THE SLAVE QUESTION APPEARS IN POLITICS.
Towards the close of Jackson's administration, slavery for the first
time made its permanent appearance in national politics; although for
some years yet it had little or no influence in shaping the course of
political movements. In 1833 the abolition societies of the North came
into prominence; they had been started a couple of years previously.
Black slavery was such a grossly anachronistic and un-American form of
evil, that it is difficult to discuss calmly the efforts to abolish it,
and to remember that many of these efforts were calculated to do, and
actually did, more harm than good. We are also very apt to forget that
it was perfectly possible and reasonable for enlightened and virtuous
men, who fully recognized it as an evil, yet to prefer its continuance
to having it interfered with in a way that would produce even worse
results. Black slavery in Hayti was characterized by worse abuse than
ever was the case in the United States; yet, looking at the condition
of that republic now, it may well be questioned whether it would not
have been greatly to her benefit in the end to have had slavery continue
a century or so longer,--its ultimate extinction being certain,--rather
than to have had her attain freedom as she actually did, with the
results that have flowed from her action. When an evil of colossal size
exists, it is often the case that there is no possible way of dealing
with it that will not itself be fraught with baleful results. Nor can
the ultra-philanthropic method be always, or even often, accepted as the
best. If there is one question upon which the philanthropists of the
present day, especially the more emotional ones, are agreed, it is that
any law restricting Chinese immigration is an outrage; yet it seems
incredible that any man of even moderate intelligence should not see
that no greater calamity could now befall the United States than to have
the Pacific slope fill up with a Mongolian population.
The cause of the Abolitionists has had such a halo shed round it by the
after course of events, which they themselves in reality did very little
to shape, that it has been usual to speak of them with absurdly
exaggerated praise. Their courage, and for the most part their
sincerity, cannot be too highly spoken of, but their share in
abolishing slavery was far less than has commonly been represented; any
single non-abolitionist politician, like Lincoln or Seward, did more
than all the professional Abolitionists combined really to bring about
its destruction. The abolition societies were only in a very restricted
degree the causes of the growing feeling in the North against slavery;
they are rather to be regarded as themselves manifestations or
accompaniments of that feeling. The anti-slavery outburst in the
Northern States over the admission of Missouri took place a dozen years
before there was an abolition society in existence; and the influence of
the professional abolitionists upon the growth of the anti-slavery
sentiment as often as not merely warped it and twisted it out of proper
shape,--as when at one time they showed a strong inclination to adopt
disunion views, although it was self-evident that by no possibility
could slavery be abolished unless the Union was preserved. Their
tendency towards impracticable methods was well shown in the position
they assumed towards him who was not only the greatest American, but
also the greatest man, of the nineteenth century; for during all the
terrible four years that sad, strong, patient Lincoln worked and
suffered for the people, he had to dread the influence of the extreme
Abolitionists only less than that of the Copperheads. Many of their
leaders possessed no good qualities beyond their fearlessness and
truth--qualities that were also possessed by the Southern fire-eaters.
They belonged to that class of men that is always engaged in some
agitation or other; only it happened that in this particular agitation
they were right. Wendell Phillips may be taken as a very good type of
the whole. His services against slavery prior to the war should always
be remembered with gratitude; but after the war, and until the day of
his death, his position on almost every public question was either
mischievous or ridiculous, and usually both.
When the abolitionist movement started it was avowedly designed to be
cosmopolitan in character; the originators looked down upon any merely
national or patriotic feeling. This again deservedly took away from
their influence. In fact, it would have been most unfortunate had the
majority of the Northerners been from the beginning in hearty accord
with the Abolitionists; at the best it would have resulted at that time
in the disruption of the Union and the perpetuation of slavery in the
South.
But after all is said, the fact remains, that on the main issue the
Abolitionists were at least working in the right direction. Sooner or
later, by one means or another, slavery had to go. It is beyond doubt a
misfortune that in certain districts the bulk of the population should
be composed of densely ignorant negroes, often criminal or vicious in
their instincts; but such is the case, and the best, and indeed the only
proper course to pursue, is to treat them with precisely the same
justice that is meted out to whites. The effort to do so in time
immediately past has not resulted so successfully as was hoped and
expected; but nevertheless no other way would have worked as well.
Slavery was chiefly responsible for the streak of coarse and brutal
barbarism which ran through the Southern character, and which marked the
ferocious outcry instantly raised by the whole Southern press against
the Abolitionists. There had been an abortive negro rising in Virginia
almost at the same time that the abolitionist movement first came into
prominence; and this fact added to the rage and terror with which the
South regarded the latter. The clamor against the North was deafening;
and though it soon subsided for the time being, it never afterwards
entirely died away. As has been shown already, there had always been a
strong separatist feeling in the South; but hitherto its manifestations
had been local and sporadic, never affecting all the states at the same
time; for it had never happened that the cause which called forth any
particular manifestation was one bearing on the whole South alike. The
alien and sedition laws were more fiercely resented in Virginia and
Kentucky than in South Carolina; the tariff, which so angered the
latter, pleased Louisiana; and Georgia and Alabama alone were affected
by the presence of great Indian communities within their borders. But
slavery was an interest common to the whole South. When it was felt to
be in any way menaced, all Southerners came together for its protection;
and, from the time of the rise of the Abolitionists onward, the
separatist movement throughout the South began to identify itself with
the maintenance of slavery, and gradually to develop greater and greater
strength. Its growth was furthered and hastened by the actions of the
more ambitious and unscrupulous of the Southern politicians, who saw
that it offered a chance for them to push themselves forward, and who
were perfectly willing to wreak almost irreparable harm to the nation if
by so doing they could advance their own selfish interests. It was in
reference to these politicians that Benton quoted with approval a letter
from ex-President Madison, which ran:--
The danger is not to be concealed, that the sympathy arising from
known causes, and the inculcated impression of a permanent
incompatibility of interests between the South and the North may put
it in the power of popular leaders, aspiring to the highest
stations, to unite the South, on some critical occasion, in a course
that will end by creating a new theatre of great, though inferior,
interest. In pursuing this course the first and most obvious step is
nullification, the next secession, and the last a farewell
separation.
This was a pretty good forecast of the crisis that was precipitated by
the greedy and reckless ambition of the secessionist leaders in 1860.
The moral difference between Benedict Arnold on the one hand, and Aaron
Burr or Jefferson Davis on the other, is precisely the difference that
obtains between a politician who sells his vote for money and one who
supports a bad measure in consideration of being given some high
political position.
The Abolitionists immediately contrived to bring themselves before the
notice of Congress in two ways; by the presentation of petitions for the
abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, and by sending out to
the Southern States a shoal of abolition pamphlets, newspapers, and
rather ridiculous illustrated cuts. What the precise point of the last
proceeding was no one can tell; the circulation of such writings as
theirs in the South could not possibly serve any good purpose. But they
had a right to send what they wished, and the conduct of many of the
Southerners in trying to get a federal law passed to prohibit their
writings from being carried in the mail was as wrong as it was foolish;
while the brutal clamor raised in the South against the whole North as
well as against the Abolitionists, and the conduct of certain Southern
legislatures in practically setting prices on the heads of the leaders
in the objectionable movement, in turn angered the North and gave the
Abolitionists ten-fold greater strength than they would otherwise have
had.
The question first arose upon the presentation of a perfectly proper and
respectful petition sent to the Senate by a society of Pennsylvania
Quakers, and praying for the abolition of slavery in the District of
Columbia. The District was solely under the control of Congress, and was
the property of the nation at large, so that Congress was the proper and
the only body to which any petition concerning the affairs of the
District could be sent; and if the right of petition meant anything, it
certainly meant that the people, or any portion thereof, should have the
right to petition their representatives in regard to their own affairs.
Yet certain Southern extremists, under the lead of Calhoun, were
anxious to refuse to receive the paper. Benton voted in favor of
receiving it, and was followed in his action by a number of other
Southern senators. He spoke at length on the subject, and quite
moderately, even crediting the petitioners, or many of them, with being
"good people, aiming at benevolent objects, and endeavoring to
ameliorate the condition of one part of the human race, without
inflicting calamities on another part," which was going very far indeed
for a slave-holding senator of that time. He was of course totally
opposed to abolition and the Abolitionists, and showed that the only
immediate effect of the movement had been to make the lot of the slaves
still worse, and for the moment to do away with any chance of
intelligently discussing the question of emancipation. For, like many
other Southerners, he fondly cherished the idea of gradual peaceful
emancipation,--an idea which the course of events made wholly visionary,
but which, under the circumstances, might well have been realized. He
proceeded to give most questionable praise to the North for some acts as
outrageous and disgraceful as were ever perpetrated by its citizens,
stating that--
Their conduct was above all praise, above all thanks, above all
gratitude. They had chased off the foreign emissaries, silenced the
gabbling tongues of female dupes, and dispersed the assemblages,
whether fanatical, visionary, or incendiary, of all that congregated
to preach against evils that affected others, not themselves; and to
propose remedies to aggravate the disease which they had pretended
to cure. They had acted with a noble spirit. They had exerted a
vigor beyond all law. They had obeyed the enactments, not of the
statute-book, but of the heart.
These fervent encomiums were fully warranted by the acts of various
Northern mobs, that had maltreated abolitionist speakers, broken up
anti-slavery meetings, and committed numerous other deeds of lawless
violence. But however flattered the Northerners of that generation may
have been, in feeling that they thoroughly deserved Benton's eulogy, it
is doubtful if their descendants will take quite the same pride in
looking back to it. An amusing incident of the debate was Calhoun's
attack upon one of the most subservient allies the South ever had in the
Northern States; he caused to be sent up to the desk and read an
abolition paper published in New Hampshire, which contained a bitter
assault upon Franklin Pierce, then a member of Congress. Nominally he
took this course to show that there was much greater strength in the
abolition movement, and therefore much greater danger to the South, than
the Northern senators were willing to admit; in reality he seems to
have acted partly from wanton malice, partly from overbearing contempt
for the truckling allies and apologists of slavery in the North, and
partly from a desire not to see the discussion die out, but rather, in
spite of his continual profession to the contrary, to see it maintained
as a standing subject of irritation. He wished to refuse to receive the
petitions, on the ground that they touched a subject that ought not even
to be discussed; yet he must have known well that he was acting in the
very way most fitted to give rise to discussion,--a fact that was
pointed out to him by Benton, in a caustic speech. He also took the
ground that the question of emancipation affected the states
exclusively, and that Congress had no more jurisdiction over the subject
in the District of Columbia than she had in the State of North Carolina.
This precious contribution to the true interpretation of the
Constitution was so farcically and palpably false that it is incredible
that he should himself have believed what he was saying. He was still
smarting from the nullification controversy; he had seceded from his
party, and was sore with disappointed ambition; and it seems very
improbable that he was honest in his professions of regret at seeing
questions come up which would disturb the Union. On the contrary, much
of the opposition he was continually making to supposititious federal
and Northern encroachments on the rights of the South must have been
merely factious, and it seems likely that, partly from a feeling of
revenge and partly with the hope of gratifying his ambition, he was
anxious to do all he could to work the South up to the highest pitch of
irritation, and keep her there until there was a dissolution of the
Union. Benton evidently thought that this was the case; and in reading
the constant threats of nullification and secession which run through
all Calhoun's speeches, and the innumerable references he makes to the
alleged fact that he had come off victorious in his treasonable struggle
over the tariff in 1833, it is difficult not to accept Benton's view of
the matter. He always spoke of Calhoun with extreme aversion, and there
were probably moments when he was inclined heartily to sympathize with
Jackson's death-bed regret that he had not hung the South Carolina
Nullifier. Doubtless in private life, or as regards any financial
matters, Calhoun's conduct was always blameless; but it may well be that
he has received far more credit for purity of motive in his public
conduct than his actions fairly entitle him to.
Calhoun was also greatly exercised over the circulation of abolition
documents in the South. At his request a committee of five was appointed
to draft a bill on the subject; he was chairman, and three of the other
four members were from the Slave States; yet his report was so extreme
that only one of the latter would sign it with him. He introduced into
it a long argument to the effect that the Constitution was a mere
compact between sovereign states, and inferentially that nullification
and secession were justifiable and constitutional; and then drew a vivid
picture of the unspeakable horrors with which, as he contended, the
action of the Northern Abolitionists menaced the South. The bill
subjected to penalties any postmaster who should knowingly receive and
put into the mail any publication touching slavery, to go into any state
which had forbidden by law the circulation of such a publication. In
discussing this bill he asserted that Congress, in refusing to pass it,
would be cooeperating with the Abolitionists; and then he went on to
threaten as usual that in such case nullification or secession would
become necessary. Benton had become pretty well tired of these threats,
his attachment to the Union even exceeding his dislike to seeing slavery
meddled with; and he headed the list of half a dozen Southern senators
who joined with the bulk of the Northerners in defeating the bill,
which was lost by a vote of twenty-five to nineteen. A few of the
Northern "dough-faces" voted with Calhoun. There is a painfully striking
contrast between the courage shown by Benton, a slave-holder with a
slave-holding constituency, in opposing this bill, and the obsequious
subserviency to the extreme Southern feeling shown on the same occasion
by Wright, Van Buren, and Buchanan--fit representatives of the sordid
and odious political organizations of New York and Pennsylvania.
Several other questions came up towards the end of Jackson's
administration which were more or less remotely affected by the feeling
about slavery. Benton succeeded in getting a bill through to extend the
boundaries of the State of Missouri so as to take in territory lying
northwest of her previous limit, the Indian title to which was
extinguished by treaty. This annexed land lay north of the boundary for
slave territory established by the Missouri Compromise; but Benton
experienced no difficulty in getting his bill through. It was not,
however, in the least a move designed in the interests of the slave
power. Missouri's feeling was precisely that which would actuate Oregon
or Washington Territory to-day, if either wished to annex part of
Northern Idaho.
The territories of Arkansas and Michigan had applied for admission into
the Union as states; and as one would be a free and the other a slave
state, it was deemed proper that they should come in together. Benton
himself urged the admission of the free state of Michigan, while the
interests of Arkansas were confided to Buchanan of Pennsylvania. The
slavery question entered but little into the matter; although some
objections were raised on that score, as well as on account of the
irregular manner in which the would-be states had acted in preparing for
admission. The real ground of opposition to the admission of the two new
states was political, as it was known that they could both be relied
upon for Democratic majorities at the approaching presidential election.
Many Whigs, therefore, both from the North and the South, opposed it.
The final removal of the Cherokees from Georgia and Alabama was brought
about in 1836 by means of a treaty with those Indians. Largely through
the instrumentality of Benton, and in spite of the opposition of Clay,
Calhoun, and Webster, this instrument was ratified in the Senate by the
close vote of thirty-one to fifteen. Although new slave territory was
thus acquired, the vote on the treaty was factional and not sectional,
being equally divided between the Northern and the Southern States,
Calhoun and six other Southern senators opposing it, chiefly from
hostility to the administration. The removal of the Indians was probably
a necessity; undoubtedly it worked hardship in individual instances, but
on the whole it did not in the least retard the civilization of the
tribe, which was fully paid for its losses; and moreover, in its new
home, continued to make progress in every way until it became involved
in the great civil war, and received a setback from which it has not yet
recovered. These Cherokees were almost the last Indians left in any
number east of the Mississippi, and their removal solved the Indian
problem so far as the old states were concerned.
Later on Benton went to some trouble to disprove the common statement
that we have robbed the original Indian occupants of their lands. He
showed by actual statistics that up to 1840 we had paid to the Indians
eighty-five millions of dollars for land purchases, which was over five
times as much as the United States gave the great Napoleon for
Louisiana; and about three times as much as we paid France, Spain, and
Mexico together for the purchase of Louisiana, Florida, and California;
while the amount of land received in return would not equal any one of
these purchases, and was but a fractional part of Louisiana or
California. We paid the Cherokees for their territory exactly as much as
we paid the French, at the height of their power, for Louisiana; while
as to the Creek and Choctaw nations, we paid each more for their lands
than we paid for Louisiana and Florida combined. The dealings of the
government with the Indian have often been unwise, and sometimes unjust;
but they are very far indeed from being so black as is commonly
represented, especially when the tremendous difficulties of the case are
taken into account.
Far more important than any of these matters was the acknowledgment of
the independence of Texas; and in this, as well as in the troubles with
Mexico which sprang from it, slavery again played a prominent part,
although not nearly so important at first as has commonly been
represented. Doubtless the slave-holders worked hard to secure
additional territory out of which to form new slave states; but Texas
and California would have been in the end taken by us, had there not
been a single slave in the Mississippi valley. The greed for the
conquest of new lands which characterized the Western people had nothing
whatever to do with the fact that some of them owned slaves. Long before
there had been so much as the faintest foreshadowing of the importance
which the slavery question was to assume, the West had been eagerly
pressing on to territorial conquest, and had been chafing and fretting
at the restraint put upon it, and at the limits set to its strivings by
the treaties established with foreign powers. The first settlers beyond
the Alleghanies, and their immediate successors, who moved down along
the banks of the Ohio, the Cumberland, and the Tennessee, and thence out
to the Mississippi itself, were not generally slave-holders; but they
were all as anxious to wrest the Mississippi valley from the control of
the French as their descendants were to overrun the Spanish lands lying
along the Rio Grande. In other words, slavery had very little to do with
the Western aggressions on Mexican territory, however it might influence
the views of Southern statesmen as to lending support to the Western
schemes.
The territorial boundaries of all the great powers originally claiming
the soil of the West--France, Spain, and the United States--were very
ill-defined, there being no actual possession of the lands in dispute,
and each power making a great showing on its own map. If the extreme
views of any one were admitted, its adversary, for the time being,
would have had nothing. Thus before the treaty of 1819 with Spain our
nominal boundaries and those of the latter power in the West overlapped
each other; and the extreme Western men persisted in saying that we had
given up some of the territory which belonged to us because we had
consented to adopt a middle line of division, and had not insisted
upon being allowed the full extent of our claims. Benton always took
this view of it, insisting that we had given up our rights by the
adoption of this treaty. Many Southerners improved on this idea, and
spoke of the desirability of "re-annexing" the territory we had
surrendered,--endeavoring by the use of this very inappropriate word
to give a color of right to their proceedings. As a matter of fact it
was inevitable, as well as in the highest degree desirable for the good
of humanity at large, that the American people should ultimately crowd
out the Mexicans from their sparsely populated Northern provinces. But
it was quite as desirable that this should not be done in the interests
of slavery.
American settlers had begun to press into the outlying Spanish province
of Texas before the treaty of 1819 was ratified. Their numbers went on
increasing, and at first the Mexican government, having achieved
independence of Spain, encouraged their incoming. But it soon saw that
their presence boded danger, and forbade further immigration; without
effect, however, as the settlers and adventurers came thronging in as
fast as ever. The Americans had brought their slaves with them, and when
the Mexican government issued a decree liberating all slaves, they
refused to be bound by it; and this decree was among the reasons alleged
for their revolt. It has been represented as the chief if not the sole
cause of the rebellion; but in reality it was not the cause at all; it
was merely one of the occasions. Long before slavery had been abolished
in Mexico, and before it had become an exciting question in the United
States, the infant colony of Texas, when but a few months old, had made
an abortive attempt at insurrection. Any one who has ever been on the
frontier, and who knows anything whatever of the domineering, masterful
spirit and bitter race prejudices of the white frontiersmen, will
acknowledge at once that it was out of the question that the Texans
should long continue under Mexican rule; and it would have been a great
misfortune if they had. It was out of the question to expect them to
submit to the mastery of the weaker race, which they were supplanting.
Whatever might be the pretexts alleged for revolt, the real reasons were
to be found in the deeply-marked difference of race, and in the absolute
unfitness of the Mexicans then to govern themselves, to say nothing of
governing others. During the dozen years that the American colony in
Texas formed part of Mexico, the government of the latter went through
revolution after revolution,--republic, empire, and military
dictatorship following one another in bewildering succession. A state of
things like this in the central government, especially when the latter
belonged to a race alien in blood, language, religion, and habits of
life, would warrant any community in determining to shift for itself.
Such would probably have been the result even on people as sober and
peaceable as the Texan settlers were warlike, reckless, and overbearing.
But the majority of those who fought for Texan independence were not men
who had already settled in that territory, but, on the contrary, were
adventurers from the States, who had come to help their kinsmen and to
win for themselves, by their own prowess, homes on what was then Mexican
soil. It may as well be frankly admitted that the conduct of the
American frontiersmen all through this contest can be justified on no
possible plea of international morality or law. Still, we cannot judge
them by the same standard we should apply to the dealings between highly
civilized powers of approximately the same grade of virtue and
intelligence. Two nations may be contemporaneous so far as mere years
go, and yet, for all that, may be existing among surroundings which
practically are centuries apart. The nineteenth century on the banks of
the Thames, the Seine, and the Rhine, or even of the Hudson and the
Potomac, was one thing; the nineteenth century in the valley of the Rio
Grande was another and quite a different thing.
The conquest of Texas should properly be classed with conquests like
those of the Norse sea-rovers. The virtues and faults alike of the
Texans were those of a barbaric age. They were restless, brave, and
eager for adventure, excitement, and plunder; they were warlike,
resolute, and enterprising; they had all the marks of a young and hardy
race, flushed with the pride of strength and self-confidence. On the
other hand they showed again and again the barbaric vies of
boastfulness, ignorance, and cruelty; and they were utterly careless of
the rights of others, looking upon the possessions of all weaker races
as simply their natural prey. A band of settlers entering Texas was
troubled by no greater scruples of conscience than, a thousand years
before, a ship-load of Knut's followers might have felt at landing in
England; and when they were engaged in warfare with the Mexicans they
could count with certainty upon assistance from their kinsfolk who had
been left behind, and for the same reasons that had enabled Rolf's
Norsemen on the sea-coast of France to rely confidently on Scandinavian
help in their quarrels with their Karling over-lords. The great Texan
hero, Houston, who drank hard and fought hard, who was mighty in battle
and crafty in council, with his reckless, boastful courage and his
thirst for changes and risks of all kinds, his propensity for private
brawling, and his queerly blended impulses for good and evil, might,
with very superficial alterations of character, stand as the type of an
old-world Viking--plus the virtue of a deep and earnestly patriotic
attachment to his whole country. Indeed his career was as picturesque
and romantic as that of Harold Hardraada himself, and, to boot, was much
more important in its results.
Thus the Texan struggle for independence stirred up the greatest
sympathy and enthusiasm in the United States. The administration
remained nominally neutral, but obviously sympathized with the Texans,
permitting arms and men to be sent to their help, without hindrance, and
indeed doing not a little discreditable bullying in the diplomatic
dealing with Mexico, which that unfortunate community had her hands too
full to resent. Still we did not commit a more flagrant breach of
neutrality than, for instance, England was at the same time engaged in
committing in reference to the civil wars in Spain. The victory of San
Jacinto, in which Houston literally annihilated a Mexican force twice
the strength of his own, virtually decided the contest; and the Senate
at once passed a resolution recognizing the independence of Texas.
Calhoun wished that body to go farther, and forthwith admit Texas as a
state into the Union; but Benton and his colleagues were not prepared to
take such a step at so early a date, although intending of course that
in the end she should be admitted. There was little opposition to the
recognition of Texan independence, although a few members of the lower
house, headed by Adams, voted against it. While a cabinet officer, and
afterwards as president, Adams had done all that he could to procure by
purchase or treaty the very land which was afterwards the cause of our
troubles with Mexico.
Much the longest and most elaborate speech in favor of the recognition
of Texan independence was made by Benton, to whom the subject appealed
very strongly. He announced emphatically that he spoke as a Western
senator, voicing the feeling of the West; and he was right. The
opposition to the growth of our country on its southwestern frontier
was almost confined to the Northeast; the West as a whole, free states
as well as slave, heartily favored the movement. The settlers of Texas
had come mainly, it is true, from the slave states; but there were also
many who had been born north of the Ohio. It was a matter of comment
that the guns used at San Jacinto had come from Cincinnati--and so had
some of those who served them.
In Benton's speech he began by pointing out the impropriety of doing
what Calhoun had done in attempting to complicate the question of the
recognition of Texan independence with the admission of Texas as a
state. He then proceeded to claim for us a good deal more credit than we
were entitled to for our efforts to preserve neutrality; drew a very
true picture of the commercial bonds that united us to Mexico, and of
the necessity that they should not be lightly broken; gave a spirited
sketch of the course of the war hitherto, condemning without stint the
horrible butcheries committed by the Mexicans, but touching gingerly on
the savage revenge taken by the Americans in their turn; and ended by a
eulogy of the Texans themselves, and their leaders.
It was the age of "spread-eagle" speeches, and many of Benton's were no
exception to the rule. As a people we were yet in a condition of raw,
crude immaturity; and our very sensitiveness to foreign criticism--a
sensitiveness which we now find it difficult to understand--and the
realization of our own awkwardness made us inclined to brag about and
exaggerate our deeds. Our public speakers and writers acquired the
abominable habit of speaking of everything and everybody in the United
States in the superlative; and therefore, as we claimed the highest rank
for all our fourth-rate men, we put it out of our power to do justice to
the really first-rate ones; and on account of our continual
exaggerations we were not believed by others, and hardly even believed
ourselves, when we presented estimates that were truthful. When every
public speaker was declared to be a Demosthenes or a Cicero, people
failed to realize that we actually had, in Webster, the greatest orator
of the century; and when every general who whipped an Indian tribe was
likened to Napoleon, we left ourselves no words with which properly to
characterize the really heroic deeds done from time to time in the grim
frontier warfare. All Benton's oratory took on this lurid coloring; and
in the present matter his final eulogy of the Texan warriors was greatly
strained, though it would hardly have been in his power to pay too high
a tribute to some of the deeds they had done. It was the heroic age of
the Southwest; though, as with every other heroic age, there were plenty
of failings, vices, and weaknesses visible, if the stand-point of
observation was only close enough.