USA > New Hampshire > History of New Hampshire, Volume III > Part 23
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The two leading Northern men in the Cabinet were, of course, Marcy and Cushing. It is not too much to say that Caleb Cushing was vastly more satisfactory to the South than to the North, especially to his own section of New England ; and Marcy was likewise acceptable to the Southern leaders who had at least prevented the choice of General Dix. Alone, of the seven men selected, William L. Marcy, had previous cabinet service. He had not held public office during the four years
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subsequent to his retirement from the Cabinet of Polk, but had stood among the foremost of the leaders of his party. When he accepted the state portfolio at the hands of Pierce he was in his sixty-seventh year. At the National Convention of 1852, he had been a candidate for the presidential nomination, and on the forty-eighth ballot as well as on the three preceding ones, the leading candidate, the vote standing, Marcy 90, Cass 73, Pierce 55, Douglas 33, Buchanan 28. Marcy was strongly urged for the Cabinet by the element which had been successful in eliminat- ing Dix, and there is reason to believe that the state portfolio was tendered him only as a result of pressure. The president had reasons for not wishing Marcy in his cabinet. He knew his ability and his national reputation, and no man likes to be overshadowed by his official subordinates. In his letter of acceptance, Gen. Pierce had made no professions of belief in the desirability of a single term, and there were doubtless already visions of a renomination and re-election. Marcy had also presi- dential aspirations. His vote in the Convention of 1852 had placed him on a level with Buchanan and Douglas as an aspirant. Douglas could afford to wait, but with Buchanan and himself, it was 1856 or never. Cass, by reason of his age, was already out of the question. It must have occurred to Pierce and his friends that Marcy might make the state department a stepping stone to the White House, and the same thought must have been enter- tained by Marcy and his friends. The appointment was a political mistake. His appointment as Secretary of War under Polk had much to do with the loss of New York to his party in 1846 and 1848, and his appointment by Pierce opened up the old breach between the party factions in New York, and was not the least of the factors which threw New York out of the Demo- cratic column of states before the close of the Pierce Admin- istration. If Marcy hoped to promote the realization of his presi- dential aspirations by the acceptance of the state portfolio he met with disappointment. It was made evident at the very start that the administration was to be conducted in the interest of a second term for Pierce. Marcy had been urged upon the presi- dent by the Southern leaders, but he was hardly satisfactory to them. A man of iron will, of incorruptible integrity, of plain unceremonial manners, yet who in his person bore the unmistake- able stamp of great intellectual force, he was the one restraining
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influence in an administration which, from a purely political standpoint, went wrong almost from the very outset. He found the affairs of his department in a most confused condition. Mr. Webster had been grossly careless, and Mr. Everett had not time to bring order out of chaos. The new Secretary had no ex- perience whatever in foreign affairs, but he soon mastered the routine of foreign relations, and his state papers entitle him to a high and honorable rank among American Secretaries of State. What is known as the Koszter case was one of the creditable features of the Pierce Administration, and credit in this case largely belongs to Marcy. One Martin Koszter, an escaped Hungarian, who had taken part in the unsuccessful revolution of 1848, had come to the United States, and taken the first steps towards naturalization by declaring his intention to become a citizen. Two years later he went to Smyrna on business and was arrested and confined in an Austrian brig of war to be carried away, when his release was demanded by the United States Consul, on the ground that he had taken the preliminary steps to become an American citizen. This demand was enforced by Capt. Ingraham of the American sloop of war St. Louis, who brought his guns to bear upon the Austrian brig. It was finally arranged that Koszter should be placed in charge of the French Consul until the claim of American protection be settled. The Austrian government addressed to the various European courts a note of protest against the action of Captain Ingraham, and called upon the United States to interpose no obstacle to the extradition of Koszter to Austria, "to disavow the conduct of its agents," and "to call them to a severe account and to tender to Austria a satisfaction proportionate to the magnitude of the outrage." This was Secretary Marcy's opportunity and he so used it that during the summer and autumn of 1853, there is little doubt he was the most popular man in the United States.
Marcy took the broad ground that Koszter, by establishing his domicile in the United States, became clothed with the na- tional character, a character he retained when he was seized at Smyrna, thus giving him the right to claim protection from the United States, and making it the duty of the United States to grant him such protection. The satisfaction asked for by Austria was denied. "Whenever," wrote Marcy, "by the operation of the law of nations, an individual becomes clothed with our
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national character, be he a native born or anturalized citizen, an exile driven from his early home by political oppression, or an emigrant enticed from it by the hopes of a better fortune for himself and his posterity, he can claim the protection of this government, and it may respond to that claim without being obliged to explain its conduct to any foreign power, for it is its duty to make its nationality respected by other nations, and respectable in every quarter of the globe." This utterance nat- urally thrilled every American heart, but it was something more than appeal to passion. The point made was one which has since been sustained by the most eminent authorities on international law, and the principle he laid down has been followed by his successors in the state department. Koszter was allowed to return to the United States.
At this time the opposition press and leaders were not slow to charge that the Administration, through its Secretary, would hardly have ventured to assume so peremptory an attitude towards Great Britain, but Secretary Marcy showed that when dealing with foreign powers he was no respecter of persons or nations. In 1854 he conducted with Lord Elgin at Washington successful negotiations relative to fisheries and reciprocal trade with Canada, but in 1856 he showed that so far as Great Britain and France were concerned, the United States would deal with them no differently than with Austria. For some time there had been under the direction of the British diplomatic and consular representatives a recruiting of men in the United States for regi- ments engaged in the Crimean war. Mr. Crampton, the British minister, paid no attention to protests made and treated the laws of the United States relative to such enlistments as if they were of no consequence. In May, 1856, Secretary Marcy sent a brief statement of the facts in the case to the British government, and closed his dispatch with a peremptory demand for the recall of Mr. Crampton and of the British Consuls at New York, Phila- delphia and Cincinnati. The French Minister de Santiges under- took the task of mediation between Mr. Crampton and Mr. Marcy. Calling at the Department of State he represented that the con- tinuance of peaceful relations between England and the United States was the earnest wish of the French Emperor, who held the Union in highest friendship and esteem. Mr. Marcy was delighted at this assurance but intimated that it did not corre-
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spond with other information which had been given him. Min- ister de Santiges emphatically denied the truth of any report adverse to the statement he had just made. Secretary Marcy excused his absence for a moment, but returned almost imme- diately holding in his hand an original dispatch addressed to Secretary of War Davis, from which to the astonishment of the French Minister he read extracts. The document was the report of an army commission sent out by the United States in the interest of science, to whom Emperor Napoleon's war minister not only refused certain courtesies solicited by members of the commission, but also expressed the hope that when they met again, it might be at the cannon's mouth. The French minister took a hurried leave and did not propose further mediation. Mr. Crampton went home and his place was not filled during the remainder of the Pierce Administration.
James Guthrie of Kentucky at the time of his appointment to the Treasury Department was not prominent in politics, but was known as a business man of marked ability. He was presi- dent of the Louisville and Portland Canal Co. and of the Louis- ville and Nashville Railroad. He made an admirable secretary, bringing to the performance of the duties of his office a genius for finance, and his record was a most honorable one.
One of the notable figures of the new Cabinet from the very beginning was the Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis of Missis- sippi. Like Dix he had served with Pierce in the war with Mexico, and like Dix he early received the offer of a cabinet portfolio. If Dix was objectionable to the South, so was Davis to the North. If Dix was opposed by the Hunkers of New York so was Davis by the Union men of Mississippi. Dix accepted the offer of the State portfolio, while Davis declined that of War. The treatment of the two men was vastly differnt. Pierce let Dix know that he wished to be relieved from the tender which had been made and accepted ; but he sent for Davis to come to Wash- ington, and was so earnest in his solicitations, that Davis came the day after inauguration and was prevailed upon to accept the appointment the president was so anxious to make.
The career of Davis had been a brilliant one. He was gradu- ated at West Point in 1828, at the age of twenty, and served as second and first lieutenant until 1835, when he resigned and engaged in cotton planting till 1845, when he entered Congress,
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but resigned in 1846 to take command of the first regiment of Mississippi Riflemen in the war with Mexico. He served with brilliancy, declining a commission as brigadier general, until July, 1847, when he resigned to enter the United States Senate, having been appointed to a seat in that body in May of that year. Subsequently elected to the seat he served till November, 1851, when he resigned to make the canvass of his state as the secession candidate for governor. Again elected to the Senate, he entered the Cabinet of President Pierce, instead of taking his seat, though his Mississippi friends managed to have a senatorial seat ready for him when he stepped out of the War Department March 4, 1857. This he kept till January 21, 1861, when he withdrew to enter upon his career as the official head of the slaveholders' con- federacy.
When he entered the cabinet at the age of forty-five, he was more than any other public man the recognized successor of John C. Calhoun, and was gradually reaching the position to which he aspired, that of champion par excellence of the extreme states rights principle. Accepting the war portfolio, he did not spend his time in theorizing or dreaming. Never was war secre- tary more active in time of peace. Material changes were made in the models of arms. Iron gun carriages were introduced, and experiments were made which led to the casting of heavy guns hollow instead of boring them after casting. Inquiries were made as to gunpowder which led to the use of a coarser grain for artillery. The army was strengthened by the addition of two regiments of infantry and two of cavalry. A commission was sent to Crimea to study the latest improvements in the art of war. The army regulations were revised. Southern forts and arsenals were carefully cared for. The fact that the act approved August 18, 1856, appropriated only $190,000 for the whole line of Northern Atlantic fortifications and $928,000 for those of the Southern Atlantic and the Gulf could but cause comment. When the storm of rebellion broke upon the country, there were many who called to mind that but four years previously Jefferson Davis of Mississippi had been Secretary of War.
Just what special qualifications James C. Dobbin of North Carolina possessed for the Secretaryship of the Navy, aside from the fact that he had been active in promoting the nomination of Gen. Pierce at Baltimore does not appear. Admitted to the bar
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in 1835, at the age of twenty-one, he enjoyed lucrative practice, served a term in Congress from 1845 to 1847, had been four times a member of the House of Commons of his state, and in 1850 had been speaker. During the Pierce Administration there was little or nothing outside the routine work of the Navy Depart- ment for a secretary to do, and Secretary Dobbin did this to the satisfaction of everybody. He was attractive in his manners, forming many warm personal friendships, but was content to follow the leaders in matters of public policy.
In many respects the most remarkable man in the Pierce Cabinet, if not indeed the dominating figure in the administration, was Caleb Cushing, the attorney-general. Born in Salisbury, Massachusetts, January 7, 1800, he died in Newburyport, Jan- uary 2, 1879. Graduating at Harvard in 1817, he was tutor of mathematics there in 1819-21. Studied law and was admitted to practice in 1823. He was a member of the Massachusetts House in 1825, of the Senate in 1827, visited Europe in 1829, and was again a member of the House in 1833 and 1834. He was elected to Congress as a Whig and served from 1835 to 1843, when he was commissioner to China from May in 1843 to March, 1845. He raised a regiment of Massachusetts volunteers for the war with Mexico, was commissioned its colonel in January, 1847, and brigadier-general by President Polk three months later. He served till July 20, 1848. He was defeated as Democratic candi- date for governor of Massachusetts in 1847 and again in 1848; declined the office of attorney-general of his state in 1851; was appointed by Governor Boutwell a justice of the Supreme Court in 1852, and resigned to enter the Pierce Cabinet as attorney- general in 1853. He presided over the National Democratic Con- vention at Charleston and Baltimore in 1860, allied himself with the states rights Democracy and supported Breckinridge for the presidency ; was appointed by President Johnson a commissioner to codify and revise the statutes of the United States, 1866-70; by President Grant senior counsel for the United States before the Geneva tribunal of arbitration on the Alabama claims; was nominated in 1874 by President Grant as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, but his nomination was withdrawn when it became certain that it would be rejected ; became Minister to Spain, serving from January, 1874, to January, 1877.
This in barest skeleton is a sketch of a remarkable career.
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He held high public office to which he was appointed by John Tyler, James K. Polk, Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson and Ulyses S. Grant. It was a unique record, and Caleb Cushing was a unique character : scholar, author, lawyer, diplomat, general, judge, achieving distinction in each field, excepting perhaps in the military. He was for a long time one of the ablest Whig leaders. When Tyler apostatized Cushing apostatized with him. He became a Democrat. He helped bring about the nomination of Pierce, and hoped to enter the Cabinet as Secretary of State, but so strong was the opposition to him that the president de- clined to appoint him. Later as is evident from the appointments given him by President Grant, his alliances were more with the Republicans than with the Democrats, but it may be doubted if he ever had sincere well-grounded political convictions of any kind. Lowell in his Biglow Papers expressed the general opinion of him in the following satirical lines :
"Gineral C. is a dreffle smart man : He's been on all sides that give places or pelf,- But consistency still wuz a part of his plan,- He's been true to one party,- an' that is himself."
Thomas H. Benton was more severe. In a speech delivered in 1856, speaking of the members of the Cabinet he said : "Of all these the attorney-general is the master spirit. He is a man of talent, of learning, of industry-unscrupulous, double-sexed, double-gendered and hermaphroditic in politics, with a hinge on his knee which he often crooks that 'thrift may follow fawning,' he governed by subserviency ; and to him is deferred the mas- ter's place in Mr. Pierce's Cabinet. When I heard that he was to be a member, I put down Mr. Pierce for a doomed man, and fore- saw the swift and full destruction which was to fall on him." Cushing was distrusted. He had the fatal lack of moral sense. It was not merely his political inconsistency which lost him the confidence of his fellow-men. Other men have changed their political affiliations, retaining meanwhile their reputation for sin- cerity. The general feeling on the part of his contemporaries was that it was not so much principle as personal interest which accounted for his political unsteadiness. The president held to the view that Cushing's fickleness was intellectual rather than moral, that he mostly needed a man of stable judgment to keep
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him straight and President Pierce believed himself that man. Never was he more seriously mistaken.
The guiding spirits of the Pierce Administration were Caleb Cushing and Jefferson Davis. The administration began with the slavery issue supposedly settled by the Compromise meas- ures of 1850, and the president announced that he would vigor- ously oppose any reopening of the question. He did not appreci- ate the "irrepressible conflict," nor did he foresee the impossibility of the Republic permanently existing "half slave and half free." Compromises are never final settlements. The question was bound to be reopened, but the reopening came to the country with startling shock. The harmony which prevailed during nearly all the first year of the administration was only the lull presaging the storm.
On the 4th of January, 1854, the country was electrified by the report in the Senate from the Committee on Territories, through its chairman, Senator Stephen A. Douglas, of the famous Kansas-Nebraska bill. Three weeks later he also re- ported from the same committee an amended substitute bill, one provision of which was that the Missouri Compromise Act of 1820 was in distinct and explicit terms pronounced void, and slavery and freedom were given an equal chance for propagation in the territories of the United States. What had been regarded as a settlement was found to have been only a brief truce, which was now suddenly broken and the conflict was on again only to be terminated when Lee laid down his sword at Appomattox eleven years later.
With the news of the report of this bill came also the intima- tion that the administration was pledged to support the bill and bound to see it through, an intimation which proved to be well based, and on May 30 it became a law by the signature of the president. It was during the pendency of this bill that the dominating influence of Cushing and Davis became specially manifest. Marcy and McClelland hesitated. Pierce himself vacillated, but whenever he showed himself influenced by an outraged Northern sentiment, and showed signs of retracting the promise of support which he had given Douglas, after an interview with Davis, on January 22, he was held to this promise. All other measures of the Pierce Administration were over- shadowed by this. Questions of tariff and revenue, the acquisi-
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tion of Cuba which had become an issue, projected public improvements became secondary to those growing out of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The satisfactory settlement of diplo- matic questions accomplished by the industry and ability of Marcy seemed to be lost sight of. Before the administration closed, a new political party had come into existence, and new issues or old issues in new forms were at the front. Perhaps no administration ever began with fairer promise. Few ever more completely failed and failed in spite of splendid accomplish- ment.
A controversy with Great Britain respecting the fisheries was harmoniously adjusted ; the rights of American citizens, and of those who had declared their intention to become citizens was vindicated; the boundary dispute with Mexico was settled by negotiation resulting in the acquisition of what is now a part of the State of Arizona; a treaty was negotiated providing for commercial reciprocity for a period of ten years between the United States and the Canadian provinces; a treaty was nego- tiated by Commodore Matthew Galbraith Perry with Japan which opened up that previously almost unknown country to the commerce of the world; proposed routes for a railroad to the Pacific were explored under the supervision and direction of the War Department; the diplomatic and consular systems of the United States were revised and improved; a court of claims was organized and a retired list was provided for the navy.
A strict constructionist of the Constitution, the vetoes of the president were in harmony with such constitutional in- terpretation. The principal vetoes were those of bills making appropriations for public works; a grant of 10,000,000 acres of public property to the states for the relief of indigent insane; provision for the payment of the French spoiliation claims; and also a bill increasing the appropriation for the Collins line of steamers.
An attempt to acquire Cuba proved abortive. Affairs in Cuba were in a bad way and filibustering expeditions from the United States to the island in 1850 and 1851 during the Fillmore Administration led to questions on the part of the European powers as to the attitude of the United States towards such ex- peditions. In 1852 Great Britain and France proposed to the
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United States a tripatite treaty by which all these powers should disavow all intention of acquiring Cuba, and discountenance any such attempt by any power. In December, 1852, Secretary of State Edward Everett declined the proposal, declaring, at the same time, however, that the United States would never ques- tion the title of Spain to the island. Conditions in Cuba, steadily growing worse, in August, 1854, President Pierce directed James Buchanan, John Y. Mason and Pierre Soule, the American Min- isters respectively to Great Britain, France and Spain, to meet and discuss the situation. They met first at Ostend in October and later at Aix la Chapelle and agreed on a dispatch, which they sent their government, which became known as the "Ostend Manifesto." It was to the effect, to state it briefly, that if Spain refused to sell Cuba, self-preservation on the part of the United States would compel her to wrest it from Spain, to prevent it from becoming Africanized into a second Santo Domingo. The great European powers at once manifested their hostility to the proposal, and the overshadowing excitement caused by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, shelved it not only for the time being but permanently.
Indeed, the Kansas-Nebraska Act overshadowed everything and became the one supreme issue. The so-called Missouri Com- promise of 1820 had forever excluded slavery north of the parallel, 36° 30'. The repeal of this by the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened up this territory to slavery, by leaving it to the people in the territories north of that line to decide the question for themselves. The act was Senator Douglas' bid for the presi- dency ; but Pierce was hampered by no single term pledge and it was generally understood that he would be a candidate for renomination and re-election. Douglas, without doubt, believed that the president would hold to the promise of his inaugural and his first annual message relative to disturbing the country's repose from a discussion of the slavery question which had fol- lowed the compromise of 1850. Pierce had said in his annual message of December, 1853: "that this repose is to suffer no shock during my official term, if I have power to prevent it, those who placed me here may be assured." Senator Douglas counted on this, but reckoned without his host. The act became a law. The plans and hopes of Douglas were disappointed. The administration of Pierce was involved in what was virtually civil
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war in Kansas, and was repudiated throughout the North. The anti-Kansas-Nebraska. Democrats went into the new political party which grew out of the contest. In 1854 with a Democratic majority in both houses of the New Hampshire legislature, the influence of the National administration was powerless to secure the election of a Democratic United States Senator, and in 1855 the Democrats lost control of the state.
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