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The Passing of the Whigs
secure the nomination. Four years earlier Scott, if nominated, would doubtless have been elected. Now his candidacy failed to evoke enthusiasm, and from the first the Whig canvass was char- acterized by an apathy which foretold defeat.
Webster, however, did not live to witness the undoing of his rival. Broken in health and spirit, he retired to his beloved Marshfield in the early summer of 1852, and there, on Oc- tober 25, he died. Washington, when news came of his passing, grieved for him as for a friend. There were the usual manifestations of mourn- ing by the government; the several depart- ments were closed, and the public buildings were draped with emblems of woe, while on the day of his funeral business was suspended during the hours when he was borne to his last resting- place. Washington's example was followed by a hundred other cities. "From east to west," said Edward Everett, who succeeded Webster as Secretary of State, " and from north to south, a voice of lamentation has gone forth, such as has not echoed through the land since the death of him who was first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen. "
Both of the old parties, so far as slavery was
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concerned, met on common ground in the cam- paign of 1852. Both stood squarely on the compromise measures of 1850, and both en- dorsed the fugitive slave law. Yet slavery would not down, and the ever-growing feeling against it found expression in the platform of the Free-Soil party, whose candidate, John P. Hale, failed to obtain a place in the electoral college, but secured more than one hundred and fifty thousand popular votes. The election showed how forlorn had been the hope led by Scott, for Pierce received two hundred and fifty- four electoral votes to forty-two for his rival, who carried only four States. No longer could it be doubted that the Whig party was in the last stage of decrepitude and decay. Two years later it vanished from the election returns of the nation.
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THE STATE, WAR, AND NAVY DEPARTMENTS BUILDING
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CHAPTER V
ENTRANCE OF THE REPUBLICANS
T HE largest number of strangers who had ever gathered in Washington to assist at the installation of a chief magistrate witnessed the inauguration of Franklin Pierce on March 4, 1853. The President-elect made the journey from the White House to the Capitol and back again standing erect in the carriage beside Presi- dent Fillmore, and bowing constantly to the cheers with which he was greeted all along the way. When he took the oath he did not, as is ordinary, use the word " swear," but accepted the constitutional alternative which permitted him to affirm that he would faithfully execute the duties of President. Pierce was also the first President to deliver his inaugural address without notes. One passage embodied a touch- ing reference to the sudden taking-away of the speaker's only living child, a bright boy of thir- teen, by a railroad accident which happened in the early part of January, 1853. "No heart
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but my own," said the President, "can know the personal regret and bitter sorrow over which I have been borne to a position so suitable for others rather than desirable for myself." And those who heard these words felt only sympathy for the man who thus frankly disclosed his private grief.
The future chief magistrate, while a student at Bowdoin, had given his heart to Jane Apple- ton, the gentle and gracious daughter of its president. His love was returned, and Mrs. Pierce had been nineteen years a wife when she became the mistress of the White House. But she had been long an invalid, and the death of her youngest son-two others had died in early childhood-was a blow from which she never recovered. With rare devotion, her hus- band cheered her gloom and took upon his own shoulders the task of hospitality which she was disqualified to meet. His exquisite urbanity and unfailing tact served to make his Admin- istration a social success, but Mrs. Pierce, who had always preferred the quiet of her New England home to the glare and glitter of fash- ionable life in Washington, dragged through it with heavy heart. She left the White House
Entrance of the Republicans
with crippled health and shattered nerves, and, dying in 1863, now sleeps by the side of her children in the cemetery at Concord.
It is the sober verdict of the historian that Pierce was the most popular man in the coun- try when he delivered his inaugural address; but he did not long enjoy this distinction, and ere his first year in office had run its course he had come to be denounced by his opponents and to be regarded by most of the leaders of his own party as unfitted for his position. This change in opinion was due in part to the disappointment and chagrin which attended the parcelling-out of offices. "There was never a fiercer time than this among the place-seekers," Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote to a friend, and he but spoke the truth. They crowded the public receptions of the President and burdened all his waking hours with their importunate de- mands. With a dozen applicants for every place, the distribution of the offices was sure to breed for the President a plentiful crop of enemies, and Pierce's lack of executive ability, which speedily became apparent, added to the irrita- tion which would have been provoked even by the wisest and firmest of men. Unable to
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say no, he came to a decision in the morning only to change it in the afternoon, and time and again promised the same important office to two men, while " indirect assurances of Ex- ecutive favor were almost as numerous as vis- itors to the White House." Thus arose general distrust of his capacity, and a growing belief that he lacked the firmness demanded by the duties of his office.
Some of those who accepted this view of the new President's character cited his selection of a Cabinet as proof of their contention. Pierce soon after his election tendered the position of Secretary of State to John A. Dix, of New York, but when some of the Southern politi- cians protested against the appointment, on ac- count of Dix's connection with the Free-Soil party in 1848, so manifest was the embarrass- ment of the President-elect that Dix at once released him from his obligation. In the end William L. Marcy, of New York, was appointed Secretary of State; James Guthrie, of Ken- tucky, Secretary of the Treasury; Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, Secretary of War; James C. Dobbins, of North Carolina, Secretary of the Navy; Robert McClelland, of Michigan,
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Secretary of the Interior; James Campbell, of Pennsylvania, Postmaster-General; and Caleb Cushing, of Massachusetts, Attorney-General. Dobbins had served in Congress, McClelland had been governor of Michigan, and Campbell had held important offices in his State. All three were men of moderate quality, but Guthrie, though practically unknown out of Kentucky, proved to be a Secretary of the Treasury to rank with the greatest, while Davis and Cushing also brought to Pierce's council-board talents of a high order.
The best-known member of the new Cabinet was Marcy, an adroit politician and a man of strong mind and honest purposes, whose con- duct of the State Department proved him worthy to rank with Webster and other of his great predecessors. Marcy's vigorous assertion, in the affair of Martin Koszta, of the power and pro- tection afforded by American nationality caused deep exultation, and made him for the moment the most popular man in the United States. Not less firm and patriotic was the course which he adopted when it became known that by the sanction of Sir John Crampton, British minister at Washington, recruits for the British army
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in the Crimea had been secretly enlisted in this country in violation of the laws and sovereign rights of the United States. Marcy demanded Crampton's recall. When this was refused by the British government, he sent the offending minister his passports, and at the same time revoked the exequaturs of three British con- suls who had connived at the enlistments. This action led to talk of war between the two coun- tries, but the difficulty was finally adjusted by negotiation, and a new British legation sent to Washington.
When Fillmore quitted office the National In- telligencer again, and for the last time, ceased to be the organ of an administration. To the Union was intrusted the official advocacy of the policy and measures of the restored De- mocracy. This journal was now owned by General Robert Armstrong, a sturdy veteran who had been a friend and comrade-in-arms of Andrew Jackson, and the confidential adviser of Polk during the latter's Presidency; but its working editor was John W. Forney, a native of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who had entered journalism at the age of twenty, and who, forging rapidly to the front as a writer and
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political manager, had in 1851 been chosen clerk of the House of Representatives, which post he held until 1855. Forney's connection with Washington journalism covered a period of twenty years, and during that time he held a high place among political writers, for, though his self-approbation was large, it was not larger than his accomplishments. His writing was clear, forcible, and logical, and, while wit and humor had been denied him, he had the rare ability always to be interesting, and the rarer virtue never to be malignant.
About the time that Forney assumed the di- rection of the Union, with Caleb Cushing as his chief editorial contributor, James C. Well- ing, a Princeton graduate who had been a teacher in New York, became literary editor of the National Intelligencer. He was charged in 1856 with the chief management of that journal, and his editorship continued until the close of the Civil War. Welling's editorials during this period, and especially in its closing years, often took the form of elaborate papers on questions of constitutional or international law, and exer- cised an acknowledged influence upon public opinion. Some of them have been republished,
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and are still cited in works of history and juris- prudence. He withdrew from journalism in 1865 to become the clerk of the Court of Claims. During his last years-he died in 1894-he was president of Columbian University, and to his well-directed efforts the present prosperity of that institution is in large measure due.
The National Intelligencer was never more stately or impressive than when under the guiding hand of Welling, but flowing periods could not conceal the fact that its greatness had departed never to return. Born in an age when the world moved slow and the news- papers were slower, it could not escape from its early environment, and daily it became clearer that the days of the mother-organ of the Whigs were numbered. The ideas and methods which were now coming into play in journalism found apter and livelier expression in the columns of the Star, an afternoon daily whose first num- ber appeared in December, 1852. Established by Charles W. Denison, the Star soon passed into the control of William D. Wallach, a shrewd and energetic man, with a keen instinct for news, under whose direction it speedily became the most widely read and circulated journal
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published at the capital. Such it has continued until the present time.
It was in 1853 that Nathaniel B. Tucker, a member of the famous Virginia family of that name, founded in Washington a short-lived jour- nal called the Sentinel, and a year later Ben : Perley Poore began his long career as capital correspondent, first of the Boston Journal and afterwards of the Boston Budget. Poore's let- ters gained him in the course of time a national reputation, and for many years his signature of "Perley" was better known in his native New England than that of any other corre- spondent. He served at the same time as clerk of the Senate Committee on Printing, founded and edited many successive editions of the Con- gressional Directory, and supervised the annual abridgment of the public documents of the United States. During thirty-three years of Washington life Major Poore-he served in the Civil War as an officer of Massachusetts vol- unteers-made the acquaintance and became the confidant of many eminent men, and his fund of recollections was large and entertaining. Shortly before his death in 1887 he embodied them in two portly volumes, whose raciness,
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wealth of detail, and general accuracy make them a mine of information for every student of capital history.
Major Poore, in the book just referred to, tells his readers that during his first years in Washington he often touched elbows with Count Adam Gurowski, a Polish author and exile, who had appeared at the capital in 1849 and resided there until his death seventeen years later. Gurowski, who had been one of the leaders of the Polish revolution of 1830, quickly became a prolific contributor to American news- papers and magazines, and, as he found few things in political or social life that were to his liking, he wrote, as a rule, with a pen that had been dipped in gall. Capital journalism, indeed, had never boasted of a more unique and tart personality. Witty and cynical, Long- fellow, in his diary, calls him "the terrible count," but he was an accomplished man, and would have been a handsome one save for the loss of an eye in a duel. Gurowski ended his days as a translator for the State Department.
When Lord Elgin, governor-general of Can- ada, visited Washington in 1854 to negotiate with Marcy a treaty settling the fishery ques-
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Entrance of the Republicans
tion,-an agreement, as it proved, profitable to both of the contracting parties, but which, by reason of the not wholly creditable manner in which a majority of the Senate was obtained for its ratification, has ever since been known as the treaty " floated through on champagne," -he brought with him as his secretary a tall, slender youth, whose face spoke his Scotch ancestry, and whose manners were so charming that they transformed, each new acquaintance into a friend. This was Lawrence Oliphant, hero in days to come of as singular a career as ever found a place in fiction, and who, though then but a few years past his majority, had already given proof of the talents which were to assure him an exceptional place among the writers and journalists of his time. He has put on record, in his fascinating " Episodes in a Life of Adventure," a noteworthy description of Washington in 1854,-" A howling wilder- ness of deserted streets running into the country, and ending nowhere, its population consisting chiefly of politicians and negroes."
But if the capital's shabby exterior repelled Oliphant, he found in its society much to praise and little to condemn. This with good reason,
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for the social life of Washington was most agreeable under the Administration of Pierce, and during its term no disturbing element was permitted to war against the enjoyment of enter- tainments which are still remembered for their lavish yet refined hospitality. Only on occa- sions of official necessity did the wife of the President appear in public, but among the wives of the Senate and Cabinet circles were a score of women whose graces gave a lustre to Wash- ington society that has never been surpassed. Mrs. Jefferson Davis was one of those whose presence was counted an additional attraction at every ball or dinner-party; the wife of Stephen A. Douglas was another. The last named, the daughter of James Madison Cutts, long Comptroller of the Treasury, had, when a reigning belle, been wooed and won by the " Little Giant," then the undisputed leader of his party in the Senate. Their marriage fol- lowed, with a display unusual for the time, and they went to live in the house on I Street which Douglas built for his bride, and in which they gave splendid entertainments that he believed were promoting his political fortunes. It was in this house also that, in April, 1860, Douglas
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received the news that the Charleston conven- tion had adjourned to meet at Baltimore, and with quick insight into coming events declared to waiting friends, "That means disunion."
This despairing announcement, however, lay seven years in the future when Pierce became President, and the opening of the Thirty-third Congress found the country facing the prospect of a long political calm. In that body and its successor appeared a number of new Senators and Representatives to whom a few words must be given before the curtain is drawn upon the act which, more than all others, brought about the Civil War. Brown, of Mississippi, Toombs, of Georgia, and Slidell, of Louisiana, left the House at this time to take seats in the Senate, where the last named had for a colleague that Judah P. Benjamin who, Hebrew-bred and for- eign-born, was to become Secretary of State under the Confederacy and to round out his long career as one of the leaders of the English bar. Vermont sent Jacob Collamer to keep Foot company, and from Maine came William Pitt Fessenden, a lawyer of repute, who a dozen years before had served a single term in the House, and who brought to his new duties II .- 9
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courage, integrity, and intellectual gifts of the first order; John B. Thompson, another emi- nent lawyer of Whig antecedents, represented Kentucky; New Jersey sent William Wright, and replaced Stockton with the latter's kinsman, John R. Thompson; while Chase, of Ohio, found a not wholly congenial colleague in George E. Pugh, now best remembered for his unswerving fidelity to the political fortunes of Douglas.
James Harlan, of Iowa, a college president turned law-maker, was to become one of the founders of the Republican party and fill a place in Lincoln's Cabinet; and honors equally en- during were in store for Lyman Trumbull, who came to the Senate from Illinois as an anti- slavery Democrat, and whose eighteen years of service proved him one of the ablest constitu- tional lawyers of his generation.
Trumbull took his place in the Senate on December 3, 1855; on the same day Henry Wilson entered that body from Massachusetts, succeeding Edward Everett, who had filled out the unexpired term of John Davis. The son of a farm laborer and himself a journeyman cobbler, Wilson came first into notice as a man-
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Entrance of the Republicans
aging politician, clever and adroit at bargains, which he was wont to employ for his own advancement; but the cause of anti-slavery gave a nobler complexion to his career, and in the Senate, where he sat for eighteen years, he was from the first recognized as a man of courage and of parts. Ever strong in his con- victions, he was always fearless in their ex- pression, and if from his speeches grace of oratory and polished diction were often absent, they never failed to prove the practical, clear- sighted statesmanship of the speaker, or to com- mand attention and respect.
Gerrit Smith, of New York, whom great wealth joined to open-handed generosity long made the financial prop of the anti-slavery move- ment, was a member of the House in the Thirty- third Congress, and his name heads a list of accessions to that body which before Pierce's term in office had run its course brought to the Capitol such men of pith and quality as the brothers Washburn; Justin Morrill, of Ver- mont ; Reuben E. Fenton, of New York; Henry Winter Davis, of Maryland; John A. Bingham and John Sherman, of Ohio; and John Scott Harrison and Schuyler Colfax, of Indiana.
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Israel Washburn left Congress at the end of ten years to become governor of his State, but his brother Elihu, of Illinois, sat there long enough to earn the titles of "Father of the House" and " Watch-dog of the Treasury,"- the latter an outcome of his continual habit of closely scrutinizing all calls upon the pub- lic funds and his persistent demands that the finances of the government should be adminis- tered with the strictest economy. When he re- tired from Congress it was to become Grant's first Secretary of State, and afterwards he served as minister to France. Cadwalader Washburn, perhaps the most remarkable member of a re- markable family, in 1861 gave up his seat in the House to command a regiment of Wisconsin cavalry, and rose in a little more than a year to be major-general of volunteers. After the war's close he again sat in Congress, ending his public career as governor of his State.
Morrill, who brought to the discharge of public duty an industry and vigor of judgment which early made him a power in all the varied processes of legislation, remained twelve years in the House and was then advanced to a seat in the Senate, of which he continued a member
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until his death. Fenton sat in the House for eleven years, and then left it to become gov- ernor of his State, afterwards serving a single term in the Senate. Though never a strong participant in debate, he took high rank in both branches of Congress, for he invited confidence without betraying himself, and he marshalled forces with profound strategic skill. Davis died too soon for the full ripening of his fame and influence, but he lived long enough to make for himself an unusual place in legislative history. Those who opposed him called him impractica- ble, yet friend and foe alike bore cheerful wit- ness to the gift of speech which enabled him to sway with ease the most turbulent assembly. Fierce, impassioned, and at times vindictive, he was for a dozen years the most powerful orator south of Mason and Dixon's line.
Bingham sat for sixteen years in the House, and during that time had no equal in debate. Though short-tempered and impatient of contra- diction, he never was caught tripping, and the man who made an attack upon him usually had quick and sure cause to regret it. The most fluent in speech of any member of the House, he spoke always with great ease and rapidity, and
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with the slightest straining for effect, though his speech rose at times to the height of the most impassioned eloquence, and poured forth in a torrent of impetuosity that carried everything before it.
Sherman had just turned thirty when he entered the House in 1855, but mettle, talent, and cool judgment pointed him out at once as one safe to follow in troubled times, and gave him commanding influence over his fellows. The place thus gained he held without dispute during forty-three years of eventful and trying public labor. He left the House in 1861 to take the place in the Senate made vacant by Chase, and he remained a member of that body until 1897. Once only was there a break in this long period of Congressional service. That was in the year 1877, when he became Secretary of the Treasury under Hayes, and for four years so directed its affairs that his stands out among the ablest and cleanest of the many able and clean Administrations of that great depart- ment of the government. Harrison, the son of one President and the father of another, left Congress at the close of his second term, but Colfax sat in the House for fourteen years;
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was thrice chosen Speaker, each time by an in- creased majority, and when he retired from that post it was to become Vice-President under Grant. He was long one of the most popular men in public life, and he merited both esteem and good-will, for his hands were always open, his aims high, and his methods honorable.
Southern delegates had brought about Pierce's nomination, Southern votes had assured his election, and he came into office pledged to main- tain and conserve the existing order as em- bodied in the compromise measures of 1850. His first message to Congress dwelt upon the repose that had followed their adoption, and declared that it should suffer no shock during his term if he had power to prevent it. Doubt- less such was then his hope and belief, but both were to have quick and rude disturbance from an unexpected quarter. During the second ses- sion of the Thirty-second Congress a bill for the organization of the territory west of Mis- souri, comprising what is now the States of Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Montana, and part of Colorado and Wyoming, had passed the House and failed in the Senate. The South would not organize that territory without
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slavery, and the North refused to organize it with slavery. On January 4, 1854, Douglas, as chairman of the Senate Committee on Ter- ritories, introduced a new bill dealing with the subject, which permitted slavery north of the parallel 36° 30' in a region from which it had been forever excluded by the Missouri Com- promise of 1820. Three weeks later, at the instance of Senator Dixon, of Kentucky, the bill was so amended by its author as to provide for a direct repeal of the Missouri restriction. Reduced to plain terms, the amended measure provided that hereafter the people of each Ter- ritory, whether north or south of the line laid down in 1820, should admit or exclude slavery as they might determine by vote.
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