In the mean time, the House of Representatives was continuing the discussion on the old lines. Although the arguments brought out little that had not been stated in the first Missouri debate, they were restated day after day with an amplitude and a bitterness of feeling that aggravated the hostility between the rival forces. Even under this provocation, most southern members expressed their opinions on the morality and expediency of slavery in language that affords a strange contrast to their later utterances: in almost every case they lamented its existence and demanded its dispersion throughout the west as a means of alleviating their misfortune.
Although most of the men who spoke on the point were from the regions where cotton was least cultivated, yet even Reid, of Georgia, likened the south to an unfortunate man who "wears a cancer in his bosom." [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 16 Cong., 1 Sess., I., 1025.] Tyler of Virginia, afterwards president of the United States, characterized slavery as a dark cloud, and asked, "Will you permit the lightnings of its wrath to break upon the South when by the interposition of a wise system of legislation you may reduce it to a summer"s cloud?" [Footnote: Ibid., II., 1391.] John Randolph, the ultra-southerner, was quoted as saying that all the misfortunes of his life were light in the balance when compared with the single misfortune of having been born a master of slaves.
In addition to the argument of "mitigation by diffusion," the south urged the injustice of excluding its citizens from the territories by making it impossible for the southern planter to migrate thither with his property. On the side of the north, it was argued with equal energy that the spread of slaves into the west would inevitably increase their numbers and strengthen the inst.i.tution.
Since free labor was unable to work in the midst of slave labor, northern men would be effectively excluded from the territories which might be given over to slavery. Economic law, it was urged, would make it almost certain that, in order to supply the vast area which it was proposed to devote to slavery, the African slave-trade would be reopened. As the struggle waxed hot, as the arguments brought out with increasing clearness the fundamental differences between the sections, threats of disunion were freely exchanged.
[Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, V., 13, 53; Benton, Abridgment of Debates, XIII., 607.] Even Clay predicted the existence of several new confederacies. [Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, IV., 526.] Nor were the extremists of the north unwilling to accept this alternative.
[Footnote: King, Life and Corresp. of King, VI., 274, 286, 287, 387.] But the danger of southern secession was diminished because Monroe was ready to veto any bill which excluded slavery from Missouri. [Footnote: Cong. Globe, 30 Cong., 2 Sess., App. 67.] While still engaged in its own debates, the House received the compromise proposal from the Senate. At first the majority remained firm and refused to accept it. [Footnote: Woodburn, in Am. Hist. a.s.soc., Report 1893, p. 251-297.] March 1, 1820, the House pa.s.sed its own bill imposing the restriction on Missouri, by a vote of 91 to 82. By the efforts of the compromisers, however, a committee of conference was arranged, which on the very next day resulted in the surrender of the House. The vote on striking out the restriction on Missouri was 90 to 87. New England gave 7 ayes to 33 nays; the middle states, 8 to 46; the south cast 58 votes for striking out, and none against it; the northwest gave all its 8 votes against striking out the restriction; while the 17 southwestern votes were solidly in favor of admitting Missouri as a slave state.
Thus, while the southern phalanx in opposition remained firm, enough members were won over from the northern ranks to defeat the restrictionists. Some of these deserters [Footnote: See King, Life and Corresp. of King, VI., 291, 329; Benton, View, I., 10; Adams, Memoirs, V., 15, 307. Randolph applied to them the term "doughfaces."] from the northern cause were influenced by the knowledge that the admission of Maine would fail without this concession; others, by the const.i.tutional argument; others, by the fear of disunion; and still others, by the apprehension that the unity of the Democratic party was menaced by the new sectional alignment, which included among its leaders men who had been prominent in the councils of the Federalists. By the final solution, it was agreed (134 to 42) to admit Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state; while all of the rest of the territory, possessed by the United States west of the Mississippi and north of 36 degrees 30" was pledged to freedom. Yet the fate of the measure was uncertain, for some of Monroe"s southern friends strongly urged him still to veto the compromise. [Footnote: Cong. Globe, 30 Cong., 2 Sess., App. 64.] The president submitted to the cabinet the question whether Congress had the right to prohibit slavery in a territory, and whether the section of the Missouri bill which interdicted slavery forever in the territory north of 36 degrees 30"
was applicable only to the territorial condition, or also to states made from the territory. John Quincy Adams notes in his diary that "it was unanimously agreed that Congress have the power to prohibit slavery in the Territories"; though he adds that neither Crawford, Calhoun, nor Wirt could find any express power to that effect given in the Const.i.tution. [Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, V., 5.] In order to avoid the difficulty arising from the fact that Adams alone believed the word "forever" to apply to states as well as territories, the president modified the question so that all would be able to answer that the act was const.i.tutional, leaving each member to construe the section to suit himself.
Although apparently the Missouri struggle was thus brought to a conclusion, it is necessary to take note of two succeeding episodes in the contest, which immediately revived the whole question, embittered the antagonism, threatened the Union, and were settled by new compromises. In her const.i.tution, Missouri not only incorporated guarantees of a slavery system, but also a provision against the admission of free Negroes to the state. Application for admission to the Union under this const.i.tution in the fall of 1820 brought on a contest perhaps more heated and more dangerous to the Union than the previous struggle. Holding that Missouri"s clause against free Negroes infringed the provision of the federal Const.i.tution guaranteeing the rights of citizens of the respective states, northern leaders reopened the whole question by refusing to vote for the admission of Missouri with the obnoxious clause. Again the north revealed its mastery of the House, and the south its control of the Senate, and a deadlock followed. Under the skilful management of Clay, a new compromise was framed, by which Missouri was required, through her legislature, to promise that the objectionable clause should never be construed to authorize the pa.s.sage of any laws by which any citizen of either of the states of the Union should be excluded from the enjoyment of any of the privileges and immunities to which such citizen was ent.i.tled under the Const.i.tution of the United States. This Missouri accepted, but the legislature somewhat contemptuously added that it was without power to bind the state.
[Footnote: Niles" Register, XX., 388, cf. 300.]
While this debate was in progress, and the problem of the status of Missouri, which had already established a const.i.tution and claimed to be a state, was under consideration, the question of counting the Missouri vote in the presidential election of 1820 was raised. For this a third compromise was framed by Clay, by which the result of the election was stated as it would be with and without Missouri"s vote. Since Monroe had been elected by a vote all but unanimous, the result was in either case the same; this theoretical question, nevertheless, was fraught with dangerous possibilities. Missouri was finally admitted by the proclamation of President Monroe, dated August 10, 1821, more than three years from the first application for statehood.
In a large view of American history, the significance of this great struggle cannot be too highly emphasized. Although the danger pa.s.sed by and the ocean became placid, yet the storm in many ways changed the coast-line of American politics and broke new channels for the progress of the nation. The future had been revealed to far-sighted statesmen, who realized that this was but the beginning, not the end, of the struggle. "This momentous question," wrote Jefferson, "like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror.
I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed, indeed, for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry pa.s.sions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper." [Footnote: Jefferson, Writings (Ford"s ed.), X., 157.]
John Quincy Adams relates a contemporaneous conversation with Calhoun, in which the latter took the ground that, if a dissolution of the Union should follow, the south would be compelled to form an alliance, offensive and defensive, with Great Britain, though he admitted that it would be returning pretty much to the colonial state. When Adams, with unconscious prophecy of Sherman"s march through Georgia, pressed Calhoun with the question whether the north, cut off from its natural outlet upon the ocean, "would fall back upon its rocks bound hand and foot, to starve, or whether it would not retain its powers of locomotion to move southward by land," Calhoun answered that the southern states would find it necessary to make their communities military. [Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, IV., 530, 531.]
To Adams himself the present question was but a "t.i.tle page to a great tragic volume." He believed that, if dissolution of the Union should result from the slavery question, it would be followed by universal emanc.i.p.ation of the slaves, and he was ready to contemplate such a dissolution of the Union, upon a point involving slavery and no other, believing that "the Union might then be reorganized on the fundamental principle of emanc.i.p.ation." "This object," wrote he, "is vast in its compa.s.s, awful in its prospects, sublime and beautiful in its issue. A life devoted to it would be n.o.bly spent or sacrificed." [Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, IV., 531.]
Looking forward to civil war, he declared: "So glorious would be its final issue, that as G.o.d shall judge me I do not say that it is not to be desired." [Footnote: Ibid., V., 210.] But as yet he confided these thoughts to his diary. The south was far from contented with the compromise, and her leading statesmen, Calhoun especially, came bitterly to regret both the concession in the matter of admitting federal control over slavery in the territories, and the division of the Louisiana purchase into spheres of influence which left to the slave-holding section that small apex of the triangle practically embraced in Arkansas. While the north received an area capable of being organized into many free states, the south could expect from the remaining territory awarded her only one state.
Among the immediate effects of the contest was its influence upon Monroe, who was the more ready to relinquish the American claim to Texas in the negotiations over Florida, because he feared that the acquisition of this southern province would revive the antagonism of the northern antislavery forces. [Footnote: Monroe, Writings, VI., 127; cf. Adams, Memoirs, V., 25, 54, 68.]
The south learned also the lesson that slavery needed defense against the power of the majority, and that it must shape its political doctrine and its policy to this end. But it would be a mistake to emphasize too strongly the immediate effect in this respect. Slavery was not yet accepted as the foundation of southern social and economic life. The inst.i.tution was still mentioned with regret by southern leaders, and there were still efforts in the border states to put it in the process of extinction. South Carolina leaders were still friendly to national power, and for several years the ruling party in that state deprecated appeals to state sovereignty. [Footnote: See chap, xviii. below.] In the next few years other questions, of an economic and judicial nature, were even more influential, as a direct issue, than the slavery question. But the economic life of the south was based on slavery, and the section became increasingly conscious that the current of national legislation was shaped by the majority against their interests.
Their political alliances in the north had failed them in the time of test, and the Missouri question disclosed the possibility of a new organization of parties threatening that southern domination which had swayed the Union for the past twenty years. [Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, IV., 529; King, Life and Corresp. of King, VI., 501; Jefferson, Writings, X., 175, 193 n.; cf. chap. xi. below; Hart, Slavery and Abolition (Am. Nation, XVI.), chap, xviii.]
The slavery struggle derived its national significance from the west, into which expanding sections carried warring inst.i.tutions.
CHAPTER XI
PARTY POLITICS (1820-1822)
To the superficial observer, politics might have seemed never more tranquil than when, in 1820, James Monroe received all but one of the electoral votes for his second term as president of the United States. One New Hampshire elector preferred John Quincy Adams, although he was not a candidate, and this deprived Monroe of ranking with Washington in the unanimity of official approval. But in truth the calm was deceptive. The election of 1820 was an armistice rather than a real test of political forces. The forming party factions were not yet ready for the final test of strength, most of the candidates were members of the cabinet, and the reelection of Monroe, safe, conciliatory, and judicious, afforded an opportunity for postponing the issue.
As we have seen, the Missouri contest had in it the possibility of a revolutionary division of the Republican party into two parties on sectional lines. The aged Jefferson, keen of scent for anything that threatened the ascendancy of the triumphant democracy, saw in the dissolution of the old alliance between Virginia and the "fanaticized" Pennsylvania, [Footnote: Jefferson, Writings (Ford"s ed.), X., 161, 171, 172, 177, 179, 192, 193 n., 279; King, Life and Corresp. of King, VI., 279, 282, 290: Cong. Globe, 30 Cong., 2 Sess., App. 63-67.] in the heat of the Missouri conflict, the menace of a revived Federalist party, and the loss of Virginia"s northern following. So hotly did Virginia resent the Missouri Compromise, that while the question was still pending, in February, 1820, her legislative caucus, which had a.s.sembled to nominate presidential electors, indignantly adjourned on learning that Monroe favored the measure. "I trust in G.o.d," said H. St. George Tucker, "if the president does sign a bill to that effect, the Southern people will be able to find some man who has not committed himself to our foes; for such are, depend on it, the Northern Politicians." [Footnote: William and Mary College Quarterly, X., 11, 15.] But the sober second thought of Virginia sustained Monroe. On the other side, Rufus King believed that the issue of the Missouri question would settle "forever the dominion of the Union." "Old Mr. Adams," said he, "as he is the first, will on this hypothesis be the last President from a free state." [Footnote: King, Life and Corresp. of King, 267; cf. Adams, Memoirs, IV., 528.]
The truth is that the individual interests of the south were stronger in opposing than those of the north in supporting a limitation of slavery; [Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, IV., 533.] the northern phalanx had hardly formed before it began to dissolve.
[Footnote: Benton, Thirty Years" View, I., 10.] Nevertheless, the Missouri question played some part in the elections in most of the states. In Pennsylvania, under the leadership of Duane, the editor of the Aurora, electors favorable to Clinton were nominated on an antislavery ticket, [Footnote: Niles" Register, XIX., 129; National Advocate, October 27, 1820; Franklin Gazette, October 25, November 8, 1820 (election returns); Ames, State Docs. on Federal Relations, No. 5, p. 5.] but, outside of Philadelphia and the adjacent district, this ticket received but slight support. With few exceptions, the northern congressmen who had voted with the south failed of re-election.
The elections in the various states in this year showed more political division than was revealed by the vote for president, and they showed that in state politics the Federalist party was by no means completely extinct. In the congressional elections the flood of Republicanism left only isolated islands of Federalism unsubmerged. In Ma.s.sachusetts eight of the thirteen members professed this political faith; New York returned some half-dozen men whose affiliations were with the same party; from Pennsylvania came a somewhat larger number; and they numbered nearly half of the delegation of Maryland. The cities of New York and Philadelphia were represented by Federalists, and there were three or four other districts, chiefly in New England, which adhered to the old party.
There were also a few congressmen from the south who had been members of this organization. On the whole, however, the Federalists awaited the new development of parties, determined to secure the best terms from those to whom they should transfer their allegiance.
In New England, as has already been pointed out, [Footnote: See chap. ii. above.] the toleration movement was completing its work of transferring power to democracy.
More important than local issues or the death throes of federalism, was the democratic tendency revealed in the const.i.tutional conventions of this period. Between 1816 and 1830, ten states either established new const.i.tutions or revised their old ones. In this the influence of the new west was peculiarly important. All of the new states which were formed in that region, after the War of 1812, gave evidence in their const.i.tutions of the democratic spirit of the frontier. With the exception of Mississippi, where the voter was obliged either to be a tax-payer or a member of the militia, all the western states entered the Union with manhood suffrage, and all of them, in contrast with the south, from which their settlers had chiefly been drawn, provided that apportionment of the legislature should be based upon the white population, thus accepting the doctrine of the rule of the majority rather than that of property.
As the flood of population moved towards the west and offered these attractive examples of democratic growth, the influence reacted on the older states. In her const.i.tution of 1818, Connecticut gave the franchise to tax-payers or members of the militia, as did Ma.s.sachusetts and New York in their const.i.tutions of 1821. Maine provided in her const.i.tution of 1820 for manhood suffrage, but by this time there was but slight difference between manhood suffrage and one based upon tax-paying.
Webster in Ma.s.sachusetts and Chancellor Kent in New York viewed with alarm the prospect that freehold property should cease to be the foundation of government. Kent particularly warned the landed cla.s.s that "one master capitalist with his one hundred apprentices, and journeymen, and agents, and dependents, will bear down at the polls an equal number of farmers of small estates in his vicinity, who cannot safely unite for their common defense." [Footnote: Carter and Stone, Reports of the Proceedings and Debates of the Convention of 1821, 222.] It was the new counties of New York, particularly those of the western and northeastern frontier, which were the stronghold of the reform movement in that state. The abolition of the council of appointments and the council of revision by the New York convention contributed to the transfer of power to the people. But under the leadership of Van Buren a group of politicians, dubbed "The Albany Regency," controlled the political machinery as effectively as before. [Footnote: McMaster, United States, V., 373- 432; ibid., Rights of Man, 61; MacDonald, Jacksonian Democracy (Am.
Nation, XV.), chap. iv.]
The campaign for the presidency of 1824 may be said to have begun as early as 1816. [Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, V., 89.] Adams observed in 1818 that the government was a.s.suming daily the character of cabal, "and preparation, not for the next Presidential election, but for the one after"; [Footnote: Ibid., IV., 193.] and by 1820, when the political sea appeared so placid, and parties had apparently dissolved, bitter factional fights between the friends of the rival candidates const.i.tuted the really significant indications of American politics. From the details of the personal struggles (usually less important to the student of party history) one must learn the tendency towards the reappearance of parties in this period, when idealists believed that all factions had been fused into one triumphant organization. In all of the great sections, candidates appeared, anxious to consolidate the support of their own section and to win a following in the nation. It is time that we should survey these men, for the personal traits of the aspirants for the presidency had a larger influence than ever before or since in the history of the country. Moreover, we are able to see in these candidates the significant features of the sections from which they came.
New England was reluctantly and slowly coming to the conclusion that John Quincy Adams was the only available northern candidate. Adams did not fully represent the characteristics of his section, for he neither sprang from the democracy of the interior of New England nor did he remain loyal to the Federalist ideas that controlled the commercial interests of the coast. Moreover, of all the statesmen whom the nation produced, he had had the largest opportunity to make a comparative study of government. As an eleven-year-old boy, he went with his father to Paris in 1778, and from then until 1817, when he became Monroe"s secretary of state, nearly half his time was spent at European courts. He served in France, Holland, Sweden, Russia, Prussia, and England, and had been senator of the United States from Ma.s.sachusetts.
Thus Adams entered on the middle period of his career, a man of learning and broad culture, rich in experience of national affairs, familiar with the centers of Old-World civilization and with methods of European administration. He had touched life too broadly, in too many countries, to be provincial in his policy. In the minds of a large and influential body of his fellow-citizens, the Federalists, he was an apostate, for in the days of the embargo he had warned Jefferson of the temper of his section, had resigned, and had been read out of the party. The unpopularity, as well as the fame, of his father, was the heritage of the son. Perhaps the most decisive indication of the weakening of sectional bias by his foreign training is afforded by his diplomatic policy. An expansionist by nature, he had been confirmed in the faith by his training in foreign courts. "If we are not taken for Romans we shall be taken for Jews," he exclaimed to one who questioned the wisdom of the bold utterances of his diplomatic correspondence.
In one important respect Adams was the personification of his section. He was a Puritan, and his whole career was deeply affected by the fact. A man of method and regularity, tireless in his work (for he rose before the dawn and worked till midnight), he never had a childhood and never tried to achieve self-forgetfulness. His diary, printed in twelve volumes, is a unique doc.u.ment for the study of the Puritan in politics. Not that it was an entirely unreserved expression of his soul, for he wrote with a consciousness that posterity would read the record, and its pages are a compound of apparently spontaneous revelation of his inmost thought and of silence upon subjects of which we would gladly know more. He had the Puritan"s restraint, self-scrutiny, and self-condemnation. "I am,"
he writes, "a man of reserved, cold, austere, and forbidding manners." Nor can this estimate be p.r.o.nounced unjust. He was a lonely man, communing with his soul in his diary more than with a circle of admiring friends. It was not easy for men to love John Quincy Adams. The world may respect the man who regulates his course by a daily dead-reckoning, but it finds it easier to make friends with him who stumbles towards rect.i.tude by the momentum of his own nature. Popularity, in any deep sense, was denied him. This deprivation he repaid by harsh, vindictive, and censorious judgments upon his contemporaries, and by indifference to popular prejudices.
With the less lovely qualities of the Puritan aggravated by his own critical nature, Adams found himself in a struggle for the presidency against some of the most engaging personalities in American history. He must win over his enemies in New England and attach that section to his fortunes; he must find friends in the middle states, conciliate the south, and procure a following in the west, where Clay, the Hotspur of debate, with all the power of the speakership behind him, and Jackson, "Old Hickory," the hero of New Orleans, contested the field. And all the time he must satisfy his conscience, and reach his goal by the craft and strength of his intellect rather than by the arts of popular management. No statesman ever handled the problems of his public career with a keener understanding of the conditions of success.
The middle region was too much divided by the game of politics played by her mult.i.tude of minor leaders to unite upon a favorite son in this campaign; but De Witt Clinton, finding elements of strength in the prestige which his successful advocacy of the Erie Ca.n.a.l had brought to him throughout the region where internal improvements were popular, and relying upon his old connections with the Federalists, watched events with eager eye, waiting for an opportunity which never came. Although the south saw in Rufus King"s advocacy of the exclusion of slavery from Missouri a deep design to win the presidency by an antislavery combination of the northern states, there was little ground for this belief. In truth, the middle region was merely the fighting-ground for leaders in the other sections.
In the south, Calhoun and Crawford were already contending for the mastery. Each of them represented fundamental tendencies in the section. Born in Virginia in 1772, Crawford had migrated with his father in early childhood to South Carolina, and soon after to Georgia. [Footnote: Phillips, "Georgia and State Rights," in Am.
Hist. a.s.soc., Report 1901, II., 95; Cobb, Leisure Labors; Miller, Bench and Bar of Georgia; West, "Life and Times of William H.
Crawford," in National Portrait Gallery, IV.; Adams, Life of Gallatin. 598.] Here he became the leader of the Virginia element against the interior democracy. But in his coa.r.s.e strength and adaptability the burly Georgian showed the impress which frontier influences had given to his state. His career in national politics brought him strange alliances. This Georgia candidate had been no mere subject of the Virginia dynasty, for he supported John Adams in his resistance to France in 1798; challenged the administration of Jefferson by voting with the Federalists in the United States Senate against the embargo; and ridiculed the ambiguous message of Madison when the issue of peace or war with Great Britain was under consideration. A fearless supporter of the recharter of the national bank, he had championed the doctrine of implied powers and denied the right of a state to resist the laws of Congress except by changing its representation or appealing to the sword under the right of revolution.
Nevertheless, in the period of this volume, Crawford joined the ranks of the southerners who demanded a return to strict construction and insistence on state rights. In the congressional caucus of 1816, he obtained 54 votes for the presidency against 65 for Monroe. Had not the influence of Madison been thrown for the latter, it seems probable that Crawford would have obtained the nomination; but his strength in building up a following in Congress was much greater than his popularity with the people at large.
Controlling the patronage of the treasury department, he enlarged his political influence. As the author of the four-years"-tenure-of- office act, in 1820, he has been vehemently criticized as a founder of the spoils system. But there are reasons for thinking that Crawford"s advocacy of this measure was based upon considerations of efficiency at least as much as those of politics, [Footnote: Fish, Civil Service and Patronage, 66 et seq.] and the conduct of his department was marked by sagacity. The administration of such a man would probably have been characterized by an accommodating spirit which would have carried on the traditions of Monroe.
In the career of Calhoun are strikingly exhibited the changing characteristics of the south in this era. His grandfather was a Scotch-Irishman who came to Pennsylvania with the emigration of that people in the first half of the eighteenth century, and thence followed the stream of settlement that pa.s.sed up the Great Valley and into South Carolina to the frontier, from which men like Daniel Boone crossed the mountains to the conquest of Kentucky and Tennessee. [Footnote: Cf. Howard, Preliminaries of the Revolution (Am. Nation, VIII.), chap. xiii.] The Calhoun family were frontier Indian fighters, but, instead of crossing the mountains as did Andrew Jackson, Calhoun remained to grow up with his section and to share its changes from a community essentially western to a cotton- planting and slave-holding region. This is the clew to his career.
In his speech in the House of Representatives in 1817, on internal improvements, Calhoun warned his colleagues against "a low, sordid, selfish, and sectional spirit," and declared that "in a country so extensive, and so various in its interests, what is necessary for the common good, may apparently be opposed to the interests of particular sections. It must be submitted to as the condition of our greatness." [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 14 Cong., 2 Sess., 854, 855.] This was the voice of the nationalistic west, as well as that of South Carolina in Calhoun"s young manhood.
In view of his later career, it is significant that many of those who described him in these youthful years of his nationalistic policy found in him a noticeable tendency to rash speculation and novelty. "As a politician," said Senator Mills, of Ma.s.sachusetts, about 1823, he is "too theorizing, speculative, and metaphysical,-- magnificent in his views of the powers and capacities of the government, and of the virtue, intelligence, and wisdom of the PEOPLE. He is in favor of elevating, cherishing, and increasing all the inst.i.tutions of the government, and of a vigorous and energetic administration of it. From his rapidity of thought, he is often wrong in his conclusions, and his theories are sometimes wild, extravagant, and impractical. He has always claimed to be, and is, of the Democratic party, but of a very different cla.s.s from that of Crawford; more like Adams, and his schemes are sometimes denounced by his party as ultra-fanatical." [Footnote: Ma.s.s. Hist. Soc., Proceedings, XIX., 37 (1881-1882).]
Another contemporary, writing prior to 1824, declared: "He wants, I think, consistency and perseverance of mind, and seems incapable of long-continued and patient investigation. What he does not see at the first examination, he seldom takes pains to search for; but still the lightning glance of his mind, and the rapidity with which he a.n.a.lyzes, never fail to furnish him with all that may be necessary for his immediate purposes. In his legislative career, which, though short, was uncommonly luminous, his love of novelty, and his apparent solicitude to astonish were so great, that he has occasionally been known to go beyond even the dreams of political visionaries, and to propose schemes which were in their nature impracticable or injurious, and which he seemed to offer merely for the purpose of displaying the affluence of his mind, and the fertility of his ingenuity." [Footnote: Quoted by Hodgson, Letters from North Am., I., 81.] "Calhoun," said William Wirt, in 1824, "advised me the other day to study less and trust more to genius; and I believe the advice is sound. He has certainly practiced on his own precepts, and has become, justly, a distinguished man. It may do very well in politics, where a proposition has only to be compared with general principles with which the politician is familiar."
[Footnote: Kennedy, William Wirt, II., 143; other views of Calhoun in MacDonald, Jacksonian Democracy, chaps, v., ix.; Hart, Slavery and Abolition, chap. xix.; Garrison, Westward Extension (Am. Nation, XV., XVI., XVII.).]
At the beginning of the campaign, Calhoun was the confidant and friend of Adams, apparently considering the alternative of throwing his influence in the latter"s favor, if it proved impossible to realize his own aspirations.
From beyond the Alleghenies came two candidates who personified the forces of their section. We can see the very essence of the west in Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson. Clay was a Kentuckian, with the characteristics of his state; but, in a larger sense, he represented the stream of migration which had occupied the Ohio Valley during the preceding half-century. This society was one which, in its composition, embraced elements of the middle region as well as of the south. It tended towards freedom, but had slaves in its midst, and had been accustomed, through experience, to adjust relations between slavery and free labor by a system of compromise.
Economically, it was in need of internal improvements and the development of manufactures to afford a home market. It had the ideal of American expansion, and in earlier days vehemently demanded the control of the Mississippi and the expulsion of the Spaniard from the coasts of the Gulf. In the War of 1812 it sent its sons to destroy English influence about the Great Lakes and had been ambitious to conquer Canada.
It is an evidence of the rapidity with which the west stamped itself upon its colonists, that although Clay was born, and bred to the law, in Virginia, he soon became the mouth-piece of these western forces. In his personality, also, he reflected many of the traits of this region. Kentucky, ardent in its spirit, not ashamed of a strain of sporting blood, fond of the horse-race, partial to its whiskey, ready to "bluff" in politics as in poker, but sensitive to honor, was the true home of Henry Clay. To a Puritan like John Quincy Adams, Clay was, "in politics, as in private life, essentially a gamester."[Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, V., 59.] But if the Puritan mind did not approve of Henry Clay, mult.i.tudes of his fellow- countrymen in other sections did. There was a charm about him that fastened men to him. He was "Harry of the West," an impetuous, willful, high-spirited, daring, jealous, but, withal, a lovable man.
He had the qualities of leadership; was ambitious, impulsive, often guided by his intuitions and his sensibilities, but, at the same time, an adroit and bold champion of constructive legislation. He knew, too, the time for compromise and for concession. Perhaps he knew it too well; for, although no statesman of this era possessed more courageous initiative and constructive power, his tact and his powers of management were such that his place in history is quite as much that of the "great compromiser" as it is that of the author of the "American system."
It is not too much to say that Clay made the speakership one of the important American inst.i.tutions. He was the master of the House of Representatives, shaping its measures by the appointment of his committees and his parliamentary management.[Footnote: Follett, Speaker of the House, pp. 41-46.] By the period of our survey, with the power of this office behind him, Clay had fashioned a set of American political issues reflective of western and middle-state ideas, and had made himself a formidable rival in the presidential struggle. He had caught the self-confidence, the continental aspirations, the dash and impetuosity of the west. But he was also, as a writer of the time declared, "able to captivate high and low, l"homme du salon and the "squatter" in the Western wilderness." He was a mediator between east and west, between north and south--the "great conciliator." [Footnote: Grund, Aristocracy in America, II., 213. For other views of Clay, cf. Babc.o.c.k, Am. Nationality, chap.
xii.; MacDonald, Jacksonian Democracy, chap. xi.; Garrison, Westward Extension, chap. iii. (Am. Nation, XIII., XV., XVII.).]
If Henry Clay was one of the favorites of the west, Andrew Jackson was the west itself. While Clay was able to voice, with statesman- like ability, the demand for economic legislation to promote her interests, and while he exercised an extraordinary fascination by his personal magnetism and his eloquence, he never became the hero of the great ma.s.ses of the west; he appealed rather to the more intelligent--to the men of business and of property. Andrew Jackson was the very personification of the contentious, nationalistic democracy of the interior. He was born, in 1767, of Scotch-Irish parents, who had settled near the boundary-line between North and South Carolina, not far from the similar settlements from which, within a few years of Jackson"s birth, Daniel Boone and Robertson went forth to be the founders of Kentucky and Tennessee. In 1788, with a caravan of emigrants, Jackson crossed the Alleghenies to Nashville, Tennessee, then an outpost of settlement still exposed to the incursions of Indians. During the first seven or eight years of his residence he was public prosecutor--an office that called for nerve and decision, rather than legal ac.u.men, in that turbulent country.
The appearance of this frontiersman on the floor of Congress was an omen full of significance. He reached Philadelphia at the close of Washington"s administration, having ridden on horseback nearly eight hundred miles to his destination. Gallatin (himself a western Pennsylvanian) afterwards graphically described Jackson, as he entered the halls of Congress, as "a tall, lank, uncouth-looking personage, with long locks of hair hanging over his face, and a cue down his back tied in an eel-skin; his dress singular, his manners and deportment those of a rough backwoodsman."[Footnote: Hildreth, United States, iv., 692.] Jefferson afterwards testified to Webster: "His pa.s.sions are terrible. When I was President of the Senate, he was a Senator, and he could never speak, on account of the rashness of his feelings. I have seen him attempt it repeatedly, and as often choke with rage."[Footnote: Webster, Writings (National ed.), XVII., 371.] At length the frontier, in the person of its leader, had found a place in the government. This six-foot backwoodsman, angular, lantern-jawed, and thin, with blue eyes that blazed on occasion; this choleric, impetuous, Scotch-Irish leader of men; this expert duelist and ready fighter; this embodiment of the contentious, vehement, personal west, was in politics to stay.[Footnote: For other appreciations, see Babc.o.c.k, Am. Nationality, chap, xvii.; MacDonald, Jacksonian Democracy, chaps, ii., xviii.(Am. Nation, XIII., XV.).] In the War of 1812, by the defeat of the Indians of the Gulf plains, he made himself the conqueror of a new province for western settlement, and when he led his frontier riflemen to the victory of New Orleans he became the national hero, the self-made man, the incarnation of the popular ideal of democracy. The very rashness and arbitrariness which his Seminole campaign displayed appealed to the west, for he went to his object with the relentless directness of a frontiersman. This episode gave to Adams the opportunity to write his masterly state paper defending the actions of the general. But Henry Clay, seeing, perhaps, in the rising star of the frontier military hero a baneful omen to his own career, and hoping to break the administration forces by holding the government responsible for Jackson"s actions, led an a.s.sault upon him in the Seminole debates on the floor of the House of Representatives.[Footnote: Babc.o.c.k, Am. Nationality (Am. Nation, XIII.), chap. xvii.] Leaving Tennessee when he heard of the attack which was meditated against him, the general rushed (1819) to this new field of battle, and had the satisfaction of winning what he regarded as "the greatest victory he ever obtained"--a triumph on every count of Clay"s indictment. This contest Jackson considered "the Touchstone of the election of the next president."[Footnote: N.
Y. Publ. Library, Bulletin, IV., 160, 161; Parton, Jackson, II., chap. xl.] From this time the personality of the "Old Hero" was as weighty a factor in