When Men Grew Tall, or The Story Of Andrew Jackson

That Jefferson dinner is an admirable device, one adapted to draw the General’s fire. Its authors go about felicitating themselves upon their sagacity in evolving it.

“What say you, Major?” asks the General, when he receives the invitation upon which so much of national good or ill may pend; “what say you? Shall we humor them? You know what these Calhoun traitors are after.”

“True!” responds Wizard Lewis; “they want to count us, and measure us, in that business of their proposed treason.”

“I’ll tell you what I think,” says the General, after a pause. “I’ll fail to attend; but you shall go, and be counted in my stead. Also, since they’ll expect a toast from me, I’ll send them one in your care. I hope they may find it to their villain liking – they and their archtraitor Calhoun!”

The Indian Queen is a crowded hostelry that Jefferson night. The halls and waiting rooms are thronged of eminent folk. Some are there to attend the dinner; others for gossip and to hear the news. As Wizard Lewis climbs the stairs to the banquet room on the second floor, he encounters the lion-faced Webster coming down.

“There’s too much secession in the air for me,” says the lion-faced one, shrugging his heavy shoulders.

“If that be so,” returns Wizard Lewis, “it’s a reason for remaining.”

Wizard Lewis mingles with the groups in the corridors and parlors, for the banquet hall is not yet thrown open. Among these, he nods his recognition of Colonel Johnson, of Kentucky, tall of form, grave of brow, he who slew Tecumseh; Senator Benton, once of that safe receptive cellar; the lean Rufus Choate, eaten of Federalism and the worship of caste; Tom Corwin, round, humorous, with a face of ruddy fun; Isaac Hill, gray and lame, the General’s Senate friend from New Hampshire whose insulted credit started the war on Banker Biddle’s bank; Editor Noah, of New York, as Hebraic and as red of head as Absalom; the quick-eyed Amos Kendall; Editor Blair, who conducts the Globe, the General’s mouthpiece in Washington; the reckless Marcy, who declares that he sees “no harm in the aphorism that ‘to the victor belong the spoils of the enemy.’”

The dinner is spread. The decorations are studied in their democracy. Hundreds of candles in many-armed iron branches blaze and gutter about the great room. The high ceilings and the walls are festooned of flags. The stars and stripes are draped over a portrait of the dead Jefferson. Here and there are hung the flags of the several States. With peculiar ostentation, and as though for challenge, next to the national colors flows the Palmetto-rattlesnake flag of South Carolina – Statesman Calhoun’s emblem.

The dinner is profuse, and folk of appetite and fineness declare it elegant. There is none of your long-drawn courses, so dear to Whigs and Federalists. Black servants come and go, to shift plates and knives, and carve at the call of a guest. At hopeful intervals along the tables repose huge sirloins, and steaming rounds of beef. There are quail pies; chickens fried and turkeys roasted; pies of venison and rabbits, and pot pies of squirrels; soups and fishes and vegetables; boiled hams, and giant dishes of earthenware holding baked beans; roast suckling pigs, each with a crab-apple in his jaws; corn breads and flour breads, and pancakes rolled with jellies; puddings – Indian, rice, and plum; mammoth quaking custards. Everywhere bristle ranks and double ranks of bottles and decanters; a widest range of drinks, from whisky to wine of the Cape, is at everybody’s elbow. Also on side tables stand wooden bowls of salads, supported by weighty cheeses; and, to close in the flanks, pies – mince, pumpkin, and apple; with final coffee and slim, long pipes of clay in which to smoke tobacco of Trinidad.

As the guests seat themselves, Chairman Lee proposes:

“The memory of Thomas Jefferson.”

The toast is drunk in silence. Then, with clatter of knife and fork, clink of glasses, and hum of conversation, the feast begins.

The General’s absence is a daunting surprise to many who do not know how to construe it. Wizard Lewis, through Chairman Lee, presents the General’s regrets. He expected to be present, but is unavoidably detained at the White House. The “regrets” are received uneasily; the General’s absence plainly gives concern to more than one.

As the dinner marches forward, “Nullification” and secession are much and loudly talked. They become so openly the burden of conversation and are withal so loosely in the common air, that sundry gentlemen – more timorous than loyal perhaps – make pointless excuses, and withdraw.

Statesman Calhoun sits on the right hand of Chairman Lee. The festival approaches the glass and bottle stage, and toasts are offered. There are a round score of these; each smells of secession and State’s rights. The speeches which follow are even more malodorous of treason than the toasts.

The hour is hurrying toward the late. Statesman Calhoun whispers a word to Chairman Lee; evidently the urgent moment is at hand.

Statesman Calhoun hands a slip of paper to Chairman Lee. There falls a stillness; laughter dies and talk is hushed.

Chairman Lee rises to his feet. He pays Statesman Calhoun many flowery compliments.

“The distinguished statesman from South Carolina,” says Chairman Lee in conclusion, “begs to propose this sentiment.” He reads from the slip: “‘The Federal Union! Next to our liberty, the most dear! May we all remember that it can only be preserved by respecting the rights of the States, and distributing equally the burdens and the benefits of that Union!’”

The stillness of death continues – marked and profound; for, as Chairman Lee resumes his seat, Wizard Lewis rises. All know his relations with the General; every eye is on him with a look of interrogation. Now when the Calhoun toast has been read, they scan the face of Wizard Lewis, representative of the absent General, to note the effect of the shot. Wizard Lewis is admirable, and notably steady.

“The President,” says Wizard Lewis, “when he sent his regrets, sent also a sentiment.”

Wizard Lewis passes a folded paper to Chairman Lee, who opens it and reads:

“‘The Federal Union! It must be preserved!”’

The words fall clear as a bell – for some, perhaps, a bell of warning. Statesman Calhoun’s face is high and insolent. But only for a moment. Then his glance falls; his brow becomes pallid, and breaks into a pin-point sprinkle of sweat. He seems to shrink and sear and wither, as though given some fleeting picture of the future, and the gallows prophecy thereof. In the end he sits as though in a kind of blackness of despair. The General is not there, but his words are there, and Statesman Calhoun is not wanting of an impression of the terrible meaning, personal to himself, which underlies them.

It is a moment ominous and mighty – a moment when a plot to stampede history is foiled by a sentiment, and Treason’s heart and Treason’s hand are palsied by a toast of seven words. And while Statesman Calhoun, white and frightened and broken, is helpless in the midst of his followers, the General sits alone and thoughtful with his quiet White House pipe.

For all the plain sureness of that toast, the would-be rebellionists now crave a surer sign. A member of Congress from South Carolina, polite and insinuating, calls on the General.

“Mr. President,” says the insinuating signseeking one, suavely deferential, “to-morrow I go back to my home. Have you any message for the good folk of South Carolina?”

“Yes,” returns the General grimly, his hard blue eyes upon the insinuating one, while his heavy brows are lowered in that falcon-trick of menace – “yes; I have a message for the ‘good folk of South Carolina.’ You may say to the ‘good folk of South Carolina’ that if one of them so much as lift finger in defiance of the laws of this government, I shall come down there. And I’ll hang the first man I lay hands on, to the first tree I can reach.”

CHAPTER XXIV – THE ROUT OF TREASON

DEMOCRACY goes not without its defects, and there be times when that very freedom wherewith it invests the citizen spreads a snare to his feet. For a chief fault, Democracy is apt to mislead ambitious ones, dominated of ego and a want of patriotism in even parts. Such are prone to run liberty into license in following forth the appetites of their own selfishness, and forget where the frontiers of loyalty leave off and those of black treason begin.

In a democracy, for your clambering narrowist to turn traitor is never a far-fetched task. Being free to speak as he politically will and, per incident, think as he politically will, he finds it no mighty journey to the perilous assumption that he may act as he politically will. Knowing his duty to guard the temple, he argues therefrom his right to deface it. Treason fades into a mere abstraction – a crime curious in this, that it is impossible of concrete commission.

Statesman Calhoun is among these ill-guided ones of topsy-turvy patriotism. Blurred by ambition, soured of disappointment, license and liberty have grown with him to be unconscious synonyms. The laws against treason carry only a remonstrance, never a warning, and – as he reads them – but deplore that civic villainy, while threatening nothing of grief for what dark souls shall be guilty of it. In this frame the General’s stark sentiment, “The Federal Union! It must be preserved!” and that subsequent hanging promise which, by the mouth of the suave insinuating one, he sends to “the good folk of South Carolina,” go beyond surprise with Statesman Calhoun, and provide a shock. It is as though, walking in a trance of treason, he knocks his head against the White House wall; his awakening is rudely, painfully complete. That dream of a separate nation, with himself at its head, gives way to hangman visions of rope and gallows tree; and, from bending his energies to methods by which he may take South Carolina out of the Union, he gives himself wholly to the more tremulous enterprise of keeping himself out of jail.

Some hint of that recent literature, which the General found so interesting, gets abroad, and many go reading the lucid dictum of old Marshall. Treason as a crime becomes better understood; and – by Statesman Calhoun at least – better feared. Moved of these fears, Statesman Calhoun sends message after message into his restless Palmetto-rattlesnake State of South Carolina commanding, nay imploring, a present suspension of “Nullification.” His Palmetto-rattlesnake adherents, while not understanding the danger which fringes them about, have already found enough that is alarming in the very air; and, for their own safety as much as his, are heedful to regard that prayer for a “Nullification” passivity. The South Carolina shouting ceases; the Minute Men rest on their traitorous arms; the manufacture of blue cockades is abandoned; while the Columbia convention devotes itself to innocuous adjournments from innocent day to day.

While Palmetto-rattlesnake affairs are thus timidly quiescent, the Senate itself – having read old Marshall, and being, moreover, somewhat instructed by the watchful attitude of the General, who sits in the White House a figure of frowning menace, both relentless and fateful – devotes itself to the scaffold extrication of Statesman Calhoun. Machiavelli Clay leads the rescue party. His is of an opposite political church to that of Statesman Calhoun; but the pair meet on the warm, common ground of a deathless hatred of the General. Under the mollifying guidance of Machiavelli Clay, Senator after Senator surrenders those pet schedules of tariff desired of his own people, and puts the surrender on the expressive basis of “saving the neck of Calhoun.”

When every possible tariff cut has been arranged, and Congress adjourns, Statesman Calhoun makes his memorable homeward flight. Horse after horse he rides down, night becomes as day; for Death crouches on his crupper, and he must stay the Nullifying hand of South Carolina to save his own neck. He succeeds beyond his deserts, and comes powdering into Columbia, worn and wan and anxious, yet none the less ahead of that “overt act” whereof old Marshall spoke, and for which the somber General waits.

Once among his own treason-hatching coterie, Statesman Calhoun loses no moments, but breaks up the “Nullification” nest. Secession dies in the shell, and the Columbia convention, with more speed even than it displayed in passing it, repeals that “Ordinance of Nullification.” Thereupon Statesman Calhoun draws his breath more freely, as one who has been grazed by the sinister fangs of Fate; while the inveterate General heaves a sigh of regret.

Wizard Lewis overhears the sigh, and questions it. At this the General explains his disappointment.

“It would have been better,” says he, “had we shed a little blood. This is not the end, Major; the serpent of treason is only bruised, not slain. Had Calhoun run his course, a handful of hundreds might have died. As affairs stand, however, the country must one day wade knee-deep in blood to save itself. These men are not honest. Their true purpose is the downfall of the Union. Their present pretext is tariff; next time it will be slavery.”

By way of bringing the iniquity of “Nullification” before the people, together with his views concerning it, the General seizes his big iron pen, and scratches off a proclamation.

“I consider,” says he, “the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one State, incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the Constitution, unauthorized by either its letter or its spirit, inconsistent with every principle upon which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed.”

The country, reading the General’s exposition of the Union and its Gibraltar-like character, breaks into bonfires, oratory, dinners, barbecues, parades, and what other schemes of jubilation are practiced by a free people. That is to say the country breaks into these sundry jubilant things, if one except the truant State of South Carolina. In that Palmetto-rattlesnake-ridden commonwealth there prevails a sulky silence. No bonfires blaze, no barbecues scorch, no dinners smoke, no parades march. Baffled in its would-be treasons, afraid to stretch forth its nullifying hand lest the sword of retribution strike it off at the wrist, it comports itself like a spoiled child thwarted, and upholds its little dignity with a pout. No one heeds, however; and, beyond an occasional baleful glance from the General, the rest of the world leaves it to recover from that pout in its own time and way.

When Congress reconvenes, Statesman Calhoun creeps back to his Senate place. But the perils through which he has passed have left their furrowing traces, and now he offers nothing, says nothing, does nothing. His heart is water; his evil potentialities have oozed away. Haunted of that hangman fear which still hag-rides him, he abides mute, motionless, impotent, like some Satan in chains.

To further wound Statesman Calhoun, and in the mean, protesting teeth of Machiavelli Clay, the Senate expunges from its record the vote of censure it once passed upon the General. The resolution to expunge is offered by Senator Benton who, as against a far-off Nashville hour when only a generous cellar saved him from the General’s saw-handle, is to-day the latter’s partisan and friend. The General is hugely pleased by the censure-expunging resolution, and has what Senate ones supported it – being fairly the whole Senate, when one forgets Machiavelli Clay, and our chained, embittered Satan, Statesman Calhoun – to a grand dinner in the East Room.

And now the official times wag prosperously with the General. His friends are everywhere dominant, his enemies everywhere in retreat. Also his hair, from iron gray, fades to milk-white.

Since nothing peculiar presses upon him in the way of opposition, the General falls ill. He makes little of this, however; and cures himself with tobacco, coffee, calomel, and lancets, while outraged doctors groan. Likewise, he burns midnight oil in planning with Wizard Lewis the elevation of Vice-President Van Buren, who he is resolved shall have the presidency after him.

While thus the General lays his Van Buren plans, misguided admirers bombard him with such marks of their regard as a phaëton built of unbarked hickory, and a cheese weighing fourteen hundred pounds. The latter sturdy confection is trundled into the White House kitchen, from which coign of vantage it sends on high a perfume so utterly urgent that none may stay in the White House until it is removed. Following its going, the executive windows are thrown open throughout a wind-swept afternoon, to the end that the last suffocating reminder of that cheese shall be eliminated.

The General’s hours as President are drawing to a close. His hopes touching a successor carry through triumphantly, and Vice-President Van Buren is selected to follow him. Neither Machiavelli Clay for the Whigs, nor Statesman Calhoun among the Democrats, has the courage to offer his own name to the people.

Statesman Calhoun, aiming to subtract as much as he may from the fortunes of nominee Van Buren, produces a bolting ticket, headed by one Mangum; and, for Mangum, Palmetto-rattlesnake South Carolina – still in a tearful pout – wastes its lonely arrow in the air. It was, it will be, ever thus with South Carolina, who might do herself a good, and come to some true notion of her own peevish inconsequence, if she would but take a long, hard look in the glass. She is as one who attends the fairs, but so over-esteems herself as to defeat every bargain she might make. Her best chances are cast away, a cheap sacrifice to vanity, since no one will either buy her or sell her at the figure she sets on herself. Thus, too, will it continue. Her frayed prospects, already behind a fashion, are to wax more shopworn and more threadbare as the years unfold.

Nominee Van Buren is elected to succeed the General in the White House, and every friend of the latter votes for the little polite man of Kinderhook. The General is delighted, since the elevation of nominee Van Buren provides for a continuation of his darling policies.