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A New Issue and New Leaders
of the Dutch painters of three centuries ago. A native of Ohio and a former student in the law- office of Thomas Corwin, he entered the House in 1843, and continued there for eight years, when he was sent as minister to Brazil. He entered the Union army in 1861, but left it at the end of two years to return to the House, where he remained until 1871, when he was appointed minister to England, and with this service terminated his political career. Both
before and after the Civil War Schenck was an acknowledged leader in the House. He
was an accomplished parliamentarian, and extraordinarily skilful in the management of bills, while as a debater he feared no assailant. What his speeches lacked in polish they made up in vigor, and when aroused he struck out right and left, and in language that was at times fearful in invective.
Another and a very different man was Baker, who crowded into his fifty years the experiences of a dozen ordinary lives. Born in England, brought to this country when a child, and or- phaned while yet a youth, he early removed to Springfield, Illinois, where he studied and began the practice of law. A man of command-
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ing presence, magnetic address, and rare ora- torical powers, he rapidly gained distinction and popularity in his section, and in 1845 en- tered the House. When the Mexican War be- gan he raised a regiment in Illinois, marched with it to the Rio Grande, and fought with signal bravery in every action on the route to the Mexican capital. Then he was again for two terms a member of the House. After that he settled in San Francisco, where he at once took rank as the leader of the California bar, but, failing of an election to Congress, re- moved to Oregon, which State, in 1860, sent him to the Senate. When Sumter was fired upon, he accepted a colonel's commission, and fell, mortally wounded, while leading a charge at Ball's Bluff. "No knight of the days of chivalry surpassed him in integrity of soul and nobility of nature."
Few men have trod a harder road in the race for high political station than did Andrew John- son, who entered the House in 1843 and served there for ten years. His father, a " poor white" of North Carolina, lost his life in saving an- other. The son became a tailor, and when he married only knew the alphabet. His wife
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A New Issue and New Leaders
taught him everything else, nor did he learn to write with ease until he had been several years in Congress. Yet before he was thirty the force of his oratory made him one of the best-known men of his State, which, after his ten years' service in the House, twice chose him governor, and in 1857 advanced him to a seat in the Senate. Both in the House and Senate John- son took an active, and frequently vehement, part in debate. One of the measures with which he early became identified, and which he pushed with uncommon zeal and energy, was the Home- stead Law. His greatest speeches in Congress were delivered on this subject and in opposition to the attempt to dissolve the Union. When the break came, Johnson was the only Southern Senator to take an unyielding stand against secession, whence issued his accession to the Presidency, and his appearance in a rôle not unlike that played by Tyler in an earlier time.
Alexander H. Stephens entered the House in 1843 and served there for sixteen years. His fame as a popular speaker had preceded him, and he at once took a foremost place among thie Whig leaders in Congress. In face and figure
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not unlike John Randolph, of Roanoke, he had the voice and frame of a woman, but his oratory was always clear, strong, and sustained, and he was a born polemic. His public career seems to many a bundle of contradictions, but he always acted upon reasons and principles, and what he believed to be right that he advocated with utter indifference to consequences. His famous encounter with Cone, the outcome of a political dispute, proved this. Cone, a large, muscular man, cut Stephens terribly with a knife, and then shouted, " Retract, or I will cut your throat!" "Never,-cut !" said Stephens, and grasped the swiftly descending blade in his right hand. They were separated, and the wounded man recovered, but that hand never again wrote plainly. Stephens fought against secession, and then went with the South, but love of the Union remained strong within him until the end. Urged after the Civil War to join the colony of ex-Confederates in Mexico, he refused to do so. "But these Yankees will hang you if you stay behind," argued the men who were ready to take up their journey for their new home, and who hated to leave behind them an associate of such rare devotion and
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A New Issue and New Leaders
courage. "I would rather hang here in the United States," said Stephens, "than live out- side of it," a reply which made him as much admired in the North as he was loved in the South.
Toombs, like Stephens, entered Congress a Whig, but upon the passage of the Compromise of 1850 joined the Democratic party. Two years later he was transferred to the Senate, and he continued one of its most conspicuous members until his withdrawal therefrom upon the passage of the ordinance of secession by his State. Toombs, to Northern men, was for upward of a dozen years the most exasperating and also the most lovable Southerner in Con- gress. Utterly without concealments, he wore his heart upon his sleeve and lived in the open day. A superbly handsome man, his vitality was extraordinary, his mind alert and quick, and his manner imperious yet magnetic, and, though a rash talker in private life, his speeches in the House and Senate were ever sagacious and sane.
He was also an earnest lover of the Union, and, while allegiance to his State swept him to the Southern side in the great conflict of arms, he had previously put himself on record in these
II .~ 3
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words : " There are courageous and honest men enough in both sections to fight. . . The peo- ple of both sections of this Union have illus- trated their courage on too many battle-fields to be questioned. They have shown their fight- ing qualities shoulder to shoulder wherever their country has called upon them, and that they may never come in contact with each other in fratri- cidal war should be the ardent wish of every true man and honest patriot." War came, how- ever, and four years later, at Washington, Georgia, the home of the man who had voiced this protest against separation, the Confederacy died. A part of the Confederate gold was thrown in his door-yard, and by his orders was taken away and divided among Johnston's ragged troopers.
Yancey's services in the House covered a period of less than three years, yet in that time he gained a national reputation, and one that still endures. This with reason, for he was the most brilliant orator of any party in the South in the years immediately preceding the Civil War, and he was altogether the ablest advocate of secession. Indeed, since Seargent S. Pren- tiss passed away, there has been no man in all
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A New Issue and New Leaders
the Southern States who equalled Yancey in eloquence, and he was as logical in argument as he was finished in rhetoric. Aggressive, tire- less, and potential on every sectional issue that arose after his voluntary retirement from Con- gress, Yancey was in the front of the battle before the people, and following Lincoln's elec- tion he was one of the earliest in demanding immediate secession. In the Confederate Sen- ate he held a leader's place, but only for a time. Death of a sudden claimed for its own the most brilliant and most beloved of all the great cham- pions of the South, and when the Confederacy fell Yancey had been two years in his grave.
This survey of the leaders of a new era began with Douglas; it may fitly close with that of the Little Giant's great antagonist, Lincoln, who served in Congress from 1847 to 1849. A tall, slim, awkward Westerner of forty, Lin- coln participated but little in the active business of the House, and made few speeches. He was not a candidate for re-election, and thereafter held no public office until a dozen years later he returned to Washington as President-elect.
e
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CHAPTER II
FOUR EVENTFUL YEARS
T HE Administration of James K. Polk, eleventh President of the United States, opened under stormy skies, for it rained through- out the day of his inauguration. Unpleasant weather, however, did not prevent the assem- bling of the largest crowds yet seen at the Capi- tol upon a like occasion, and the President read his address from the east portico to a shift- ing sea of umbrellas, being afterwards sworn into office by Chief Justice Taney. Two balls were given in the evening. The select gathered at Carusi's, and Mrs. Polk, who abhorred dancing, looked on as complacently as she could, dressed, to quote a contemporary account, "in a severely plain, black silk gown, long black velvet coat with deep fringed cape, and bonnet of purple velvet, trimmed with satin ribbon."
Polk was in the shadow of his fiftieth year when he became President,-a plain, spare man of middle stature, with small head, angular brow, expressive gray eyes, and a firm mouth.
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Four Eventful Years
His hair, worn long and brushed back behind the ears, was flaked with silver when his term be- gan, and almost white at its end. He had mar- ried, at the age of twenty-seven, Sarah Childress. the nineteen-year-old daughter of a farmer in easy circumstances. Mrs. Polk at the time of her marriage was considered remarkable for her brunette beauty, and a quarter-century later, when she presided at the White House, it was so fresh and unimpaired as to attract great admiration and be noted in the published works and private journals of visiting foreigners. She was tactful in all social affairs, and an accom- plished hostess, equal to every demand and charming in every phase. Her husband's friends delighted in talking to her, for she was sympa- thetic, responsive, and a good listener, and there remains an old-fashioned prim little poem in which one of them celebrates these amiable qualities :
"For I have listened to thy voice, and watched thy playful mind ;
Truth, in the noblest sense, thy choice, graceful, kind."
A devout church woman, Mrs. Polk never permitted dancing at the White House, and always observed Sunday with Puritan strict-
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ness. She made her Washington friends ob- serve it, too; and there is a touch of humor in the description of the way in which she was accustomed to disperse the group of men who often invaded her husband's rooms to talk poli- tics on Sunday morning. Shawled and bon- neted, the pretty woman would smilingly enter, remind her husband that it was church-time, and, with the sweetest courtesy, invite the vis- itors to accompany them. Sunday calling under these circumstances did not long survive.
Mrs. Polk's tact and kindness, however, al- ways saved her from giving offence, and made her generally beloved in Washington, as another anecdote that has come down to us bears wit- ness. At a White House reception one even- ing, when the rooms were filled with guests, there fell a sudden silence; and presently in this silence arose a solemn voice. "Madam," it said, "I have long since wished to see the lady upon whom the Bible pronounces woe !" The silence was deeper than ever, for this was a startling speech. Mrs. Polk, much puzzled, looked at the stranger, and again the solemn voice arose in the silence: " Does not the Bible say, 'Woe unto you when all men shall speak
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Four Eventful Years
well of you?' " Such was compliment in the days of our fathers. Mrs. Polk's biographers gravely note that the company was considerably relieved at this happy turn, and the lady bowed her thanks.
.
President Polk found cabinet-making a task beset with difficulty. John C. Calhoun had expected to retain the post of Secretary of State, but the friends of Van Buren would not con- sent that this honor should be bestowed on the man who had connived at the undoing of their chief. Calhoun, therefore, gave way to James Buchanan, and soon returned to the capital as a Senator from South Carolina. The President, anxious to further placate Van Buren, first ten- dered the portfolio of the Treasury to Silas Wright, who had lately left the Senate to be- come governor of his State. Wright declined it, but recommended for the place Azariah C. Flagg, another able and trusted follower of Van Buren. William L. Marcy, leader of the anti-Van Buren faction of the New York De- mocracy, objected to Flagg's appointment, and in the end Robert J. Walker was made Secretary of the Treasury.
The remaining seats in the Cabinet were filled
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without friction. Marcy was given the War portfolio; New England was recognized in the appointment of George Bancroft as Secretary of the Navy; Cave Johnson, who had been for several years a member of the House from Tennessee, was made Postmaster-General, and John Y. Mason, of Virginia, who had been Secretary of the Navy under Tyler, was re- tained by Polk as Attorney-General. When Bancroft left the Cabinet at the end of a year to become minister to England, Mason re- turned to the Navy Department, being succeeded as Attorney-General by Nathan Clifford, of Maine. Clifford, however, soon left office, to resume the practice of his profession, and Isaac Toucey, of Connecticut, served as Attorney- General during the remainder of Polk's term.
Polk came into office an avowed champion of the annexation of Texas. Francis P. Blair, editor of the Globe and a warm friend of Van Buren, had stoutly opposed it, thus inviting the ill-will of Calhoun and his South Carolina followers, who made his removal from the edi- torship the only condition upon which Polk could receive the electoral vote of their State, then in the hands of the General Assembly and
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THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION
Four Eventful Years
controlled by the politicians. Polk agreed to this condition, and soon after his inauguration the Globe ceased to be the organ of the Ad- ministration. Blair, declining the Spanish mis- sion, offered him by Polk, retired to a comfort- able home at Silver Springs in the suburbs of Washington, there to lead a life of lettered ease until his death thirty years later, while his partner, John C. Rives, became the official pub- lisher, through the Congressional Globe, of the proceedings of the House and Senate, and so continued until the end of his days.
Meantime, Thomas Ritchie, who had for many years edited the Richmond Enquirer, was invited to Washington, where he established the Union as the recognized central organ of the Administration. Events proved that the President had not been wholly fortunate in his choice of an editorial champion. " The most genteel old fogy who ever wore nankeen trousers, high shirt-collars, and broad-brimmed straw hats, Ritchie," writes John W. Forney, " was the Grandfather Whitehead of the poli- ticians, the Jesse Rural of the diplomats,- his efforts at making peace between contending rivals generally ending in the renewal of strife,
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and his paragraphs in defence of the Adminis- tration awakening new storms of ridicule. Everything was serious to him; and it was amusing to note how the most trifling allusion to the President and his Cabinet would quicken his facile pen, and how he would pour his al- most unintelligible manuscript into the hands of the printer. r. He wrote much,-not always clearly, but always honestly,-and when he left the tripod to which he had been tempted by large promises, he was neither as comfortable nor as rich a man as when he broke up his household to share the gay society and the heavy burden of Washington journalism."
William E. Robinson, who wrote under the pen-name of " Richelieu," was at this time the Washington correspondent of the recently founded New York Tribune, and for three months, in 1848, Horace Greeley, the editor of that journal, was a member of the House. Brief as was Greeley's period of service in Con- gress, it served to make him the best hated man in that body. Regarding as an abuse the methods then pursued by Congressmen, he pub- lished a list of the members' mileage accounts. This caused great indignation, and the anger
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Four Eventful Years
of his fellow-members was fed by Greeley's incisive comments on Congressional proceedings contributed daily to the Tribune over his signa- ture. Thus, he said that if either house " had a chaplain who dared preach of the faithless- ness, neglect of duty, iniquitous waste of time, and robbery of the public by Congressmen, there would be some sense in the chaplain busi- ness; but any ill-bred Nathan or Elijah who should undertake any such job would be kicked out in short order." Greeley, however, broke down the mileage abuse, and it also stands to his enduring credit that he introduced the first bill in Congress giving free homesteads to actual settlers upon the public lands.
Those were moving times in capital journal- ism. Early in the Polk Administration the House expelled " Richelieu" Robinson from the reporter's seats on the floor because, in one of his letters to the Tribune, he had humorously described the mid-day luncheon, upon a chunk of bread and a sausage, of one Sawyer, a mem- ber of the House from Ohio; a little later Ritchie, editor of the Union, was formally ex- cluded from the floor of the Senate, some of whose members had taken umbrage at his too
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candid criticisms, and in 1848 an angry mob besieged the office of the National Era and sought, without success, to lay it in ruins.
Gamaliel Bailey, the editor of the National Era, was an uncommon man. A native of New Jersey and a physician by profession, he early be- came an active agitator against slavery, and in 1836 joined James G. Birney, mob-driven from Kentucky, in the publication of the Cincinnati Philanthropist, the first abolition organ in the West, of which, in 1837, he became sole editor. Twice in that year, and again in 1841, his printing-office was sacked by a mob, but he issued his paper regularly until after the elec- tion of 1844, when he was called to the editor- ship of the National Era, a weekly journal which the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, acting through Lewis Tappan, had decided to establish in Washington. The National Era, which for a dozen years following January, 1847, laid siege to slavery in its great parlia- mentary stronghold, Dr. Bailey conducted with signal talent, tact, and devotion, its influence ever deepening and widening until its mission was accomplished.
But before success and prosperity came strug-
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Four Eventful Years
gle and trial. In 1848 a Northern schooner, having on board some threescore fugitive slaves from the District of Columbia, was captured in the Chesapeake. The captain and mate were safely lodged in jail, but the excitement in Washington was intense. Soon a mob collected, uttering dire threats against Dr. Bailey and his paper, and for three days, as already stated, his office was besieged, while a committee of leading citizens advised and urged him to re- store peace to the city and secure his own safety by pledging himself to discontinue the National Era, and even to surrender his press to the rioters. He refused, however, to surrender any- thing, and on the night of the third day the mob besieged his house. Here Bailey displayed not alone rare courage, but that rarer magnetism which moves and subjugates masses of men. Hearing his name called by a hundred voices, he walked out on the steps of his house and quietly said, "I am Dr. Bailey. What is your wish ?"
When they demanded the immediate surren- der of his property and his rights, he declined with dignity to give or take, but asked to be heard in his own defence. This request, after
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some demurs, was granted. The result was marvellous. Every instant the speaker gained on the prejudices of his hearers, and ere long . murmurs of assent and approval were heard here and there in the surging crowd. Finally. a well-known resident of Washington, who was with the mob, if not of it, leaped upon the steps and made an earnest speech against haste and violence, and in favor of the right of a man to his own property,-of an American citizen to free speech and a free press. So effective were both appeals that when the last speaker moved an adjournment the crowd, with but one dissenting voice, voted for it and quietly adjourned,-some actually calling back, " Good- night, doctor!" And that was the end of it.
The National Era thenceforward pursued a prosperous and potential career. It long had John G. Whittier as "corresponding editor," and its list of contributors included Theodore Parker. Bayard Taylor, the sisters Carey, Grace Greenwood, and Gail Hamilton. " Uncle Tom's Cabin" was first published in its columns, and for it Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth wrote her first novel, "Retribution." The author last named holds an honorable place in the literary
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Four Eventful Years
history of Washington. A native of George- town, she early became a bride, but her mar- ried life was not a happy one. She was de- serted by her husband after bearing him two children, and thus thrown upon her own re- sources, taught in the public schools, and tried to eke out a livelihood by making manuscript. Her joint vocations at first brought her small returns, but " Retribution," when issued in book form, had an extraordinary sale, and opened the way to comfort and a competence. Mrs. Southworth, during the next forty years, wrote upward of sixty novels, which found more readers than those of any woman author of her time. Her home during that fruitful period was a modest cottage in Georgetown, on the edge of a high cliff overlooking the Potomac, where she died, at the age of eighty, in June, 1899.
The Administration of Polk covered an event- ful period in the history of Washington and of the country, for during his Presidency an act was passed establishing the Smithsonian Insti- tution; the war with Mexico took place; the Oregon boundary was settled; a new tariff bill became a law, and the independent treasury sys- tem was re-enacted. With the first of these
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events is bound up the romantic life-story of an exceptional man. James Smithson was the natural son of Sir Hugh Smithson, first Duke of Northumberland, and of Elizabeth Macie. He was educated at Oxford, where he took a degree in 1786, but after his graduation while devoting himself to scientific studies, especially in chemistry, he does not appear to have had any fixed or permanent residence, living at lodgings in London, and occasionally staying a year or two at a time in cities on the Con- tinent, as Paris, Berlin, Florence, or Genoa. He died in the last-mentioned place in June, 1829, finding a grave in the English cemetery at San Benign.
It came out after Smithson's death that he had bequeathed the handsome fortune which the generosity of the Duke of Northumberland, enhanced by his own retired and simple habits, had enabled him to accumulate to his nephew for life, and after the latter's decease to his surviving children; but in the event of the nephew dying without issue, then the whole of the property was "left to the United States for the purpose of founding an institution at. Washington to be called the Smithsonian In-
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Four Eventful Years
stitution for the increase and diffusion of knowl- edge among men." Smithson's nephew dying without heirs in 1835, the property reverted to the United States, and in September, 1838, after a suit in chancery, there was paid into the federal treasury upward of half a million dollars. The disposition of the bequest was for several years before Congress, but in Au- gust, 1846, at which time the available funds had increased to seven hundred and fifty thou- sand dollars, the Smithsonian Institution was founded, and an act was passed directing the formation of a library, a museum to which were transferred the collections belonging to the gov- ernment, and a gallery of art, while it left to a board of regents the power of adopting such other parts of an organization as they might deem best suited to promote the objects of the bequest. The corner-stone of the Institution was laid in May, 1847, and the building completed ten years later. The square of land upon which this structure stands was set aside and especially reserved for the purpose by the government, and to-day, with the natural growth of trees and shrubbery, is one of the most at- tractive parks in Washington.
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Joseph Henry was chosen first executive offi- cer of the Institution, and under his wise man- agement and that of his successors, Spencer T. Baird and Samuel P. Langley, it has developed with the years into one of the most impor- tant scientific centres of the world. Its objects are to assist men of science in prosecuting origi- nal research and to publish the results of re- searches in a series of volumes, a copy of them being presented to every first-class library in the world. The Institution maintains an im- mense correspondence, and its influence and active aid reach investigators in every land. No other institution is more in touch with the vital interests of the country and its higher development, and nobly does it redeem the prom- ise once made by its founder, that his name " should live in the memory of men when the titles of his ancestors, the Northumberlands and the Percys, were extinct and forgotten."
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