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American Statesmen
EDITED BY
JOHN T. MORSE, JR.
American Statesmen
THOMAS HART BENTON
BY
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1890
Copyright, 1886,
BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
_All rights reserved._
FIFTH EDITION.
_The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
THE YOUNG WEST 1
CHAPTER II.
BENTON'S EARLY LIFE AND ENTRY INTO THE SENATE 23
CHAPTER III.
EARLY YEARS IN THE SENATE 47
CHAPTER IV.
THE ELECTION OF JACKSON, AND THE SPOILS SYSTEM 69
CHAPTER V.
THE STRUGGLE WITH THE NULLIFIERS 88
CHAPTER VI.
JACKSON AND BENTON MAKE WAR ON THE BANK 114
CHAPTER VII.
THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE SURPLUS 143
CHAPTER VIII.
THE SLAVE QUESTION APPEARS IN POLITICS 157
CHAPTER IX.
THE CHILDREN'S TEETH ARE SET ON EDGE 184
CHAPTER X.
LAST DAYS OF THE JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY 209
CHAPTER XI.
THE PRESIDENT WITHOUT A PARTY 237
CHAPTER XII.
BOUNDARY TROUBLES WITH ENGLAND 260
CHAPTER XIII.
THE ABOLITIONISTS DANCE TO THE SLAVE BARONS' PIPING 290
CHAPTER XIV.
SLAVERY IN THE NEW TERRITORIES 317
CHAPTER XV.
THE LOSING FIGHT 341
THOMAS HART BENTON.
CHAPTER I.
THE YOUNG WEST.
Even before the end of the Revolutionary War the movement had begun
which was to change in form a straggling chain of sea-board republics
into a mighty continental nation, the great bulk of whose people would
live to the westward of the Appalachian Mountains. The hardy and
restless backwoodsmen, dwelling along the eastern slopes of the
Alleghanies, were already crossing the mountain-crests and hewing their
way into the vast, sombre forests of the Mississippi basin; and for the
first time English-speaking communities were growing up along waters
whose outlet was into the Gulf of Mexico and not into the Atlantic
Ocean. Among these communities Kentucky and Tennessee were the earliest
to form themselves into states; and around them, as a nucleus, other
states of the woodland and the prairie were rapidly developed, until, by
the close of the second decade in the present century, the region
between the Great Lakes and the Gulf was almost solidly filled in, and
finally, in 1820, by the admission of Missouri, the Union held within
its borders a political body whose whole territory lay to the west of
the Mississippi.
All the men who founded these states were of much the same type; they
were rough frontiersmen, of strong will and adventurous temper,
accustomed to the hard, barren, and yet strangely fascinating life of
those who dwell as pioneers in the wilderness. Moreover, they were
nearly all of the same blood. The people of New York and New England
were as yet filling out their own territory; it was not till many years
afterwards that their stock became the predominant one in the
northwestern country. Most of the men who founded the new states north
of the Ohio came originally from the old states south of the Potomac;
Virginia and North Carolina were the first of the original thirteen to
thrust forth their children in masses, that they might shift for
themselves in the then untrodden West.
But though these early Western pioneers were for the most part of
Southern stock, they were by no means of the same stamp as the men who
then and thereafter formed the ruling caste in the old slave-holding
states. They were the mountaineers, the men of the foot-hills and
uplands, who lived in what were called the backwater counties. Many of
them were themselves of northern origin. In striking contrast to the
somewhat sluggish and peaceful elements going to make up the rest of its
heterogeneous population, Pennsylvania also originally held within its
boundaries many members of that most fiery and restless race, the
Scotch-Irish. These naturally drew towards the wilder, western parts of
the state, settling along the slopes of the numerous inland mountain
ridges running parallel to the Atlantic coast; and from thence they
drifted southward through the long valleys, until they met and mingled
with their kinsfolk of Virginia and the Carolinas, when the movement
again trended towards the West. In a generation or two, all, whether
their forefathers were English, Scotch, Irish, or, as was often the
case, German and Huguenot, were welded into one people; and in a very
short time the stern and hard surroundings of their life had hammered
this people into a peculiar and characteristically American type, which
to this day remains almost unchanged. In their old haunts we still see
the same tall, gaunt men, with strongly marked faces and saturnine,
resolute eyes; men who may pass half their days in listless idleness,
but who are also able to show on occasion the fiercest intensity of
purpose and the most sustained energy of action. We see them, moreover,
in many places, even across to the Pacific coast and down to the Rio
Grande. For after thronging through the gaps and passes of the
Appalachians, and penetrating the forest region to the outskirts of the
treeless country beyond, the whilom mountaineers and woodsmen, the
wielders of the axe and rifle, then streamed off far to the West and
South and even to the Northwest, their lumbering, white-topped wagons
being, even to the present moment, a familiar sight to those who travel
over the prairies and the great plains; while it is their descendants
who, in the saddle instead of afoot, and with rope and revolver instead
of axe and rifle, now form the bulk of the reckless horsemen who spend
their lives in guarding the wandering cattle herds that graze over the
vast, arid plains of the "Far West."
The method of settlement of these states of the Mississippi valley had
nothing whatever in common with the way in which California and the
Australian colonies were suddenly filled up by the promiscuous overflow
of a civilized population, which had practically no fear of any
resistance from the stunted and scanty native races. It was far more
closely akin to the tribe movements of the Germanic peoples in time
past; to that movement, for example, by which the Juttish and Low Dutch
sea-thieves on the coast of Britain worked their way inland at the cost
of the Cymric Celts. The early settlers of the territory lying
immediately west of the Alleghanies were all of the same kind; they were
in search of homes, not of riches, and their actions were planned
accordingly, except in so far as they were influenced by mere restless
love of adventure and excitement. Individuals and single families, of
course, often started off by themselves; but for the most part the men
moved in bands, with their wives and their children, their cattle and
their few household goods; each settler being from the necessity of the
case also a fighter, ready, and often forced, to do desperate battle in
defense of himself and his family. Where such a band or little party
settled, there would gradually grow up a village or small town; for
instance, where those renowned pioneers and heroes of the backwoods,
Boone and Harrod, first formed permanent settlements after they had
moved into Kentucky, now stand the towns of Boonsboro and Harrodsburg.
The country whither these settlers went was not one into which timid men
would willingly venture, and the founders of the West were perforce men
of stern stuff, who from the very beginning formed a most warlike race.
It is impossible to understand aright the social and political life of
the section, unless we keep prominently before our minds that it derived
its distinguishing traits largely from the extremely militant character
acquired by all the early settlers during the long drawn out warfare in
which the first two generations were engaged. The land was already held
by powerful Indian tribes and confederacies, who waged war after war, of
the most ferocious and bloody character, against the men of the border,
in the effort to avert their inevitable doom, or at least to stem for
the time being the invasion of the swelling tide of white settlement. At
the present time, when an Indian uprising is a matter chiefly of
annoyance, and dangerous only to scattered, outlying settlers, it is
difficult to realize the formidable nature of the savage Indian wars
waged at the end of the last and the beginning of the present centuries.
The red nations were then really redoubtable enemies, able to send into
the field thousands of well-armed warriors, whose ferocious bravery and
skill rendered them quite as formidable antagonists as trained European
soldiers would have been. Warfare with them did not affect merely
outlying farms or hamlets; it meant a complete stoppage of the white
movement westward, and great and imminent danger even to the large
communities already in existence; a state of things which would have to
continue until the armies raised among the pioneers were able, in fair
shock of battle, to shatter the strength of their red foes. The
victories of Wayne and Harrison were conditions precedent to the opening
of the Ohio valley; Kentucky was won by a hundred nameless and bloody
fights, whose heroes, like Shelby and Sevier, afterwards rose to
prominent rank in civil life; and it was only after a hard-fought
campaign and slaughtering victories that the Tennesseeans were able to
break the power of the great Creek confederacy, which was thrust in
between them and what were at that time the French and Spanish lands
lying to the south and southwest.
The founders of our Western States were valiant warriors as well as
hardy pioneers, and from the very first their fighting was not confined
to uncivilized foes. It was they who at King's Mountain slew gallant
Ferguson, and completely destroyed his little army; it was from their
ranks that most of Morgan's men were recruited, when that grizzled old
bush-fighter smote Tarleton so roughly at the battle of the Cowpens.
These two blows crippled Cornwallis, and were among the chief causes of
his final overthrow. At last, during the War of 1812, there was played
out the final act in the military drama of which the West had been the
stage during the lifetime of a generation. For this war had a twofold
aspect: on the sea-board it was regarded as a contest for the rights of
our sailors and as a revolt against Great Britain's domineering
insolence; west of the mountains, on the other hand, it was simply a
renewal on a large scale of the Indian struggles, all the red-skinned
peoples joining together in a great and last effort to keep the lands
which were being wrested from them; and there Great Britain's part was
chiefly that of ally to the savages, helping them with her gold and with
her well-drilled mercenary troops. The battle of the Thames is memorable
rather because of the defeat and death of Tecumseh, than because of the
flight of Proctor and the capture of his British regulars; and for the
opening of the Southwest the ferocious fight at the Horseshoe Bend was
almost as important as the far more famous conflict of New Orleans.
The War of 1812 brought out conspicuously the solidarity of interest in
the West. The people there were then all pretty much of the same blood;
and they made common cause against outsiders in the military field
exactly as afterwards they for some time acted together politically.
Further eastward, on the Niagara frontier, the fighting was done by the
troops of New York and New England, unassisted by the Southern States;
and in turn the latter had to shift for themselves when Washington was
burned and Baltimore menaced. It was far otherwise in the regions lying
beyond the Appalachians. Throughout all the fighting in the Northwest,
where Ohio was the state most menaced, the troops of Kentucky formed the
bulk of the American army, and it was the charge of their mounted
riflemen which at a blow won the battle of the Thames. Again, on that
famous January morning, when it seemed as if the fair Creole city was
already in Packenham's grasp, it was the wild soldiery of Tennessee who,
lolling behind their mud breastworks, peered out through the lifting fog
at the scarlet array of the English veterans, as the latter, fresh from
their long and unbroken series of victories over the best troops of
Europe, advanced, for the first time, to meet defeat.
This solidarity of interest and feeling on the part of the
trans-Appalachian communities is a factor often not taken into account
in relating the political history of the early part of this century;
most modern writers (who keep forgetting that the question of slavery
was then not one tenth as absorbing as it afterwards became) apparently
deeming that the line of demarkation between North and South was at
that period, as it has since in reality become, as strongly defined west
of the mountains as east of them. That such was not the case was due to
several different causes. The first comers into Tennessee and Kentucky
belonged to the class of so-called poor whites, who owned few or no
slaves, and who were far less sectionally southern in their feelings
than were the rich planters of the low, alluvial plains towards the
coast of the Atlantic; and though a slave-owning population quickly
followed the first pioneers, yet the latter had imprinted a stamp on the
character of the two states which was never wholly effaced,--as witness
the tens of thousands of soldiers which both, even the more southern of
the two, furnished to the Union army in the Civil War.
If this immigration made Kentucky and Tennessee, and afterwards
Missouri, less distinctively Southern in character than the South
Atlantic States, it at the same time, by furnishing the first and for
some time the most numerous element in the population of the states
north of the Ohio, made the latter less characteristically Northern than
was the case with those lying east of them. Up to 1810 Indiana kept
petitioning Congress to allow slavery within her borders; Illinois, in
the early days, felt as hostile towards Massachusetts as did Missouri.
Moreover, at first the Southern States west of the mountains greatly
outweighed the Northern, both in numbers and importance.
Thus several things came about. In the first place, all the communities
across the Alleghanies originally felt themselves to be closely knit
together by ties of blood, sentiment, and interest; they felt that they
were, taking them altogether, Western as opposed to Eastern. In the next
place, they were at first Southern rather than Northern in their
feeling. But, in the third place, they were by no means so extremely
Southern as were the Southern Atlantic States. This was the way in which
they looked at themselves; and this was the way in which at that time
others looked at them. In our day Kentucky is regarded politically as
being simply an integral portion of the solid South; but the greatest of
her sons, Clay, was known to his own generation, not as a Southern
statesman, but as "Harry of the West." Of the two presidents, Harrison
and Taylor, whom the Whigs elected, one lived in Ohio and one in
Louisiana; but both were chosen simply as Western men, and, as a matter
of fact, both were born in Virginia. Andrew Jackson's victory over Adams
was in some slight sense a triumph of the South over the North, but it
was far more a triumph of the West over the East. Webster's famous
sneer at old Zachary Taylor was aimed at him as a "frontier colonel;" in
other words, though Taylor had a large plantation in Louisiana, Webster,
and many others besides, looked upon him as the champion of the rough
democracy of the West rather than as the representative of the polished
slave-holders of the South.
Thus, during the first part of this century, the term "Western" was as
applicable to the states lying south of the Ohio as to those lying north
of it. Moreover, at first the Central, or, as they were more usually
termed, the Border States, were more populous and influential than were
those on either side of them, and so largely shaped the general tone of
Western feeling. While the voters in these states, whether Whigs or
Democrats, accepted as their leaders men like Clay in Kentucky, Benton
in Missouri, and Andrew Jackson in Tennessee, it could be taken for
granted that on the whole they felt for the South against the North, but
much more for the West against the East, and most strongly of all for
the Union as against any section whatsoever. Many influences came
together to start and keep alive this feeling; but one, more potent than
all the others combined, was working steadily, and with ever-increasing
power, against it; and when slavery finally brought about a break
between the Northern and Southern States of the West as complete as that
in the East, then the Democrats of the stamp of Jackson and Benton
disappeared as completely from public life as did the Whigs of the stamp
of Clay.
Benton's long political career can never be thoroughly understood unless
it is kept in mind that he was primarily a Western and not a Southern
statesman; and it owes its especial interest to the fact that during its
continuance the West first rose to power, acting as a unit, and to the
further fact that it was brought to a close by the same causes which
soon afterwards broke up the West exactly as the East was already
broken. Benton was not one of the few statesmen who have left the
indelible marks of their own individuality upon our history; but he was,
perhaps, the most typical representative of the statesmanship of the
Middle West at the time when the latter gave the tone to the political
thought of the entire Mississippi valley. The political school which he
represented came to its fullest development in the so-called Border
States of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri, and swayed the destinies of
the West so long as the states to the north as well as the states to the
south were content to accept the leadership of those that lay between
them. It came to an end and disappeared from sight when people north of
the Ohio at last set up their own standard, and when, after some
hesitation, the Border States threw in their lot with the other side and
concluded to follow the Southern communities, which they had hitherto
led. Benton was one of those public men who formulate and express,
rather than shape, the thought of the people who stand behind them and
whom they represent. A man of strong intellect and keen energy, he was
for many years the foremost representative of at least one phase of that
thought; being, also, a man of high principle and determined courage,
when a younger generation had grown up and the bent of the thought had
changed, he declined to change with it, bravely accepting political
defeat as the alternative, and going down without flinching a hair's
breadth from the ground on which he had always stood.
To understand his public actions as well as his political ideas and
principles it is, of course, necessary to know at least a little of the
men among whom he lived and from whom he sprang: the men who were the
first of our people to press out beyond the limits of the thirteen old
states; who filled Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Missouri, and who
for so long a time were the dominant class all through the West, until,
at last, the flood of Northeastern immigration completely swamped their
influence north of the Ohio, while along the Gulf coast the political
control slipped from their hands into the grasp of the great planter
class.
The wood-choppers, game-hunters, and Indian-fighters, who first came
over the mountains, were only the forerunners of the more regular
settlers who followed them; but these last had much the same attributes
as their predecessors. For many years after the settlements were firmly
rooted, the life of the settlers was still subject to all the perils of
the wilderness. Above all, the constant warfare in which they were
engaged for nearly thirty-five years, and which culminated in the battle
of New Orleans, left a deep and lasting imprint on their character.
Their incessant wars were waged almost wholly by the settlers
themselves, with comparatively little help from the federal government,
and with hardly any regular troops as allies. A backwoods levy, whether
raised to meet an Indian inroad or to march against the disciplined
armies of the British, was merely a force of volunteers, made up from
among the full-grown male settlers, who were induced to join either from
motives of patriotism, or from love of adventure, or because they felt
that their homes and belongings were in danger from which they could
only extricate them by their own prowess. Every settler thus became more
or less of a soldier, was always expert with the rifle, and was taught
to rely upon his own skill and courage for his protection. But the
military service in which he was from time to time engaged was of such a
lawless kind, and was carried on with such utter absence of discipline,
that it did not accustom him in the least to habits of self-command, or
render him inclined to brook the exercise of authority by an outsider;
so that the Western people grew up with warlike traditions and habits of
thought, accustomed to give free rein to their passions, and to take
into their own hands the avenging of real or supposed wrongs, but
without any of the love for order and for acting in concert with their
fellows which characterize those who have seen service in regular
armies. On the contrary, the chief effect of this long-continued and
harassing Border warfare was to make more marked the sullen and almost
defiant self-reliance of the pioneer, and to develop his peculiarly
American spirit of individual self-sufficiency, his impatience of
outside interference or control, to a degree not known elsewhere, even
on this continent. It also gave a distinct military cast to his way of
looking at territory which did not belong to him. He stood where he was
because he was a conqueror; he had wrested his land by force from its
rightful Indian lords; he fully intended to repeat the same feat as soon
as he should reach the Spanish lands lying to the west and southwest; he
would have done so in the case of French Louisiana if it had not been
that the latter was purchased, and was thus saved from being taken by
force of arms. This belligerent, or, more properly speaking, piratical
way of looking at neighboring territory, was very characteristic of the
West, and was at the root of the doctrine of "manifest destiny."
All the early settlers, and most of those who came after them, were
poor, living narrow lives fraught with great hardship, and varying
between toil and half-aimless roving; even when the conditions of their
life became easier it was some time before the influence of their old
existence ceased to make itself felt in their way of looking at things.
The first pioneers were, it is true, soon followed by great
slave-owners; and by degrees there grew up a clan of large landed
proprietors and stock-raisers, akin to the planter caste which was so
all-powerful along the coast; but it was never relatively either so
large or so influential as the latter, and was not separated from the
rest of the white population by anything like so wide a gap as that
which, in the Southern Atlantic and Gulf States, marked the difference
between the rich growers of cotton, rice, and sugar, and the squalid
"poor whites" or "crackers."
The people of the Border States were thus mainly composed of small
land-owners, scattered throughout the country; they tilled their small
farms for themselves, were hewers of their own wood, and drawers of
their own water, and for generations remained accustomed to and skillful
in the use of the rifle. The pioneers of the Middle West were not
dwellers in towns; they kept to the open country, where each man could
shift for himself without help or hindrance from his neighbors, scorning
the irksome restraints and the lack of individual freedom of city life.
They built but few cities of any size; the only two really important
ones of whose inhabitants they formed any considerable part, St. Louis
and New Orleans, were both founded by the French long before our people
came across the mountains into the Mississippi valley. Their life was
essentially a country life, alike for the rich and for the bulk of the
population. The few raw frontier towns and squalid, straggling villages
were neither seats of superior culture nor yet centres for the
distribution of educated thought, as in the North. Large tracts of land
remained always populated by a class of backwoodsmen differing but
little from the first comers. Such was the district from which grand,
simple old Davy Crockett went to Washington as a Whig congressman; and
perhaps there was never a quainter figure in our national legislature
than that of the grim old rifleman, who shares with Daniel Boone the
honor of standing foremost in the list of our mighty hunters. Crockett
and his kind had little in common with the men who ruled supreme in the
politics of most of the Southern States; and even at this day many of
their descendants in the wooded mountain land are Republicans; for when
the Middle States had lost the control of the West, and when those who
had hitherto followed such leaders as Jackson, Clay, and Benton, drifted
with the tide that set so strongly to the South, it was only the men of
the type of dogged, stubborn old Crockett who dared to make head against
it. But, indeed, one of the characteristics of the people with whom we
are dealing was the slowness and suspicion with which they received a
new idea, and the tenacity with which they clung to one that they had at
last adopted.
They were above all a people of strong, virile character, certain to
make their weight felt either for good or for evil. They had many
virtues which can fairly be called great, and their faults were equally
strongly marked. They were not a thrifty people, nor one given to
long-sustained, drudging work; there were not then, nor are there now,
to be found in this land such comfortable, prosperous homes and farms as
those which dot all the country where dwell the men of Northeastern
stock. They were not, as a rule, even ordinarily well educated; the
public school formed no such important feature in their life as it did
in the life of their fellow-citizens farther north. They had narrow,
bitter prejudices and dislikes; the hard and dangerous lives they had
led had run their character into a stern and almost forbidding mould.
They valued personal prowess very highly, and respected no man who did
not possess the strongest capacity for self-help, and who could not
shift for himself in any danger. They felt an intense, although perhaps
ignorant, pride in and love for their country, and looked upon all the
lands hemming in the United States as territory which they or their
children should some day inherit; for they were a race of masterful
spirit, and accustomed to regard with easy tolerance any but the most
flagrant violations of law. They prized highly such qualities as
courage, loyalty, truth, and patriotism, but they were, as a whole,
poor, and not over-scrupulous of the rights of others, nor yet with the
nicest sense of money obligations; so that the history of their state
legislation affecting the rights of debtor and creditor, whether public
or private, in hard times, is not pleasant reading for an American who
is proud of his country. Their passions, once roused, were intense, and
if they really wished anything they worked for it with indomitable
persistency. There was little that was soft or outwardly attractive in
their character: it was stern, rude, and hard, like the lives they led;
but it was the character of those who were every inch men, and who were
Americans through to the very heart's core.
In their private lives their lawless and arrogant freedom and lack of
self-restraint produced much gross licentiousness and barbarous cruelty;
and every little frontier community could tell its story of animal
savagery as regards the home relations of certain of its members. Yet in
spite of this they, as a whole, felt the family ties strongly, and in
the main had quite a high standard of private morality. Many of them, at
any rate, were, according to their lights, deeply and sincerely
religious; though even their religion showed their strong,
coarse-fibred, narrow natures. Episcopalianism was the creed of the rich
slave-owner, who dwelt along the sea-board; but the Western settlers
belonged to some one or other of the divisions of the great Methodist
and Baptist churches. They were as savagely in earnest about this as
about everything else; meekness, mildness, broad liberality, and gentle
tolerance of difference in religious views were not virtues they
appreciated. They were always ready to do battle for their faith, and,
indeed, had to do it, as it was quite a common amusement for the wilder
and more lawless members of the community to try to break up by force
the great camp-meetings, which formed so conspicuous a feature in the
social and religious life of the country. For even irreligion took the
form of active rebellion against God, rather than disbelief in his
existence.
Physically they were, and are, especially in Kentucky, the finest
members of our race; an examination of the statistics relating to the
volunteers in the Civil War shows that the natives of no other state,
and the men from no foreign country whatsoever, came up to them in
bodily development.
Such a people, in choosing men to represent them in the national
councils, would naturally pay small heed to refined, graceful, and
cultivated statesmanship; their allegiance would be given to men of
abounding vitality, of rugged intellect, and of indomitable will. No
better or more characteristic possessor of these attributes could be
imagined than Thomas Benton.