Page images
PDF
EPUB

broad divergent theories as to its function, whether fostering or merely permissive, will always exist in a republic. It would be but fair to judge him from that standpoint in public affairs which he deliberately chose. But happily the time has come when we can rise to a plane above the line of party divisions and test him by his adhesion to the Constitution, the laws, and entire welfare of his country, and to the sound and righteous. principles on which that government was founded. He believed, as we all believe, that whatever may have been its theoretical or practical human defects the world has seen no such government as ours, and were it once broken in pieces no such government would take its place, and that with its downfall the great hopes of the world would be clouded over. To the watchful guardianship of the vast and precious interests thus garnered up in this federal government he gave, in the House, the Senate, and the Cabinet, thirty-three years of assiduous, self-sacrificing toil and a patriotism hampered by no sectional or party ties but as broad as the nation's boundaries and as high as her destinies.

Of the vast and complex variety of measures which during that protracted period felt his hand, enlisted his pen, and evoked his voice, I cannot even speak by enumeration. Mr. Choate, after some pages of outline, breaks off by declaring that it "demands a volume." They include the functions of the government itself from center to circumference, its boundaries and its territory, its resources, finances, commerce, improvements, its internal and foreign relations, in peace and

war, on the land and on the sea. In all these multifarious and complicated affairs he stood forth for a generation a leading spirit, a guiding and often a controlling power, shaping the destiny of the whole. country. During that long period no measure that concerned the honor, integrity, or prosperity of the nation escaped his vigilance or his influence. Some of those services were conspicuous enough to arrest the eyes of the nation and the world. When in his reply to Hayne he strangled the doctrine of nullification it is the testimony of the southern Bayard and the northern Winthrop that he deferred the bloody conflict thirty years. And when the conflict came the long echoes of that speech were the reverberating call that summoned and cheered the friends of the Union to the rescue ; its solid principles the impregnable rock on which a million soldiers stood and fought and won. In the celebrated Washington treaty by his wisdom, firmness, legal knowledge, reasoning power, diplomatic tact, and personal ascendency he calmed the excited passions of the two foremost nations and averted the imminent danger of a fratricidal and ruinous war. He did it only by remaining in the cabinet of President Tyler for the good of his country but against the warnings of political friends. No other man in America could have wafted that momentous treaty over all the rocks and shoals and breakers at home and abroad. And posterity, I think, has already accorded him its unanimous and admiring vote. So sometimes did the judgment of contemporaries. Thus when, in that bold and masterly

dispatch to Hülsemann, he courteously rebuked the insolence of the Austrian chargé and left mot a shred of his argument, when he demolished the claim of the Austrian cabinet to treat the American envoy as a spy, and met their menace with the information that such a course would have roused, if need be, the whole military and naval force of a republic "whose power," said he, "is spread over a region, one of the richest and most fertile on the globe, and of an extent in comparison with which the possessions of the House of Hapsburg are but as a patch on the surface of the earth," the heart of the whole American people beat with him in sympathetic admiration.

Not the least shining aspect of his statesmanship and diplomacy was the readiness with which, in the discharge of duty, he overleaped party lines, sustained what he deemed the right measures of political opponents, aided in the election of his rivals and inferiors, and followed what he avowed to be his duty though it cost him hosts of lifelong friends. "It was not in his nature," well says Mr. Blaine, "to be a partisan chief.” And so in a critical time of Jackson's administration he came to his rescue on the "force bill," and "Old Hickory" in person expressed his gratitude. VicePresident Johnson had to thank him for "a magnanimity and courtesy above the times." Though urged to the contrary he took the stump for his constant competitor Clay - a favor, alas! ill-requited by Mr. Clay at the close of his life. He turned the tide of northern votes in behalf of General Taylor, though at first the

nomination had seemed to him "not fit to be made." To one candidate of his party he refused his support, because while "himself well enough" and "of good principles," he was sure to be "the tool" of other men, and he predicted the signal defeat which awaited the candidate. How generously he could speak of the high qualities of Clay, Calhoun, and Pierce, and how promptly he could clasp hands once more with Benton after years of estrangement. How completely his letter of apology won the heart of Senator Dickinson, who "perused and reperused the beautiful note." How frankly he met the friendly overtures of his lifelong, keen antagonist, our Governor Hill, and welcomed him at his house in Franklin. And though there were some sharp passages at arms during his long career, how magnanimously was every stinging word struck out from his published works.

No more conspicuous instance could be furnished of freedom from all trammels but his own sense of. duty than his noted speech on the seventh of March, 1850, on the Compromise. It was deliberately done. Weeks beforehand, in the evening interview sought by Mr. Clay, he had declared his purpose to take his stand "no matter what might befall himself at the North." He took it. It cost him more than any other act of his life —— estrangement of friends, loss of popularity, bitter taunts and revilings, the refusal once of old Faneuil Hall, and unfavorable judgments to the present day. Occurring at the close of a long and honored life the scene is pathetic and almost tragic. Now that

the excitements are gone and the issues are dead it is time to appeal to the sober second thought of posterity. Whether judged by his own record and his avowed standard of duty or by the standard freely conceded by the nation to other illustrious men his great memory should now be cleared from that odium. We can now see that his whole past career brought him where he stood that day. With every utterance of his public life he was committed to the preservation of the Constitution and the Union; and on that day he proclaimed: "I speak to-day for the preservation of the Union." He had always held slavery to be a "great moral, social, and political evil"; he deliberately reiterated the opinion on that seventh of March. He had argued and voted steadily against the extension of slavery, and he most emphatically declared on that day: "Wherever there is a foot of land to be prevented from becoming slave territory, I am ready to assert the principle of the exclusion of slavery. I have been pledged to it again and again and I will redeem those pledges." He declared that in those sections where slavery existed under the solemn pledges of the Constitution, those pledges, once made, could not be broken. So he had always declared, and so had the whole nation. He confessed himself unable and who was not? to propose measures for the extinction of slavery, but willing to appropriate two hundred millions of the public money to colonize colored people who were or should be made free. No human eye could then discern a possible remedy for the central evil except in the

« PreviousContinue »