BENTON'S EARLY LIFE AND ENTRY INTO THE SENATE.
Thomas Hart Benton was born on March 14, 1782, near Hillsborough, in
Orange County, North Carolina,--the same state that fifteen years
before, almost to a day, had seen the birth of the great political chief
whose most prominent supporter he in after life became. Benton, however,
came of good colonial stock; and his early surroundings were not
characterized by the squalid poverty that marked Jackson's, though the
difference in the social condition of the two families was of small
consequence on the frontier, where caste was, and is, almost unknown,
and social equality is not a mere figure of speech--particularly it was
not so at that time in the Southwest, where there were no servants,
except black slaves, and where even what in the North would be called
"hired help" was almost an unknown quantity.
Benton's father, who was a lawyer in good standing at the North Carolina
bar, died when the boy was very young, leaving him to be brought up by
his Virginian mother. She was a woman of force, and, for her time, of
much education. She herself began the training of her son's mind,
studying with him history and biography, while he also, of course, had
access to his father's law library. The home in which he was brought up
was, for that time and for that part of the country, straightlaced; his
mother, though a Virginian, had many traits which belonged rather to the
descendants of the Puritans, and possessed both their strength of
character and their austerely religious spirit. Although living in a
roistering age, among a class peculiarly given to all the coarser kinds
of pleasure, and especially to drink and every form of gambling, she
nevertheless preserved the most rigid decorum and morality in her own
household, frowning especially upon all intemperance, and never
permitting a pack of cards to be found within her doors. She was greatly
beloved and respected by the son, whose mind she did so much to mould,
and she lived to see him become one of the foremost statesmen of the
country.
Young Benton was always fond of reading. He began his studies at home,
and continued them at a grammar school taught by a young New Englander
of good ability, a very large proportion of the school-teachers of the
country then coming from New England; indeed, school-teachers and
peddlers were, on the whole, the chief contributions made by the
Northeast to the _personnel_ of the new Southwest. Benton then began a
course at Chapel Hill, the University of North Carolina, but broke off
before completing it, as his mother decided to move her family westward
to the almost unbroken wilderness near Nashville, Tennessee, where his
father had left them a large tract of land. But he was such an
insatiable student and reader that he rapidly acquired a very extensive
knowledge, not only of law, but of history and even of Latin and English
literature, and thus became a well-read and cultivated, indeed a
learned, man; though his frequent displays of learning and knowledge
were sometimes marked by a trace of that self-complacent, amusing
pedantry so apt to characterize a really well-educated man who lives in
a community in which he believes, and with which he has thoroughly
identified himself, but whose members are for the most part below the
average in mental cultivation.
The Bentons founded a little town, named after them, and in which, of
course, they took their position as leaders and rich landed proprietors.
It lay on the very outskirts of the Indian country; indeed, the great
war trail of the Southern Indians led right through the settlement, and
they at all times swarmed around it. The change from the still somewhat
rude civilization of North Carolina to the wildness on the border was
far less abrupt and startling then than would be the case under similar
circumstances now, and the Bentons soon identified themselves completely
with the life and interests of the people around them. They even
abandoned the Episcopalianism of their old home, and became Methodists,
like their neighbors. Young Benton himself had his hands full, at first,
in attending to his great backwoods farm, tilled by slaves, and in
pushing the growth of the settlement by building first a rude log
school-house (he himself taught school at one time, while studying law),
and a meeting-house of the same primitive construction, then mills,
roads, bridges, and so forth. The work hardened and developed him, and
he readily enough turned into a regular frontiersman of the better and
richer sort. The neighboring town of Nashville was a raw, pretentious
place, where horse-racing, cock-fighting, gambling, whiskey-drinking,
and the various coarse vices which masquerade as pleasures in frontier
towns, all throve in rank luxuriance. It was somewhat of a change from
Benton's early training, but he took to it kindly, and though never a
vicious or debauched man, he bore his full share in the savage brawls,
the shooting and stabbing affrays, which went to make up one of the
leading features in the excessively unattractive social life of the
place and epoch.
At that time dueling prevailed more or less throughout the United
States, and in the South and West to an extent never before or since
attained. On the frontier, not only did every man of spirit expect now
and then to be called on to engage in a duel, but he also had to make up
his mind to take occasional part in bloody street-fights. Tennessee, the
state where Benton then had his home, was famous for the affrays that
took place within its borders; and that they were common enough among
the people at large may be gathered from the fact that they were of
continual occurrence among judges, high state officials, and in the very
legislature itself, where senators and assemblymen were always becoming
involved in undignified rows and foolish squabbles, apparently without
fear of exciting any unfavorable comment, as witness Davy Crockett's
naive account of his early experiences as a backwoods member of the
Tennessee assembly. Like Jackson, Benton killed his man in a duel. This
was much later, in 1817, when he was a citizen of Missouri. His
opponent was a lawyer named Lucas. They fought twice, on Bloody Island,
near St. Louis. On the first occasion both were wounded; on the second
Lucas was killed. The latter came of a truculent family. A recent
biographer of his father, Judge John R. Lucas, remarks, with refreshing
unconsciousness of the grotesque humor of the chronicle: "This gentleman
was one of the most remarkable men who ever settled west of the
Mississippi River.... Towards the close of his life Judge Lucas became
melancholy and dejected--the result of domestic affliction, for six of
his sons met death by violence." One feels curious to know how the other
sons died.
But the most famous of Benton's affrays was that with Jackson himself,
in 1813. This rose out of a duel of laughable rather than serious
character, in which Benton's brother was worsted by General Carroll,
afterwards one of Jackson's lieutenants at New Orleans. The encounter
itself took place between the Benton brothers on one side, and on the
other, Jackson, General Coffee, also of New Orleans fame, and another
friend. The place was a great rambling Nashville inn, and the details
were so intricate that probably not even the participants themselves
knew exactly what had taken place, while all the witnesses impartially
contradicted each other and themselves. At any rate, Jackson was shot
and Benton was pitched headlong down-stairs, and all the other
combatants were more or less damaged; but it ended in Jackson being
carried off by his friends, leaving the Bentons masters of the field,
where they strutted up and down and indulged in a good deal of loud
bravado. Previous to this Benton and Jackson had been on the best of
terms, and although there was naturally a temporary break in their
friendship, yet it proved strong enough in the end to stand even such a
violent wrench as that given by this preposterously senseless and almost
fatal brawl. They not only became completely reconciled, but eventually
even the closest and warmest of personal and political friends; for
Benton was as generous and forgiving as he was hot-tempered, and
Jackson's ruder nature was at any rate free from any small meanness or
malice.
In spite of occasional interludes of this kind, which must have given a
rather ferocious fillip to his otherwise monotonous life, Benton
completed his legal studies, was admitted to the bar, and began to
practice as a frontier lawyer at Franklin. Very soon, however, he for
the first time entered the more congenial field of politics, and in 1811
served a single term in the lower house of the Tennessee legislature.
Even thus early he made his mark. He had a bill passed introducing the
circuit system into the state judiciary, a reform of much importance,
especially to the poorer class of litigants; and he also introduced, and
had enacted into a law, a bill providing that a slave should have the
same right to the full benefit of a jury trial as would a white man
suffering under the same accusation. This last measure is noteworthy as
foreshadowing the position which Benton afterwards took in national
politics, where he appeared as a slave-holder, it is true, but as one of
the most enlightened and least radical of his class. Its passage also
showed the tendency of Southern opinion at the time, which was
undoubtedly in the direction of bettering the condition of the blacks,
though the events of the next few years produced such a violent
revulsion of feeling concerning the negro race that this current of
public opinion was completely reversed. Benton, however, was made of
sturdy stuff, and as he grew older his views on the question did not
alter as did those of most of his colleagues.
Shortly after he left the legislature the War of 1812 broke out, and its
events impressed on Benton another of what soon became his cardinal
principles. The war was brought on by the South and West, the Democrats
all favoring it, while the Federalists, forming the then
anti-Democratic party, especially in the Northeast, opposed it; and
finally their more extreme members, at the famous Hartford Convention,
passed resolutions supposed to tend towards the dissolution of the
Union, and which brought upon the party the bitter condemnation of their
antagonists. Says Benton himself: "At the time of its first appearance
the right of secession was repulsed and repudiated by the Democracy
generally.... The leading language in respect to it south of the Potomac
was that no state had a right to withdraw from the Union, ... and that
any attempt to dissolve it, or to obstruct the action of constitutional
laws, was treason. If since that time political parties and sectional
localities have exchanged attitudes on this question, it cannot alter
the question of right." For, having once grasped an idea and made it his
own, Benton clung to it with unyielding tenacity, no matter whether it
was or was not abandoned by the majority of those with whom he had been
in the habit of acting.
Thus early Benton's political character became moulded into the shape
which it ever afterwards retained. He was a slave-holder, but as
advanced as a slave-holder could be; he remained to a certain extent a
Southerner, but his Southernism was of the type prevalent immediately
after the Revolution, and not of the kind that came to the fore prior to
the Rebellion. He was much more a Westerner in his feelings, and more
than all else he was emphatically a Union man.
Like every other hot spirit of the West--and the West was full of little
but hot spirits--Benton heartily favored the War of 1812. He served as a
colonel of volunteers under Jackson, but never saw actual fighting, and
his short term of soldiership was of no further account than to furnish
an excuse to Polk, thirty-five years later, for nominating him
commanding general in the time of the Mexican War,--an incident which,
as the nomination was rejected, may be regarded as merely ludicrous, the
gross impropriety of the act safely defying criticism. He was of genuine
use, however, in calling on and exciting the volunteers to come forward;
for he was a fluent speaker, of fine presence, and his pompous
self-sufficiency was rather admired than otherwise by the frontiersmen,
while his force, energy, and earnestness commanded their respect. He
also, when Jackson's reckless impetuosity got him into a snarl with the
feeble national administration, whose imbecile incapacity to carry on
the war became day by day more painfully evident, went to Washington,
and there finally extricated his chief by dint of threatening that, if
"justice" was not done him, Tennessee would, in future political
contests, be found ranged with the administration's foes. For Benton
already possessed political influence, and being, like most of his
class, anti-Federalist, or Democratic, in sentiment, was therefore of
the same party as the people at Washington, and was a man whose
representations would have some weight with them.
During his stay in Tennessee Benton's character was greatly influenced
by his being thrown into close contact with many of the extraordinary
men who then or afterwards made their mark in the strange and
picturesque annals of the Southwest. Jackson even thus early loomed up
as the greatest and arch-typical representative of his people and his
section. The religious bent of the time was shown in the life of the
grand, rugged old Methodist, Peter Cartwright, who, in the far-off
backwoods, was a preacher and practical exponent of "muscular
Christianity" half a century before the day when, under Bishop Selwyn
and Charles Kingsley, it became a cult among the most highly civilized
classes of England. There was David Crockett, rifleman and congressman,
doomed to a tragic and heroic death in that remarkable conflict of which
it was said at the time, that "Thermopylae had its messengers of death,
but the Alamo had none;" and there was Houston, who, after a singular
and romantic career, became the greatest of the statesmen and soldiers
of Texas. It was these men, and their like, who, under the shadow of
world-old forests and in the sunlight of the great, lonely plains,
wrought out the destinies of a nation and a continent, and who, with
their rude war-craft and state-craft, solved problems that, in the
importance of their results, dwarf the issues of all European struggles
since the day of Waterloo as completely as the Punic wars in their
outcome threw into the shade the consequences of the wars waged at the
same time between the different Greek monarchies.
Benton, in his mental training, came much nearer to the statesmen of the
sea-board, and was far better bred and better educated, than the rest of
the men around him. But he was, and was felt by them to be, thoroughly
one of their number, and the most able expounder of their views; and it
is just because he is so completely the type of a great and important
class, rather than because even of his undoubted and commanding ability
as a statesman, that his life and public services will always repay
study. His vanity and boastfulness were faults which he shared with
almost all his people; and, after all, if they overrated the
consequence of their own deeds, the deeds, nevertheless, did possess
great importance, and their fault was slight compared to that committed
by some of us at the present day, who have gone to the opposite extreme
and try to belittle the actions of our fathers. Benton was deeply imbued
with the masterful, overbearing spirit of the West,--a spirit whose
manifestations are not always agreeable, but the possession of which is
certainly a most healthy sign of the virile strength of a young
community. He thoroughly appreciated that he was helping to shape the
future of a country, whose wonderful development is the most important
feature in the history of the nineteenth century; the non-appreciation
of which fact is in itself sufficient utterly to disqualify any American
statesman from rising to the first rank.
It was not in Tennessee, however, that Benton rose to political
prominence, for shortly after the close of the war he crossed the
Mississippi and made his permanent home in the territory of Missouri.
Missouri was then our extreme western outpost, and its citizens
possessed the characteristic western traits to an even exaggerated
extent. The people were pushing, restless, and hardy; they were lawless
and violent to a degree. In spite of the culture and education of some
families, society, as a whole, was marked by florid unconventionality
and rawness. The general and widespread intemperance of the judges and
high officials of state was even more marked than their proclivities for
brawling. The lawyers, as usual, furnished the bulk of the politicians;
success at the bar depended less upon learning than upon "push" and
audacity. The fatal feuds between individuals and families were as
frequent and as bloody as among Highland clans a century before. The
following quotations are taken at random from a work on the Bench and
Bar of Missouri, by an ex-judge of its supreme court: "A man by the name
of Hiram K. Turk, and four sons, settled in 1839 near Warsaw, and a
personal difficulty occurred between them and a family of the name of
Jones, resulting in the death of one or two. The people began to take
sides with one or the other, and finally a general outbreak took place,
in which many were killed, resulting in a general reign of terror and of
violence beyond the power of the law to subdue." The social annals of
this pleasant town of Warsaw could not normally have been dull; in 1844,
for instance, they were enlivened by Judge Cherry and Senator Major
fighting to the death on one of its principal streets, the latter being
slain. The judges themselves were by no means bigoted in their support
of law and order. "In those days it was common for people to settle
their quarrels during court week.... Judge Allen took great delight in
these exhibitions, and would at any time adjourn his court to witness
one.... He (Allen) always traveled with a holster of large pistols in
front of his saddle, and a knife with a blade at least a foot long."
Hannibal Chollop was no mere creature of fancy; on the contrary, his
name was legion, and he flourished rankly in every town throughout the
Mississippi valley. But, after all, this ruffianism was really not a
whit worse in its effects on the national character than was the case
with certain of the "universal peace" and "non-resistance" developments
in the Northeastern States; in fact, it was more healthy. A class of
professional non-combatants is as hurtful to the real, healthy growth of
a nation as is a class of fire-eaters; for a weakness or folly is
nationally as bad as a vice, or worse; and, in the long run, a Quaker
may be quite as undesirable a citizen as is a duelist. No man who is not
willing to bear arms and to fight for his rights can give a good reason
why he should be entitled to the privilege of living in a free
community. The decline of the militant spirit in the Northeast during
the first half of this century was much to be regretted. To it is due,
more than to any other cause, the undoubted average individual
inferiority of the Northern compared to the Southern troops; at any
rate, at the beginning of the great war of the Rebellion. The
Southerners, by their whole mode of living, their habits, and their love
of out-door sports, kept up their warlike spirit; while in the North the
so-called upper classes developed along the lines of a wealthy and timid
bourgeoisie type, measuring everything by a mercantile standard (a
peculiarly debasing one if taken purely by itself), and submitting to be
ruled in local affairs by low foreign mobs, and in national matters by
their arrogant Southern kinsmen. The militant spirit of these last
certainly stood them in good stead in the Civil War. The world has never
seen better soldiers than those who followed Lee; and their leader will
undoubtedly rank as without any exception the very greatest of all the
great captains that the English-speaking peoples have brought forth--and
this, although the last and chief of his antagonists may himself claim
to stand as the full equal of Marlborough and Wellington.
The other Western States still kept touch on the old colonial
communities of the sea-coast, having a second or alternative outlet
through Louisiana, newly acquired by the United States, it is true, but
which was nevertheless an old settled land. Missouri, however, had lost
all connection with the sea-coast, and though, through her great river
towns, swarming with raftsmen and flat-boatmen, she drove her main and
most thriving trade with the other Mississippi cities, yet her restless
and adventure-loving citizens were already seeking other outlets for
their activity, and were establishing trade relations with the Mexicans;
being thus the earliest among our people to come into active contact
with the Hispano-Indian race from whom we afterwards wrested so large a
part of their inheritance. Missouri was thrust out beyond the
Mississippi into the vast plains-country of the Far West, and except on
the river-front was completely isolated, being flanked on every side by
great stretches of level wilderness, inhabited by roaming tribes of
warlike Indians. Thus for the first time the borderers began to number
in their ranks plainsmen as well as backwoodsmen. In such a community
there were sure to be numbers of men anxious to take part in any
enterprise that united the chance of great pecuniary gain with the
certainty of even greater personal risk, and both these conditions were
fulfilled in the trading expeditions pushed out from Missouri across the
trackless wastes lying between it and the fringe of Mexican settlements
on the Rio del Norte. The route followed by these caravans, which
brought back furs and precious metals, soon became famous under the name
of the Santa Fe trail; and the story of the perils, hardships, and gains
of the adventurous traders who followed it would make one of the most
striking chapters of American history.
Among such people Benton's views and habits of thought became more
markedly Western and ultra-American than ever, especially in regard to
our encroachments upon the territory of neighboring powers. The general
feeling in the West upon this last subject afterwards crystallized into
what became known as the "Manifest Destiny" idea, which, reduced to its
simplest terms, was: that it was our manifest destiny to swallow up the
land of all adjoining nations who were too weak to withstand us; a
theory that forthwith obtained immense popularity among all statesmen of
easy international morality. It cannot be too often repeated that no one
can understand even the domestic, and more especially the foreign,
policy of Benton and his school without first understanding the
surroundings amidst which they had been brought up and the people whose
chosen representatives they were. Recent historians, for instance,
always speak as if our grasping after territory in the Southwest was
due solely to the desire of the Southerners to acquire lands out of
which to carve new slave-holding states, and as if it was merely a move
in the interests of the slave-power. This is true enough so far as the
motives of Calhoun, Tyler, and the other public leaders of the Gulf and
southern sea-board states were concerned. But the hearty Western support
given to the movement was due to entirely different causes, the chief
among them being the fact that the Westerners honestly believed
themselves to be indeed created the heirs of the earth, or at least of
so much of it as was known by the name of North America, and were
prepared to struggle stoutly for the immediate possession of their
heritage.
One of Benton's earliest public utterances was in regard to a matter
which precisely illustrates this feeling. It was while Missouri was
still a territory, and when Benton, then a prominent member of the St.
Louis bar, had by his force, capacity, and power as a public speaker
already become well known among his future constituents. The treaty with
Spain, by which we secured Florida, was then before the Senate, which
body had to consider it several times, owing to the dull irresolution
and sloth of the Spanish government in ratifying it. The bounds it gave
us were far too narrow to suit the more fiery Western spirits, and these
cheered Benton to the echo when he attacked it in public with fierce
vehemence. "The magnificent valley of the Mississippi is ours, with all
its fountains, springs, and floods; and woe to the statesman who shall
undertake to surrender one drop of its water, one inch of its soil to
any foreign power." So he said, his words ringing with the boastful
confidence so well liked by the masterful men of the West, strong in
their youth, and proudly conscious of their strength. The treaty was
ratified in the Senate, nevertheless, all the old Southern States
favoring it, and the only votes at any stage recorded against it being
of four Western senators, coming respectively from Ohio, Kentucky,
Tennessee, and Louisiana. So that in 1818, at any rate, the desire for
territorial aggrandizement at the expense of Maine or Mexico was common
to the West as a whole, both to the free and the slave states, and was
not exclusively favored by the Southerners. The only effect of Benton's
speech was to give rise to the idea that he was hostile to the Southern
and Democratic administration at Washington, and against this feeling he
had to contend in the course of his successful candidacy for the United
States senatorship the following year, when Missouri was claiming
admittance to the Union.
It was in reference to this matter of admitting Missouri that the
slavery question for the first time made its appearance in national
politics, where it threw everything into confusion and for the moment
overshadowed all else; though it vanished almost as quickly as it had
appeared, and did not again come to the front for several years. The
Northerners, as a whole, desiring to "restrict" the growth of slavery
and the slave-power, demanded that Missouri, before being admitted as a
state, should abolish slavery within her boundaries. The South was
equally determined that she should be admitted as a slave state; and for
the first time the politicians of the country divided on geographical
rather than on party lines, though the division proved but temporary,
and was of but little interest except as foreshadowing what was to come
a score of years later. Even within the territory itself the same
contest was carried on with the violence bred by political conflicts in
frontier states, there being a very respectable "restriction" party,
which favored abolition. Benton was himself a slave-holder, and as the
question was in no way one between the East and the West, or between the
Union as a whole and any part of it, he naturally gave full swing to his
Southern feelings, and entered with tremendous vigor into the contest on
the anti-restriction side. So successful were his efforts, and so great
was the majority of the Missourians who sympathized with him, that the
restrictionists were completely routed and succeeded in electing but one
delegate to the constitutional convention. In Congress the matter was
finally settled by the passage of the famous Missouri Compromise bill, a
measure Southern in its origin, but approved at the time by many if not
most Northerners, and disapproved by not a few Southerners. Benton
heartily believed in it, announcing somewhat vaguely that he was
"equally opposed to slavery agitation and to slavery extension." By its
terms Missouri was admitted as a slave state, while slavery was
abolished in all the rest of the old province of Louisiana lying north
and west of it and north of the parallel of 36 deg. 30'. Owing to an
objectionable clause in its Constitution, the admission was not fully
completed until 1821, and then only through the instrumentality of Henry
Clay. But Benton took his seat immediately, and entered on his thirty
years' of service in the United States Senate. His appearance in
national politics was thus coincident with the appearance of the
question which, it is true, almost immediately sank out of sight for a
period of fifteen years, but which then reappeared to stay for good and
to become of progressively absorbing importance, until, combining
itself with the still greater question of national unity, it dwarfed all
other issues, cleft the West as well as the East asunder, and, as one of
its minor results, brought about the political downfall of Benton
himself and of his whole school in what were called the Border States.
Before entering the Senate, Benton did something which well illustrates
his peculiar uprightness, and the care which he took to keep his public
acts free from the least suspicion of improper influence. When he was at
the bar in St. Louis, real estate litigation was much the most important
branch of legal business. The condition of Missouri land-titles was very
mixed, since many of them were based upon the thousands of "concessions"
of land made by the old French and Spanish governments, which had been
ratified by Congress, but subject to certain conditions which the Creole
inhabitants, being ignorant and lawless, had generally failed to
fulfill. By an act of Congress these inchoate claims were to be brought
before the United States recorder of land titles; and the Missouri bar
were divided as to what action should be taken on them, the majority
insisting that they should be held void, while Benton headed the
opposite party, which was averse to forfeiting property on technical
grounds, and advocated the confirmation of every honest claim. Further
and important legislation was needed to provide for these claims.
Benton, being much the most influential member of the bar who had
advocated the confirmation of the claims, and being so able, honest, and
energetic, was the favorite counsel of the claimants, and had hundreds
of their titles under his professional charge. Of course in such cases
the compensation of the lawyer depended solely upon his success; and
success to Benton would have meant wealth. Nevertheless, and though his
action was greatly to his own pecuniary hurt, the first thing he did
when elected senator was to convene his clients, and tell them that
henceforth he could have nothing more to do, as their attorney, with the
prosecution of their claims, giving as his reason that their success
largely depended upon the action of Congress, of which he was now
himself a member, so that he was bound to consult, not any private
interest, but the good of the community as a whole. He even refused to
designate his successor in the causes, saying that he was determined not
only to be quite unbiased in acting upon the subject of these claims as
senator, but not to have, nor to be suspected of having, any personal
interest in the fate of any of them. Many a modern statesman might most
profitably copy his sensitiveness.