gentleman; but whilst his remarks were fresh in his mind he wished
to reply.
"Mr. Cutting yielded, and no objection was made to Mr. B.'s
proceeding.
"Mr. Breckinridge said that he had listened to the gentleman from
New York, who had not met a single position which he took the
other day. He had been amazed at the manner in which a man of
intellectual ingenuity had twisted and distorted words and
opinions out of their proper connections.
"He explained that the reason why he permitted two days to elapse
before he replied to the gentleman, was because the gentleman
himself after making his speech the other day on the motion to
commit, put down the hatchway of the previous question, so that he
was denied an opportunity of responding to him.
"He had said, and he now repeated, that with the gentleman's
motives he had nothing to do; he had made and should make no
attack upon them. When he spoke of the movement of the gentleman,
he characterized it as one the effect of which would be to kill
the bill, and said that after the question was decided, he was
surrounded by every abolitionist in the hall, and received their
congratulations for the course he had pursued. He did not intend
to charge the gentleman with intentionally playing the part of an
assassin; but said, and could not take it back, that the act, to
all intents, was like throwing one arm around it in friendship,
and stabbing it with the other--to kill the bill.
"The gentleman from New York had said that there were but eighteen
or nineteen bills before the Nebraska bill on the calendar?
"MR. ENGLISH.--There are fifty bills before the Senate bill.
"MR. CUTTING.--Before the House bill?
"MR. BRECKINRIDGE.--I will nail the gentleman to the counter
there. 'Before the House bill?' says he. 'Why, I give up that we
will never reach the Senate bill, but we will reach the House
bill.' But did not the gentleman say that his object in moving to
commit the bill was that he might discuss the bill and examine the
Badger proviso? And is not the Badger amendment contained in the
Senate bill? Thus it would be seen that the bill which the
gentleman moved to commit for the purpose of examining into could
never be reached.
"The meaning of the gentleman's remarks about the press was, that
he (Mr. B.) had acted in concert with papers in this city to drive
the gentleman from the support of the bill. Was it not a low
ambition for a man to take a course against a measure because
another was for it? Did the gentleman suppose that twenty
Administrations could ever drive him (Mr. B.) from his position?
Even if the Administration were against the bill, he (Mr. B.)
would go for it. They should never influence him in this respect.
He had no more connection with the Administration than any other
gentleman on this floor.
"The gentleman had said that he (Mr. B.) was the last individual
whom he supposed would have made an assault on him, because in the
hour of his greatest need the Hards came to his assistance. This
innuendo was so deep that he could not understand it, and
therefore asked for an explanation.
"MR. CUTTING replied, that he had been informed that during the
canvass in Kentucky, it having been intimated that the gentleman's
friends needed assistance to accomplish his election, his friends
in New York made up a subscription of some $1,500, and transmitted
it to Kentucky, to be employed for the benefit of the gentleman,
who is now the peer of Presidents and Cabinets. [Laughter.]
"MR. BRECKINRIDGE.--And not only the peer of Presidents and
Cabinets, but the peer of the gentleman from New York, fully and
in every respect.
"MR. BRECKINRIDGE, resuming, said that the gentleman should have
known the truth of what he uttered before he pronounced it on this
floor. He (Mr. B.) was not aware that any intimations were sent
from Kentucky that funds were needed to aid in his election, nor
was he aware that they were received. He did not undertake to say
what the fact might be in regard to what the gentleman had said,
but he had no information whatever on that fact. He (Mr. B.) came
here not by the aid of money, but against the use of money.
[Applause.] The gentleman could not escape by any subtlety, or by
any ingenuity, a thorough and complete exposure of any ingenious
device to which he might resort for the purpose of putting
gentlemen in a false position, and the sooner he stopped that
game, the better.
"MR. CUTTING said that he had given the gentleman an opportunity
of indulging in one of the most violent, inflammatory, and
personal assaults that had ever been known upon this floor; and he
would ask, how could the gentleman disclaim any attack upon him
when he followed it up by declaring that his (Mr. C.'s) intention
and motive was to destroy a measure for which he professed
friendship?
"MR. BRECKINRIDGE asked the gentleman to point to the occasion
when he made such a remark.
"MR. CUTTING submitted to the committee that the whole tenor and
scope of the speech of the gentleman from Kentucky was an attack
upon his motives in moving to commit the bill. It was in vain for
the gentleman to attempt to escape by disclaiming it; the fact was
before the committee. But he would say to the gentleman that he
scorned his imputation. How dare the gentleman undertake to assert
that he had professed friendship for the measure, with a view to
kill it, to assassinate it by sending it to the bottom of the
calendar? And then, when he said that the committee of the whole
had under its control the House bill upon this identical subject,
which the committee intended to take up, discuss, amend, and
report to the House, the gentleman skulked behind the Senate bill,
which had been sent to the foot of the calendar!
"MR. BRECKINRIDGE.--I ask the gentleman to withdraw that last
word.
"MR. CUTTING.--I withdraw nothing. I have uttered what I have said
in answer to one of the most violent and most personal attacks
that has ever been witnessed upon this floor.
"MR. BRECKINRIDGE.--Then, when the gentleman says I skulk, he says
what is false.
"THE CHAIR.--The gentleman is not in order.
"MR. CUTTING.--I do not intend upon this floor to answer the
remark which the gentleman from Kentucky has thought proper to
employ. It belongs to a different region. It is not here that I
will desecrate my lips with undertaking to retort in that manner.
"Mr. C. then declared that in moving to commit the bill, his
object was to get it in such a shape as would be satisfactory to
the country, and put at rest the outcries of fanaticism which now
prevailed throughout the land.
"He desired peace and harmony, and would suggest to gentlemen who
were anxious for the passage of the bill, that it was not the best
mode of accomplishing their object by assailing those who
proclaimed themselves favorable to its principles and its great
cardinal outlines. It seemed to him, if gentlemen desired the
success of the bill, it would answer a better purpose if they
would turn their batteries upon its enemies, rather than attempt
to destroy those who were its friends."
The result was, that the preliminaries of a duel were arranged, but
fortunately, by the interposition of friends, an amicable adjustment
of the difficulty was arrived at.
When Mr. Pierce was in power, he offered Mr. Breckinridge the Spanish
mission, but he refused it. In 1856, he was put upon the Democratic
ticket and elected Vice-President of the United States.
The official position of Mr. Breckinridge has been such as to render
his position on some of the present political issues somewhat
doubtful. He is, of course, a believer in the old Democratic creed,
and is a moderate supporter of the South and her institutions. It was
generally understood at Washington, during the Lecompton struggle,
that he sided with the President against Mr. Douglas--in other words,
was in favor of the bill. He was a warm supporter of Mr. Douglas in
1854, and his great measure, the Kansas act. In the last session of
Congress, Mr. Breckinridge gave his casting vote to postpone the
consideration of the Homestead bill, which gives an indication of his
hostility to the measure. He is a very fair politician, of unspotted
integrity as a man, and is possessed of talents of high order, such as
fit him to occupy with ability any office within the gift of the
people.
JOHN C. FREMONT.
The leadership of Mr. Fremont in a Presidential campaign has doubtless
made his name and history familiar to all intelligent men, but the
fact that he is a prominent candidate for the Presidency in 1860,
makes it proper to give in this volume an outline sketch of his life.
Aside from this, such men as Fremont, whether Presidential candidate
or not, whether President or not, are the great, daring,
characteristic, men of our times, and their deeds should always be
held in remembrance.
Mr. Fremont is a native of Savannah, Georgia, where he was born, June
21, 1813. At an early age he entered the law office of John W.
Mitchell, of Charleston, where he gave such indications of talent,
that Mr. Mitchell bestowed unusual pains upon his education, placing
him under the care of an excellent teacher, Dr. Robertson, a Scotch
gentleman, who carried him through the classics. At the age of
sixteen, young Fremont was confirmed in the Protestant Episcopal
church. In 1833, the sloop-of-war Natchez entered the port of
Charleston and was ordered from there to South America. Fremont, just
twenty years old, got the situation of teacher of mathematics aboard
of her, and made a cruise of two and a half years. Upon his return, he
was made professor of mathematics and appointed to the frigate
Independence. He afterward made one of a corps of topographical
engineers to explore a route of a railway from Charleston to
Cincinnati. It was here that Fremont got his first experience of camp
life. He went next to the Upper Mississippi on a similar undertaking.
In 1841, Mr. Fremont was ordered to examine the Desmoines River, in
Iowa--then a wilderness; and when it was performed, he returned to
marry Jessie Benton, the young daughter of Thomas H. Benton. The next
year he projected his first great exploring expedition to the Rocky
Mountains, setting out from Washington, May 2, 1842. The results of
the expedition were great and made a deep impression upon the
Government and nation, and a second expedition was ordered, much more
complete in preparation than the first. The party left Kansas in May,
1843, and did not get back to the United States until August of 1844.
The tour was full of dangers and thrilling incidents, and the results
were still more striking than those of the first expedition. Col.
Benton sketched the expedition in a few eloquent words, as follows:
"'The Government deserves credit for the zeal with which it has
pursued geographical discovery.' Such is the remark which a
leading paper made upon the discoveries of Fremont, on his return
from his second expedition to the great West; and such is the
remark which all writers will make upon all his discoveries who
write history from public documents and outside views. With all
such writers the expeditions of Fremont will be credited to the
zeal of the Government for the promotion of science, as if the
Government under which he acted had conceived and planned these
expeditions, as Mr. Jefferson did that of Lewis and Clark, and
then selected this young officer to carry into effect the
instructions delivered to him. How far such history would be true
in relation to the first expedition, which terminated in the Rocky
Mountains, has been seen in the account which has been given of
the origin of that undertaking, and which leaves the Government
innocent of its conception; and, therefore, not entitled to the
credit of its authorship, but only to the merit of permitting it.
In the second, and greater expedition, from which great political
as well as scientific results have flowed, their merit is still
less; for, while equally innocent of its conception, they were not
equally passive to its performance--countermanding the expedition
after it had begun--and lavishing censure upon the adventurous
young explorer for his manner of undertaking it. The fact was,
that his first expedition barely finished, Mr. Fremont sought and
obtained orders for a second one, and was on the frontier of
Missouri with his command, when orders arrived at St. Louis to
stop him, on the ground that he had made a military equipment
which the peaceful nature of his geographical pursuit did not
require! as if Indians did not kill and rob scientific men as well
as others, if not in a condition to defend themselves. The
particular point of complaint was that he had taken a small
mountain howitzer, in addition to his rifles; and which, he was
informed, was charged to him, although it had been furnished upon
a regular requisition on the commandant of the arsenal at St.
Louis, approved by the commander of the military department
(Colonel, afterward General Kearney). Mr. Fremont had left St.
Louis, and was at the frontier, Mrs. Fremont being requested to
examine the letters that came after him, and forward those which
he ought to receive. She read the countermanding orders and
detained them! and Fremont knew nothing of their existence, until
after he had returned from one of the most marvellous and eventful
expeditions of modern times--one to which the United States are
indebted (among other things) for the present ownership of
California, instead of seeing it a British possession. The writer
of this view, who was then in St. Louis, approved of the course
which his daughter had taken (for she had stopped the orders
before he knew it); and he wrote a letter to the department
condemning the recall, repulsing the reprimand which had been
lavished upon Fremont, and demanding a court martial for him when
he should return. The Secretary of War was then Mr. James Madison
Porter, of Pennsylvania; the chief of the topographical corps the
same as now (Colonel Abert), himself an office man, surrounded by
West Point officers, to whose pursuit of easy service, Fremont's
adventurous expedition was a reproach; and in conformity to whose
opinions the secretary seemed to have acted. On Fremont's return,
upward of a year afterward, Mr. William Wilkins, of Pennsylvania,
was Secretary of War, and received the young explorer with all
honor and friendship, and obtained for him the brevet of captain
from President Tyler. And such is the inside view of this piece of
history--very different from what documentary evidence would make
it.
"To complete his survey across the continent, on the line of
travel between the State of Missouri and the tide-water region of
the Columbia, was Fremont's object in this expedition; and it was
all that he had obtained orders for doing; but only a small part,
and to his mind, an insignificant part, of what he proposed doing.
People had been to the mouth of the Columbia before, and his
ambition was not limited to making tracks where others had made
them before him. There was a vast region beyond the Rocky
Mountains--the whole western slope of our continent--of which but
little was known; and of that little, nothing with the accuracy of
science. All that vast region, more than seven hundred miles
square--equal to a great kingdom in Europe--was an unknown land--a
sealed book, which he longed to open, and to read. Leaving the
frontier of Missouri in May, 1843, and often diverging from his
route for the sake of expanding his field of observation, he had
arrived in the tide-water region of Columbia in the month of
November; and had then completed the whole service which his
orders embraced. He might then have returned upon his tracks, or
been brought home by sea, or hunted the most pleasant path for
getting back; and if he had been a routine officer, satisfied with
fulfilling an order, he would have done so. Not so the young
explorer, who held his diploma from nature, and not from the
United States Military Academy. He was, at Fort Vancouver, guest
of the hospitable Dr. McLaughlin, Governor of the British Hudson
Bay Fur Company; and obtained from him all possible information
upon his intended line of return--faithfully given, but which
proved to be disastrously erroneous in its leading and governing
feature. A southeast route, to cross the great unknown region
diagonally through its heart (making a line from the Lower
Columbia to the Upper Colorado of the Gulf of California), was his
line of return; twenty-five men (the same who had come with him
from the United States) and a hundred horses, were his equipment;
and the commencement of winter the time of starting--all without a
guide, relying upon their guns for support; and, in the last
resort, upon their horses--such as should give out! for one that
could carry a man, or a pack, could not be spared for food.
"All the maps up to that time had shown this region traversed from
east to west--from the base of the Rocky Mountains to the bay of
San Francisco--by a great river called the _Buena Ventura_: which
may be translated, the _Good Chance_. Governor McLaughlin believed
in the existence of this river, and made out a conjectural
manuscript map to show its place and course. Fremont believed in
it, and his plan was to reach it before the dead of winter, and
then hibernate upon it. As a great river, he knew that it must
have some rich bottoms, covered with wood and grass, where the
wild animals would collect and shelter, when the snows and
freezing winds drove them from the plains: and with these animals
to live on, and grass for the horses, and wood for fires, he
expected to avoid suffering, if not to enjoy comfort, during his
solitary sojourn in that remote and profound wilderness.
"He proceeded--soon encountered deep snows, which impeded progress
upon the highlands--descended into a low country to the left
(afterward known to be the Great Basin, from which no water issues
to any sea)--skirted an enormous chain of mountain on the right,
luminous with the glittering white snow--saw strange Indians, who
mostly fled--found a desert--no Buena Ventura; and death from cold
and famine staring him in the face. The failure to find the river,
or tidings of it, and the possibility of its existence seeming to
be forbid by the structure of the country, and hibernation in the
inhospitable desert being impossible, and the question being that
of life and death, some new plan of conduct became indispensable.
His celestial observations told him that he was in the latitude of
the bay of San Francisco, and only seventy miles from it. But what
miles! up and down that snowy mountain which the Indians told him
no men could cross in the winter--which would have snow upon it as
deep as the trees, and places where people would slip off, and
fall half a mile at a time;--a fate which actually befell a mule,
packed with the precious burden of botanical specimens, collected
along a travel of two thousand miles. No reward could induce an
Indian to become a guide in the perilous adventure of crossing
this mountain. All recoiled and fled from the adventure. It was
attempted without a guide--in the dead of winter--accomplished in
forty days--the men and surviving horses, a woeful procession,
crawling along one by one--skeleton men leading skeleton
horses--and arriving at Sutter's Settlement in the beautiful
valley of the Sacramento; and where a genial warmth, and budding
flowers, and trees in foliage, the grassy ground, and flowing
streams, and comfortable food, made a fairy contrast with the
famine and freezing they had encountered, and the lofty Sierra
Nevada which they had climbed. Here he rested and recruited; and
from this point, and by way of Monterey, the first tidings were
heard of the party since leaving Fort Vancouver.
"Another long progress to the south, skirting the western base of
the Sierra Nevada, made him acquainted with the noble valley of
the San Joaquin, counterpart to that of the Sacramento; when
crossing through a gap, and turning to the left, he skirted the
Great Basin; and by many deviations from the right line home,
levied incessant contributions to science from expanded lands, not
described before. In this eventful exploration, all the great
features of the western slope of our continent were brought to
light--the Great Salt Lake, the Utah Lake, the Little Salt Lake;
at all which places, then deserts, the Mormons now are; the Sierra
Nevada, then solitary in the snow, now crowded with Americans,
digging gold from its flanks; the beautiful valleys of the
Sacramento and San Joaquin, then alive with wild horses, elk,
deer, and wild fowls, now smiling with American cultivation, the
Great Basin itself, and its contents; the Three Parks; the
approximation of the great rivers which, rising together in the
central region of the Rocky Mountains, go off east and west,
toward the rising and the setting sun--all these, and other
strange features of a new region, more Asiatic than American, were
brought to light and revealed to public view in the results of
this exploration.
"Eleven months he was never out of sight of snow; and sometimes,
freezing with cold, would look down upon a sunny valley, warm with
genial heat; sometimes, panting with the summer's heat, would look
up at the eternal snows which crowned the neighboring mountain.
But it was not then that California was secured to the Union--to
the greatest power of the new world--to which it of right
belonged; but it was the first step toward the acquisition, and
the one that led to it. The second expedition led to a third, just
in time to snatch the golden California from the hands of the
British, ready to clutch it. But of this hereafter. Fremont's
second expedition was now over. He had left the United States a
fugitive from his Government, and returned with a name that went
over Europe and America, and with discoveries bearing fruit which
the civilized world is now enjoying."
In 1845, the third expedition of Col. Fremont was made--principally
intended to explore the Great Basin and country of Oregon and
California.
"He approached these settlements in the winter of 1845-6. Aware of
the critical state of affairs between the United States and
Mexico, and determined to give no cause of offence to the
authorities of the province, with commendable prudence he haulted
his command on the frontier, one hundred miles from Monterey, and
proceeded alone to that city to explain the object of his coming
to the commandant general, Castro, and to obtain permission to go
to the valley of the San Joaquin, where there was game for his men
and grass for his horses, and no inhabitants to be molested by his
presence. The leave was granted; but scarcely had he reached the
desired spot for refreshment and repose, before he received
information from the American settlements, and by express from our
Consul at Monterey, that General Castro was preparing to attack
him with a comparatively large force of artillery, cavalry and
infantry, upon the pretext that, under the cover of a scientific
mission, he was exciting the American settlers to revolt. In view
of this danger and to be in a condition to repel an attack, he
then took a position on a mountain overlooking Monterey, at a
distance of about thirty miles, intrenched it, raised the flag of
the United States, and with his own men, sixty-two in number,
awaited the approach of the commandant general.