the history of the world who has
not used this method of constructive progress. There will never be a
statesman who succeeds who can use any other method in dealing with
masses of his fellow men.
Douglas was the coming constructive statesman of the republic and all
eyes were being focused on him. His life at the moment was the fevered
center of the nation's thought. That his ambitions were boundless no
one who knew the man doubted. That his patriotism was as genuine and as
great all knew at last.
Lee studied every feature of his fine face. No eye could miss him in
an assemblage of people, no matter how great the numbers. His compact
figure was erect, aggressive, dominant. A personage, whose sense of
power came from within, not without. He was master of himself and of
others. He looked the lion and he was one. The lines of his face were
handsome in the big sense, strong, regular, masculine. He drew young
men as a magnet. His vitality inspired them. His stature was small in
height, measured by inches, but of such dignity, power and magnetism
that he suggested Napoleon.
He smiled into Colonel Lee's face and his smile lighted the room. Every
man and woman present was warmed by it.
Douglas had scarcely greeted Mrs. Lee and passed into an earnest
conversation with the young Congressman when Robert Toombs of Georgia
entered.
Toombs had become within two years the successor of John C. Calhoun. He
had the genius of Calhoun, eloquence as passionate, as resistless;
and he had all of Calhoun's weaknesses. He called a spade a spade.
He loathed compromise. Three years before he had swept the floor and
galleries of the House with a burst of impassioned eloquence that had
made him a national figure.
Lifting his magnificent head he had cried:
"I do not hesitate to avow before this House and the Country, and in
the presence of the living God, that if by your legislation you seek to
drive us from the Territory of California and New Mexico, purchased
by the blood of Southern white people, and to abolish Slavery in the
District of Columbia, thereby attempting to fix a national degradation
upon half the States of this Confederacy, _I am for disunion_. The
Territories are the common property of the United States. You are their
common agents; it is your duty while they are in the Territorial state
to remove all impediments to their free enjoyment by both sections--the
slave holder and the non-slave holder!"
He was the man of iron will, of passionate convictions. He might lead a
revolution. He could not compromise.
His rapidly growing power was an ominous thing in the history of the
South. Lee studied his face with increasing fascination.
In this gathering no man or woman thought of wealth as the source of
power or end of life. No one spoke of it. Office, rank, position,
talent, beauty, charm, personality--these things alone could count.
These men and women _lived_. They did not merely exist. They were making
the history of the world and yet they refused to rush through life.
Their souls demanded hours of repose, of thought, of joy and they took
them.
Toombs' pocket was stuffed with a paper-backed edition of a French play.
It was his habit to read them in the original with keen enjoyment in
moments of leisure. The hum of social life filled the room and strife
was forgotten. Douglas and Toombs were boys again and Lee was their
companion.
Mary Lee managed to avoid Stuart and took her seat beside Phil
Sheridan--not to tease her admirer but to give to her Western guest
the warmest welcome of the old South. She knew the dinner would be a
revelation to Phil and she would enjoy his appreciation.
The long table groaned under the luxuries of the season. Course
succeeded course, cooked with a delicate skill unknown to the world of
to-day. The oysters, fresh, fat, luscious, were followed by diamond-back
terrapin stew as a soup.
Phil tasted it and whispered to his fair young hostess.
"Miss Mary, what is this I'm eating?"
"Don't you like it?"
"I never expected to taste it on earth. I've only dreamed about it on
high."
"It's only terrapin stew. We serve it as a soup."
"The angels made it."
"No, Aunt Hannah."
"I won't take it back. Angels only could brew this soup."
The terrapin was followed by old Virginia ham and turnip greens. And
then came the turkey with chestnut stuffing and jellies. The long table,
flashing with old china and silver, held the staples of ham and turkey
as ornaments as well as dainties for the palate. The real delicacies
were served later, the ducks which Doyle had sent the Colonel, and plate
after plate of little, brown, juicy birds called sora, so tender and
toothsome they could be eaten bones and all.
When Phil wound up with cakes and custards, apples, pears and nuts from
the orchard and fields, his mind was swimming in a dream of luxury. And
over it all the spirit of true hospitality brooded. A sense of home and
reality as intimate, as genuine as if he sat beside his mother's chair
in the little cottage in Ohio.
"Lord save me," he breathed. "If I stay here long I'll have but one
hope, to own a plantation and a home like this--"
Toombs sat on Lee's right and Douglas on his left. Mr. and Mrs. Pryor
occupied the places of honor beside Mrs. Lee.
The Colonel's keen eye studied Douglas with untiring patience. To his
rising star, the man who loved the Union, was drawn as by a magnet.
Toombs, the Whig, belonged to his own Party, the aristocracy of brains
and the inheritors of the right to leadership. He was studying Toombs
with growing misgivings. He dreaded the radicalism within the heart of
the Southern Whig.
His eye rested on Sam, serving the food as assistant butler in Ben's
absence. In the kink of his hair, the bulge of his smiling lips, the
spread of his nostrils, the whites of his rolling eyes, he saw
the Slave. He saw the mystery, the brooding horror, the baffling
uncertainty, the insoluble problem of such a man within a democracy of
self-governing freemen. He stood bowing and smiling over his guests, in
shape a man. And yet in racial development a million years behind the
wit and intelligence of the two leaders at his side.
Over this dusky figure, from the dawn of American history our fathers
had wrangled and compromised. More than once he had threatened to divide
or destroy the Union. Reason and the compromises of great minds had
saved us. In Sam he saw this grinning skeleton at his feast.
He could depend on the genius of Douglas when the supreme crisis came.
He felt the quality of his mind tonight. But could Douglas control the
mob impulse of the North where such appeals as _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ had
gripped the souls of millions and reason no longer ruled life?
There was the rub.
There was no question of the genius of Douglas. The question was could
any leadership count if the mob, not the man, became our real ruler? The
task of Douglas was to hold the fanatic of the North while he soothed
the passions of the radical of the South. Henry Clay had succeeded. But
_Uncle Tom's Cabin_ had not been written in his day.
Toombs was becoming a firebrand. His eloquence was doing in the South
what Mrs. Stowe's novel was doing in the North--preparing the soil for
revolution--planting gunpowder under the foundations of society.
Could these forces yet be controlled or were they already beyond
control?