WIZARD LEWIS boldly re-begins his work of White House capturing. He
becomes busy to the elbows in the General's destinies before Statesman
Adams is inaugurated. When the latter names Statesman Clay to be his
Secretary of State, Wizard Lewis lays bare the deal which thus exalts
the Kentuckian. He raises the cry of “Bargain and Corruption!” and the
public takes it up. Statesman Adams and Statesman Clay are pilloried as
conspirators who have wronged the General of a Presidency, and the State
portfolio in the hands of Statesman Clay is pointed to as proof. The
General writes the blooming Rachel, just now at home by the Cumberland:
“The Judas of the West has closed the contract and received the thirty
pieces of silver.” Statesman Clay defends himself badly. He declares
that he objects to the General's White House ambitions only because he
is a “Military Chieftain.” He speaks as though the world knows that a
“Military Chieftain” will make a perilous Chief Magistrate. The world
knows nothing of the sort; the cry of “Bargain and Corruption” gains
head.
In retort to that arraignment of being a “Military Chieftain”--made as
if the phrase be merely another name for “buccaneer”--the General writes
the old friendly fox, Colonel Burr:
“It is not strange that he (Statesman Clay) should indulge himself in
such reasoning, since it comes somewhat to his own personal defense. Our
blue-grass Secretary has been ever remarkable for his caution, to give
it a no worse name, and has not yet risked himself for his country, or
moved from safe repose to repel an invading foe.”
The General is not the only one who comments upon the astounding
copartnership in politics and policies between Statesman Adams and
Statesman Clay. John Randolph, of Roanoke, remarks concerning it, from
his bitter place in the Senate:
“Sir, it is a coming together of the puritan and the blackleg--Blifil
and Black George!”
This view seems hugely to excite Statesman Clay, and he challenges the
picturesque Randolph to a duel by Little Falls. They meet; but, since
both are at pains to miss, no good comes of it.
[Illustration: 0267]
Wizard Lewis goes teaching the General's merits in every State of the
Union. In his White House siege, Wizard Lewis receives his best help
from Statesman Adams himself.
The latter publicist is a personage of ice-cold ideas, and lists
ingratitude at the top of the virtues. There be folk--descended,
doubtless, of ancestors that heated the pincers and turned the
thumbikins, and worked the straining rack for the Inquisitions as mere
day laborers at torture--who delight in doing mean, hateful, punishing
things to their fellow mortals, if they may but call such doing “duty.”
They will weep hypocritically while burning a victim, and aver,
between sobs, that they pile the fagots and apply the torch only from
a “sternest conviction of duty.” The word “duty,” like the venom of
a serpent, is ever in their mouths; by it they break hearts, destroy
hopes, create blackness, blot out light, forbid happiness, foster grief,
and plant pain in breasts innocent of every crime save that of helping
them. Statesman Adams--heart as hollow as a bell and quite as brazen--is
one of these. He demonstrates his purity by refusing his obligations,
and proves himself great by turning his back on his friends. Made up of
a multitude of littlenesses, he offers no trait of breadth or bigness
as an offset. He is not wise; he is not brave; he is not generous; he
is not--even in wrongdoing--original. He will guide by some maxim; or
he will permit himself to be posed by a proverb; and, while ever
breathlessly respectable, he is never once right. As President he
proposes for himself an inhuman goodness, and declares that he will
remove no one from office on “account of politics”--a catch phrase which
has protected incompetency in place in every age.
Although he is so fond of them, Statesman Adams, in taking the latter
snow-white position, overlooks an aphorism that will be vital while time
lasts. He forgets that “The President who makes no removals will himself
be removed.”
“Strike, lest you be stricken!” murmured Queen Elizabeth, as seizing the
pen she signed the warrant of block and axe for Scottish Mary, and it
might be well and wise for Statesman Adams to wear in constant mind that
illustrious example.
The thought is vain. Statesman Adams ignores his friends, consults
his foes, and offers a base picture of the ungrateful that draws the
public's honest wrath his way. Wizard Lewis is no one to miss such
opportunities to upbuild the General's fortunes at the expense of the
enemy; and so the General grows each day stronger, while Statesman
Adams--who hopes to succeed himself--owns less and less of strength.
The currents of time flow swiftly now, and four years go by--four years
wherein the old friendly far-seeing fox, Colonel Burr, in his Nassau
Street burrow, teaches the General's leaders intrigue as a pedagogue
teaches the alphabet to his pupils. And day after day the purblind
Adams, with the purblind Clay at the elbow of his hopes and fears, sets
traps against his own prospects, and does his unwitting best or worst to
destroy himself. Then comes the canvass: the General against Statesman
Adams, who courts a reelection.
The moment the rival forces march upon the field, the dullest marks
the superiority of the General's. With that, Statesman Clay--in the war
saddle for Statesman Adams, whose battle is his battle and whose defeat
means his downfall--loses his head. He accuses the General of every
offense except that of theft, calls him every name save that of coward.
The accusations fail; the epithets fall harmless to the ground; the
people know, and draw the closer about the General's standards.
The latter's popularity rises as might a hurricane, and sweeps away
opposition like down of thistles!
Statesman Clay becomes frantic. Possessed as by a demon, he issues
instructions to assail the blooming Rachel. His hound-pack obey the
call. From that moment the General's marriage is the issue. He is
charged with “stealing another's wife,” and every shaft of mendacious
villification is shot against the unoffending bosom of the blooming
Rachel. Those are fire-swept moments of anguish for the General,
who feels the pain the more, since his hands are tied against what
saw-handle methods silenced the dead Dickinson one May Kentucky morning
in that poplar wood.
The blooming Rachel, for her wronged part, says never a word. She goes
the oftener to the little church, but that is all. And yet, while she
seems so resigned and patient beneath the slandrous lash, the thong is
biting always to her soul's source.
The election takes place, and now the people speak. They set the
grinding heel of their anger upon those slanders; they throw down that
ladder of lies by which Statesman Adams hopes to climb. Wizard Lewis,
Burr-guided, foils Statesman Clay at every point; the General rides down
Statesman Adams like a coach and six.
New England is tribal and narrow, with the reeking taint of old
Federalism in its veins; it gives itself for Statesman Adams, unredeemed
save by a single district in Maine. There, indeed, rises up one
electoral vote for the General. It shows in the gray waste of Adams
sentiment about it, like a green tree and a fountain against the gray
wastes of Sahara. New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland follow in New England's
dreary wake for Statesman Adams; while New York gives him sixteen
electoral votes out of thirty-six. That offers the round circumference
of his Clay-collected strength--an electoral vote of eighty-three!
For the General, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina,
Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, Kentucky, Ohio, and Illinois
go headlong; while New York gives him twenty electoral votes, with
Tennessee his own by a popular count of twenty for one. Statesman Clay,
as a retort to the slanders he fulminated, beholds his own State
of Kentucky reject him, and aid in swelling those one hundred and
seventy-eight electoral votes which declare for the General. The world
at large, seated by its fireside and sagely thumbing those returns
of one hundred and seventy-eight for the General against a meager
eighty-three for Statesman Adams, finds therein a stunning rebuke to
both the ambitions and the methods of Statesman Clay.
When word of the General's election reaches the blooming Rachel, she
smiles wearily and says:
“For the General's sake I'm glad! For myself I never wished it.”
Now that the war of the votes is over and the General victor, mankind
relaxes into its customary dinners and parades. The Cumberland good
people resolve to outparade all former parades, outdine all former
dinners. They engage themselves with tremendous gala preparations. It
shall be a time when oxen are eaten whole, and whisky is drunk by the
barrel.
The day set apart as sacred to the coming parade, and that dinner yet to
be devoured, breaks brightly full of promise. There is never a cloud in
the Cumberland sky, never a care on the Cumberland heart. In a moment
all is reversed!--light gives way to blackness, happiness to grief! Like
a bolt from a heaven smiling, the word descends that the blooming Rachel
lies dead. The word is true. The monstrous weight of slander heaped upon
it breaks her gentle heart.
[Illustration: 0275]
They bury the blooming Rachel at the foot of the garden where her
best-loved flowers grow. The General is ten years older in a night; the
tall form, yesterday as straight as a lance, is bent and broken. The
blue eyes, once hawklike, are dimmed with tears. Friends come to press
his hand--he chokes and cannot speak! But the awful agony of his soul is
written in the sweat drops on his wrung brow.
As the General stands by the grave that is smothering for him all the
song and the sweet sunshine of life, the ever-faithful, never-failing
Coffee is by his side. The poor General reaches blindly out and takes
hold of the rough, big, loyal hand for support. His beloved Coffee, who
flanked the Red Stick Creeks for him at the Horseshoe and held his low
mud walls against England's boast and best at New Orleans, will not
fail him now in this his sternest trial by the graveside of the blooming
Rachel.
The General, doubly quiet, doubly stern, issues forth of that ordeal
another man. He is as one who lives because it is his duty, and not
for love of life. Plainly, his hopes like his heart are buried with the
blooming Rachel. In his soul he lays her death to the doors of Statesman
Adams and Statesman Clay; throughout the years to follow he will never
forget nor forgive. To the end he will cultivate his hatred of them, and
tend it as he might a flower. Time cannot remold him in this belief; and
a decade later he will say to his friend Lewis, while his eye flashes
like some sudden-drawn rapier:
“Major, she was stung to death by slander! It was such adders as John
Quincy Adams, such pit-vipers as Henry Clay, that killed her!”