THOMAS HART BENTON (1782-1858)

"OLD BULLION”

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T was in the days of unlimited paper money, issued almoA at random by every wildcat bank throughout the land, that Thomas H. Benton won his sobriquet of "Old Bullion," by his urgent advocacy of a currency of the precious metals, issued by the government alone. But perhaps Benton's most prominent claim to distinction was in the part he bore in one of the greatest parliamentary debates of modern times, that between Hayne and Webster in 1832. Benton, an advocate of the right of State opposition to laws deemed unconstitutional, though not of nullification, began his debate by an attack upon Massachusetts, an assault which precipitated the mighty contest which has been already dealt with in our sketches of Webster and Hayne. Those were the days of giants in oratory, and perhaps we should add to the names of Clay, Webster and Calhoun that of Benton, as the fourth in a great quartet. Unlike the former three, he was a strong supporter of Jackson, whom he earnestly sustained in his suppression of the United States Bank and in other radical issues.

In earlier years Benton was as decided an enemy of Jackson as he afterward became a friend. He quarrelled with him in 1812, when in command of a regiment under him. In 1813 Jackson attempted to horse whip him at Nashville, and was severely wounded by a pistol shot fired by Benton's brother. But all this was forgiven in later years, and the former enemies became close friends.

Born in North Carolina, Benton began to practice law at Nashville in 1811, and founded a political newspaper at St. Louis in 1815. In 1820 he was elected to the Senate from Missouri, and remained a member of this body for thirty years. He was defeated in 1851, and afterward served for some years in the House of Representatives.

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Benton rendered a service of the greatest value to Congress and the country by his voluminous work, entitled "A Thirty Years' View, or a History of the Working of the American Government for Thirty Years, from 1820 to 1850." This most excellent history of Congress was supplemented for the succeeding twenty years in a similar work by James G. Blaine, the two photographing for us a half century of Congress.

SPANNING THE CONTINENT

[In place of offering our readers a selection from Benton's Congressional speeches, we prefer to give a brief address on a different topic, an eloquent prevision of a great work that was to be realized twenty years afterward. In 1849, when this address was delivered, the railroad in this country had not reached its twentieth year of age, and the country west of the Mississippi was a vast unknown land, the home of the Indian and the buffalo. Our almost utter ignorance of it is indicated in the maps of that period, in which a mighty territory, now the home of innumerable farms, is designated as "The Great American Desert." Yet Benton's prophetic vision already saw the railroad stretching over these unsettled thousands of miles and the iron horse careening from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In this speech he suggested the building of such a road. It then seemed like the dream of a wild enthusiast, yet we all know how amply his broad conception has since then been realized.]

We live in extraordinary times, and are called upon to elevate ourselves to the grandeur of the occasion. Three and a half centuries ago the great Columbus,—the man who afterward was carried home in chains from the New World which he discovered, this great Columbus, in the year 1492, departed from Europe to arrive in the east by going to the west. It was a sublime conception. He was in the line of success when the intervention of two continents, not dreamed of before, stopped his progress. Now, in the nineteenth century, mechanical genius enables his great design to be fulfilled.

In the beginning and in the barbarous ages the sea was a barrier to the intercourse of nations. It separated nations. Mediæval genius invented the ship, which converted the barrier into a facility. Then land and continents became an obstruction. The two Americas intervening prevented Europe and Asia from communicating on a straight line. For three centuries and a half this obstacle has frustrated the grand design of Columbus. Now, in our day, mechanical genius has again triumphed over the obstacles of Nature and converted into a facility what had so long been an impossible obstruction. The steam car has worked upon the land among enlightened nations to a degree far transcending the miracle which the ship in barbarous ages worked upon the ocean. The land has now become a facility for the most distant communication, a conveyance being invented which annihilates both time and space. We hold the

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intervening land; we hold the obstacle which stopped Columbus; we are in the line between Europe and Asia; we have it in our power to remove that obstacle; to convert it into a facility to carry him on to this land of promise and of hope with a rapidity and a safety unknown to all ocean navigation.

A king and a queen started him upon his great enterprise. It is in the hands of a republic to complete it. It is in our hands, in the hands of us, the people of the United States of the first half of the nineteenth century. Let us raise ourselves up. Let us rise to the grandeur of the occasion. Let us repeat the grand design of Columbus by putting Europe and Asia into communication, and that to our advantage, through the heart of our country. Let us give to his ships a continued course unknown to all former times. Let us make an iron road, and make it from sea to sea; States and individuals making it east of the Mississippi and the nation. making it west. Let us now, in this convention, rise above everything sectional. Let us beseech the national legislature to build a great road upon the great national line which unites Europe and Asia; the line which will find on our continent the Bay of San Francisco for one end, St. Louis in the middle, and the great national metropolis and emporium at the other; and which shall be adorned with its crowning honor, the colossal statue of the great Columbus, whose design it accomplishes, hewn from the granite mass of a peak of the Rocky Mountains, the mountain itself the pedestal and the statue a part of the mountain, pointing with outstretched hand to the western horizon, and saying to the flying passengers, "There is East; there is India."