Chapter 20

The late Philadelphia experiment at making a party out of nullities reminds us of nothing so much as of the Irishman's undertaking to produce a very palatable soup out of no more costly material than a pebble. Of course he was to be furnished with a kettle as his field of operations, and after that he asked only for just the least bit of beef in the world to give his culinary miracle a flavor, and a pinch of salt by way of relish. As nothing could be more hollow and empty than the pretence on which the new movement was founded, nothing more coppery than the material out of which it was mainly composed, we need look no further for the likeness of a kettle wherewith to justify our comparison; as for the stone, nothing could be more like that than the Northern disunion faction, which was to be the chief ingredient in the newfangled pottage, and whose leading characteristic for the last five years has been a uniform alacrity in going under; the offices in the gift of the President might very well be reckoned on to supply the beef which should lead by their noses the weary expectants whose hunger might be too strong for their nicety of stomach; and the pinch of salt,--why could not that be found in the handful of Republicans who might be drawn over by love of notoriety, private disgusts, or that mixture of motives which has none of the substance of opinion, much less of the tenacity of principle, but which is largely operative in the action of illogical minds? But the people? Would they be likely to have their appetite aroused by the fumes of this thin decoction? Where a Chinaman is cook, one is apt to be a little suspicious; and if the Address in which the Convention advertised their ingenious mess had not a little in its verbiage to remind one of the flowery kingdom, there was something in that part of the assemblage which could claim any bygone merit of Republicanism calculated to stimulate rather than to allay any dreadful surmise of the sagacious rodent which our antipodes are said to find savory. And as for the people, it is a curious fact, that the party which has always been loudest to profess its faith in their capacity of self-government has been the last to conceive it possible that they should apprehend a principle, arrive at a logical conclusion, or be influenced by any other than a mean motive. The _cordons bleus_ of the political cooks at Philadelphia were men admirably adapted for the petty intrigues of a local caucus, but by defect of nature profoundly unconscious of that simple process of generalization from a few plain premises by which the popular mind is guided in times like these, and upon questions which appeal to the moral instincts of men.

The Convention was well managed, we freely admit,--and why not, when all those who were allowed to have any leading part in it belonged exclusively to that class of men who are known as party managers, and who, like the director of a theatre or a circus, look upon the mass of mankind as creatures to be influenced by a taking title, by amplitude of posters, and by a thrilling sensation or two, no matter how coarse? As for the title, nothing could be better than that of the "Devoted Unionists,"--and were not the actors, no less than the scenery and decorations, for the most part entirely new,--at least in that particular play? Advertisement they did not lack, with the whole Democratic press and the Department of State at their service, not to speak of the real clown being allowed to exhibit himself at short intervals upon the highest platform in this or any other country. And if we ask for sensation, never were so many performers exhibited together in their grand act of riding two horses at once, or leaping through a hoop with nothing more substantial to resist them than the tissue-paper of former professions, nay, of recent pledges. And yet the skill of the managers had something greater still behind, in Massachusetts linked arm in arm with South Carolina. To be sure, a thoughtful mind might find something like a false syllogism in pairing off a Commonwealth whose greatest sin it has been to lead the van in freedom of opinion, and in those public methods of enlightenment which make it a safeguard of popular government, with an Oligarchy whose leadership has been in precisely the opposite direction, as if both had equally sinned against American ideas. But such incongruities are trifles no greater than those of costume so common on every stage; and perhaps the only person to be pitied in the exhibition was Governor Orr, who had once uttered a hope that his own State might one day walk abreast with the daughter of Puritan forethought in the nobler procession of prosperous industry, and who must have felt a slight shock of surprise, if nothing more, at the form in which Massachusetts had chosen to incarnate herself on that particular occasion. We cannot congratulate the Convention on the name of its chairman, for there is something ominously suggestive in it. But, on the other hand it is to be remembered that Mr. Doolittle has a remarkably powerful voice, which is certainly one element in the manufacture of sound opinions. A little too much latitude was allowed to Mr. Raymond in the Address, though on the whole perhaps it was prudent to make that document so long as to insure it against being read. In their treatment of Mr. Vallandigham the managers were prudent. He was allowed to appear just enough not quite to alienate his party, on whom the new movement counts largely for support, and just not enough to compromise the Convention with the new recruits it had made among those who would follow the name Conservative into anything short of downright anarchy. The Convention, it must be confessed, had a rather hard problem to solve,--nothing less than to make their patent reconciliation cement out of fire and gunpowder, both useful things in themselves, but liable in concert to bring about some odd results in the way of harmonious action. It is generally thought wiser to keep them apart, and accordingly Mr. Vallandigham was excluded from the Convention altogether, and the Southern delegates were not allowed any share in the Address or Resolutions. Indeed, as the Northern members were there to see what they could make, and the Southern to find out how much they could save, and whatever could be made or saved was to come out of the North, it was more prudent to leave all matters of policy in the hands of those who were supposed to understand best the weak side of the intended victim. The South was really playing the game, and is to have the lion's share of the winnings; but it is only as a disinterested bystander, who looks over the cards of one of the parties, and guides his confederate by hints so adroitly managed as not to alarm the pigeon. The Convention avoided the reef where the wreck of the Chicago lies bleaching; but we are not so sure that they did not ground themselves fast upon the equally dangerous mud-bank that lies on the opposite side of the honest channel. At Chicago they were so precisely frank as to arouse indignation; at Philadelphia they are so careful of generalities that they make us doubtful, if not suspicious. Does the expectation or even the mere hope of pudding make the utterance as thick as if the mouth were already full of it? As to the greater part of the Resolutions, they were political truisms in which everybody would agree as so harmless that the Convention might almost as well have resolved the multiplication table article by article. The Address was far less explicit; and where there is so very much meal, it is perhaps not altogether uncharitable to suspect that there may be something under it. There is surely a suspicious bulge here and there, that has the look of the old Democratic cat. But, after all, of what consequence are the principles of the party, when President Johnson covers them all when he puts on his hat, and may change them between dinner and tea, as he has done several times already? The real principle of the party, its seminal and vital principle alike, is the power of the President, and its policy is every moment at the mercy of his discretion. That power has too often been the plaything of whim, and that discretion the victim of ill-temper or vanity, for us to have any other feeling left than regret for the one and distrust of the other.

The new party does not seem to have drawn to itself any great accession of strength from the Republican side, or indeed to have made many converts that were not already theirs in fact, though not in name. It was joined, of course, at once by the little platoon of gentlemen calling themselves, for some mystical reason, Conservatives, who have for some time been acting with the Democratic faction, carefully keeping their handkerchiefs to their noses all the while. But these involuntary Catos are sure, as if by instinct, to choose that side which is doomed not to please the gods, and their adhesion is as good as a warranty of defeat. During the President's progress they must often have been driven to their handkerchiefs again. It was a great blunder of Mr. Seward to allow him to assume the apostolate of the new creed in person, for every word he has uttered must have convinced many, even of those unwilling to make the admission, that a doctrine could hardly be sound which had its origin and derives its power from a source so impure. For so much of Mr. Johnson's harangues as is not positively shocking, we know of no parallel so close as in his Imperial Majesty Kobes I.:--

"Er rühmte dass er nie studirt Auf Universitäten Und Reden sprachi aus sich selbst heraus, Ganz ohne Facultäten."

And when we consider his power of tears; when we remember Mr. Reverdy Johnson and Mr. Andrew Johnson confronting each other like two augurs, the one trying not to laugh while he saw the other trying to cry; when we recall the touching scene at Canandaigua, where the President was overpowered by hearing the pathetic announcement that Stephen A. Douglas had for two years attended the academy in what will doubtless henceforward be dubbed that "classic locality," we cannot help thinking of

"In seinem schönen Auge glänzt Die Thräne, die Stereotype."

Indeed, if the exhibition of himself were not so profoundly sad, when we think of the high place he occupies and the great man he succeeded in it, nothing could well be so comic as some of the incidents of Mr. Johnson's tour. No satirist could have conceived anything so bewitchingly absurd as the cheers which greeted the name of Simeon at the dinner in New York, whether we suppose the audience to have thought him some eminent member of their party of whom they had never heard, or whom they had forgotten as thoroughly as they had Mr. Douglas, or if we consider that they were involuntarily giving vent to their delight at the pleasing prospect opened by their "illustrious guest's" allusion to his speedy departure. Nor could anything have been imagined beforehand so ludicrously ominous as Mr. Seward's fears lest the platform should break down under them at Niagara. They were groundless fears, it is true, for the Johnson platform gave way irreparably on the 22d of February; but they at least luckily prevented Nicholas Bottom Cromwell from uttering his after-dinner threat against the people's immediate representatives, against the very body whose vote supplies the funds of his party, and whose money, it seems, is constitutional, even if its own existence as a Congress be not. We pity Mr. Seward in his new office of bear-leader. How he must hate his Bruin when it turns out that his tricks do not even please the crowd!

But the ostensible object of this indecent orgy seems to us almost as discreditable as the purpose it veiled so thinly. Who was Stephen A. Douglas, that the President, with his Cabinet and the two highest officers of the army and navy, should add their official dignity to the raising of his monument, and make the whole country an accomplice in consecrating his memory? His name is not associated with a single measure of national importance, unless upon the wrong side. So far was he from being a statesman that, even on the lower ground of politics, both his principles and his expression of them were tainted with the reek of vulgar associations. A man of naturally great abilities he certainly was, but wholly without that instinct for the higher atmosphere of thought or ethics which alone makes them of value to any but their possessor, and without which they are more often dangerous than serviceable to the commonwealth. He habitually courted those weaknesses in the people which tend to degrade them into a populace, instead of appealing to the virtues that grow by use, and whose mere acknowledgment in a man in some sort ennobles him. And by doing this he proved that he despised the very masses whose sweet breaths he wooed, and had no faith in the system under which alone such a one as he could have been able to climb so high. He never deserted the South to take side with the country till the South had both betrayed and deserted him. If such a man were the fairest outcome of Democracy, then is it indeed a wretched failure. But for the factitious importance given to his name by the necessity of furnishing the President with a pretext for stumping the West in the interest of Congress, Mr. Douglas would be wellnigh as utterly forgotten as Cass or Tyler, or Buchanan or Fillmore; nor should we have alluded to him now but that the recent pilgrimage has made his name once more public property, and because we think it a common misfortune when such men are made into saints, though for any one's advantage but their own. We certainly have no wish to play the part of _advocatus diaboli_ on such an occasion, even were it necessary at a canonization where the office of Pontifex Maximus is so appropriately filled by Mr. Johnson.

In speaking of the late unhappy exposure of the unseemly side of democratic institutions, we have been far from desirous of insisting on Mr. Seward's share in it. We endeavored to account for it at first by supposing that the Secretary of State, seeing into the hands of how vain and weak a man the reins of administration had fallen, was willing, by flattering his vanity, to control his weakness for the public good. But we are forced against our will to give up any such theory, and to confess that Mr. Seward's nature has been "subdued to what it works in." We see it with sincere sorrow, and are far from adding our voice to the popular outcry against a man the long and honorable services of whose prime we are not willing to forget in the decline of his abilities and that dry-rot of the mind's nobler temper which so often results from the possession of power. Long contact with the meaner qualities of men, to whose infection place and patronage are so unhappily exposed, could not fail of forcing to a disproportionate growth any germs of that cynicism always latent in temperaments so exclusively intellectual and unmitigated by any kindly lenitive of humor. Timid by nature, the war which he had prophesied, but had not foreseen, and which invigorated bolder men, unbraced him; and while the spendthrift verbosity of his despatches was the nightmare of foreign ministries, his uncertain and temporizing counsels were the perpetual discouragement of his party at home. More than any minister with whose official correspondence we are acquainted, he carried the principle of paper money into diplomacy, and bewildered Earl Russell and M. Drouyn de Lhuys with a horrible doubt as to the real value of the verbal currency they were obliged to receive. But, unfortunately, his own countrymen were also unprovided with a price-current of the latest quotation in phrases, and the same gift of groping and inconclusive generalities which perhaps was useful as a bewilderment to would-be hostile governments abroad was often equally effective in disheartening the defenders of nationality at home. We cannot join with those who accuse Mr. Seward of betraying his party, for we think ourselves justified by recent events in believing that he has always looked upon parties as the mere ladders of ambitious men; and when his own broke under him at Chicago in 1860, he forthwith began to cast about for another, the rounds of which might be firmer under his feet. He is not the first, and we fear will not be the last, of our public men who have thought to climb into the White House by a back window, and have come ignominiously to the ground in attempting it. Mr. Seward's view of the matter probably is that the Republican party deserted him six years ago, and that he was thus absolved of all obligations to it. But might there not have been such a thing as fidelity to its principles? Or was Mr. Seward drawn insensibly into the acceptance of them by the drift of political necessity, and did he take them up as if they were but the hand that had been dealt him in the game, not from any conviction of their moral permanence and power, perhaps with no perception of it, but from a mere intellectual persuasion of the use that might be made of them politically and for the nonce by a skilful gamester? We should be very unwilling to admit such a theory of his character; but surely what we have just seen would seem to justify it, for we can hardly conceive that any one should suddenly descend from real statesmanship to the use of such catch-rabble devices as those with which he has lately disgusted the country. A small politician cannot be made out of a great statesman, for there is an oppugnancy of nature between the two things, and we may fairly suspect the former winnings of a man who has been once caught with loaded dice in his pocket. However firm may be Mr. Seward's faith in the new doctrine of Johnsonian infallibility, surely he need not have made himself a partner in its vulgarity. And yet he has attempted to vie with the Jack-pudding tricks of the unrivalled performer whose man-of-business he is, in attempting a _populacity_ (we must coin a new word for a new thing) for which he was exquisitely unfitted. What more stiffly awkward than his essays at easy familiarity? What more painfully remote from drollery than his efforts to be droll? In the case of a man who descends so far as Mr. Seward, such feats can be characterized by no other word so aptly as by tumbling. The thing would be sad enough in any prominent man, but in him it becomes a public shame, for in the eyes of the world it is the nation that tumbles in its Prime Minister. The Secretary of State's place may be dependent on the President, but the dignity of it belongs to the country, and neither of them has any right to trifle with it. Mr. Seward might stand on his head in front of what Jenkins calls his "park gate," at Auburn, and we should be the last to question his perfect right as a private citizen to amuse himself in his own way, but in a great officer of the government such pranks are no longer harmless. They are a national scandal, and not merely so, but a national detriment, inasmuch as they serve to foster in foreign statesman a profound misapprehension of the American people and of the motives which influence them in questions of public policy. Never was so great a wrong done to democracy, nor so great an insult offered to it, as in this professional circuit of the presidential Punch and his ministerial showman.

Fortunately, the exhibitions of this unlucky pair, and their passing round the hat without catching even the greasy pence they courted, have very little to do with the great question to be decided at the next elections, except in so far as we may be justified in suspecting their purity of motive who could consent to such impurity of means, and the soundness of their judgment in great things who in small ones show such want of sagacity. The crowds they have drawn are no index of popular approval. We remember seeing the prodigious nose of Mr. Tyler (for the person behind it had been added by nature merely as the handle to so fine a hatchet) drawn by six white horses through the streets, and followed by an eager multitude, nine tenths of whom thought the man belonging to it a traitor to the party which had chosen him. But then the effigy at least of a grandiose, if not a great man, sat beside him, and the display was saved from contempt by the massive shape of Webster, beneath which he showed like a swallow against a thunder-cloud. Even Mr. Fillmore, to whom the Fugitive Slave Law denies the complete boon of an otherwise justly earned oblivion, had some dignity given to his administration by the presence of Everett. But in this late advertising-tour of a policy in want of a party, Cleon and Agoracritus seem to have joined partnership, and the manners of the man match those of the master. Mr. Johnson cannot so much as hope for the success in escaping memory achieved by the last of those small Virginians whom the traditionary fame of a State once fertile in statesmen lifted to four years of imperial pillory, where his own littleness seemed to heighten rather than lower the grandeur of his station; his name will not be associated with the accomplishment of a great wrong against humanity, let us hope not with the futile attempt at one; but he will be indignantly remembered as the first, and we trust the last, of our chief magistrates who believed in the brutality of the people, and gave to the White House the ill-savor of a corner-grocery. _He_ a tribune of the people? A lord of misrule, an abbot of unreason, much rather!