Aqua-pura                     ½ part,
                 Saccharum                    7½ parts,
                                             ———
                 restored them to par, or    100 proof.

When in November, 1860, the lights were put out, it appeared that Mr.
Lincoln had received 180, Mr. Breckenridge 72, Mr. Bell 39, and the
Douglas 12 electoral votes. There were 130,773 more ballots cast even at
the South against Mr. Breckenridge than in his favor. His opinion of the
Union, for which he had run out of breath to be President, was now, of
course, very unfavorable; but as it was balanced by its kindred opinion
of him, he was under no obligation to confirm its judgment by taking the
first prize soon after offered to him.

South Carolina, which had often been outvoted before, only waited this
time four days—not stopping long enough to see if she was hurt, or how
the heads-and-tails flag would look—before calling a convention which
_more Cariolense_ substantially resolved that the Union had broken the
Union, and that the people who voted differently from South Carolina
were unconstitutional, and _ergo_, that she might have her own
Constitution and by-laws. She had helped to rule the roast so long that
she could not think of taking turns now.

Congress met in December, 1860. Of course John C. Breckenridge was on
hand. To him the Union was a good thing so long as he could preside over
its representatives. While caucusing nights against it, he could sit in
daylight to administer oaths—and even to take them—to support it.

The message was full of unginned cotton-seeds vigorously sprouting. It
charged the attempted burglary of the Union safe, not on the burglars,
but upon its owners. It chided the people for having done wrong in
electing an Anak so absurd as not to agree with South Carolina on the
little dark-skinned question; proposed several Africanizing amendments
to the Federal Constitution, and then floundered into the author’s
chronic chaos; seeming at one moment to believe that a State could not
secede, then again that it rather could; then, that if it did, it ought
not to; but then if it ought not to, who could prevent it if it did; and
if it did not, why the fire-flies did not hold out their little lanterns
long enough to light him, or in fact any one else that he knew of,
across the miry place.

The old hickory-tree had manifestly been chopped down and a very spongy
bass-wood had been substituted in the Federal grounds.

During January, 1861, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and
Louisiana somehow did something, in some way, somewhere, by somebody,—as
did Texas in the month of February following,—which was claimed by the
head-and-tails party in the South, as indicating the popular conviction
that Sambo was the only proper object of care by Uncle Sam; that they
fancied from what they suspected that the Anak Abraham would not carry
their pet lamb in his bosom as it had been carried; and that therefore
the family was played out. These mysterious, inexplicable somethings, by
somebody, somewhere and somehow, were gravely labelled “Ordinances of
Secession.” Certain it is, that in not one of these States, except in
Texas, were the people consulted about or called to ratify these very
grave resolves. Having only three months before voted against their
incarnation,—the prize-taker,—it is to be presumed that they would hold
to the same beliefs still, in the absence of any act or deed on the part
of the Anak to induce a change of opinion.

The uncomic truth is, that in this case, as in so many others which have
occurred or are occurring in our political history, these overwhelmingly
large questions—upon which hang so many lives, so much happiness or
suffering, such accumulated stores of hard-earned savings and
character—were undertaken to be answered by a few cunning, selfish,
dishonest, narrow-headed politicians, audaciously presuming upon what
they ignorantly called leadership,—in the absence of men engaged in more
honest work, of clearer head and better instincts,—who, idle hands in a
country where all just men are busy, too proud to work, too poor to live
without the proceeds of others’ labor, ever restless and intriguing for
luxurious places and foremost positions, find that, by getting up a
strike, they can preside, officer, talk to, and become prominent at
assemblages of arrested workmen, and live from their accumulated fund.

Disturbed, as well they might be, by these mysterious ordinances, forged
by these mischievous idlers, an assemblage of white-headed and unwisely
patriotic gentlemen met at Washington to get rid of them. Ordnance would
undoubtedly have affected it, but ordnance was not to be thought of by
those who were recommending cotton-sprouts and hopelessly tramping after
fire-flies.

Some of the Southern Senators gathered up their dark robes, and loftily
chaffing their Northern associates, strode from the chamber.

There was no ordnance in Washington. Of course John C. Breckenridge did
not yet follow them; it was more profitable to him and the ordinance
parties to stay.

John B. Floyd dispersed our little army of 16,000 men into small squads
far away from the ordnance-makers. He knew that the cotton-sprouts would
grow better unshaded by bayonets. On land there was no ordnance where it
was needed.

General Robert Anderson, of Southern birth, was, in the autumn of 1860,
assigned to Charleston Harbor, and there left with only 80 men to the
presumed magnetic attractions of that affirmative place. To these his
patriotism declined to be drawn. December 26, 1860, he removed from Fort
Moultrie to Sumter, two miles farther off from the magnets. For eight
months preceding, Mr. Floyd had sent heaps of muskets and ammunition, as
desirable compost for the cotton-sprouts. Isaac Toucey, of Hartford,
Connecticut, of a cold temperament, and from a cool latitude, thought
the health of naval officers might suffer from the heats of Charleston,
Wilmington, Savannah, St. Augustine, Mobile, and New Orleans, and so
ordered our ships to rove in distant seas.

There was, therefore, no ordnance off the seaboard.

The little garrison at Fort Sumter now became the pivot of the Union.
Around the question of its reinforcement the Cabinet swung and went to
pieces. General Cass, who had broken his sword before surrendering it to
those who sought to prevent our Union, now broke his heart over the
attempts of those who sought to shiver it in pieces. He was succeeded by
Jeremiah S. Black, a gentleman devoted to the black family when
enchained, indifferent to them when free. Floyd, one of the ring-leaders
in the strike, skedaddled to Virginia, followed in his rapid journey by
an indictment for having connived at the withdrawal of $870,000 worth of
bonds from Jacob Thompson’s loosely managed Interior. His place was
taken by the unbelieving Thomas, of Maryland, who soon became tangled by
his want of faith, and was succeeded by General Dix, who had more
confidence in guns than in Dixie.

  THE SKEDADDLE OF JOHN B. FLOYD.
  (p. 461)
]

On the 4th of February, 1861, the en-gulfed States and South Carolina
sent some delegates—chosen also somehow, somewhere, by somebody, in some
way unknown—to Montgomery, Alabama, to a convention, where the leading
strikers of course got upon the platform, and had the principal chairs.
They proceeded forthwith to concoct that first-class patent medicine for
all supposed ills, a constitution. In the composition of this draught
_radex Africanus_ largely entered. It was to be poured out by slaves,
and taken every waking hour. A separate government, called the
Confederate, was set up by these somehow delegates.

A flag was also devised, not in consonance with the avowed object of its
bearers, namely,—a colored man saddled and running like an unpaid,
tireless velocipede with a white rider in the seat working its shackled,
eccentric way,—but with stars and bars,—stars rayless as night, and bars
destined to be very sinister to the Southern hopes, and eventually to be
leaped and beaten down by spirited Northern trampers.

To be President of this African Commonwealth, the mysteriously elected
delegates invited J. Davis, who was as ready to say yes as the old maid
who had done the courting for a series of years. Of a metaphysical turn
of mind,—a turn around which all State rights arguments wind themselves
up,—sharp-visaged, lean of muscle, leaner of conscience, and leanest of
veracity, he had, after being educated at the government expense at West
Point, tracked office with a faultless scent, shown much pluck during
the Black Hawk and Mexican wars, gnawed the bone of repudiation in
Mississippi, and was now ready to bay at Federal flocks wherever they
appeared. Like John Brown, Stonewall Jackson, and those hard Scotch
fighters who prayed before the direst slaughters, he was most devout
just before writing those calm-looking, philosophy-streaked messages,
which massacred truth with a glaived hand, and shamed fiction by the
recital of atrocities which had no foundation, except at Andersonville
and in the Libby Prison at Richmond.

While these active heats were raging on the edges of the government,
cold chaos brooded at the centre. Through the rank growth of cotton,
threatening to overtop everything national, only fire-flies still.

At last the weary days vanished. Fourth of March came, and Mr. B. went
away—to his own place.

                             CHAPTER XVIII.

                       OUR NEWER NATIONAL ALBUM.

The Second Generation of our Great Men nearer in Time but not in
  Affection.—Several sufficient Reasons therefor.—Ingenious Biographers
  confusing our Verdicts over old Offenders.—A Latin Quotation to prove
  an Original Remark.—Why we should not stick to old Opinions.—Sketches
  of Clay, Calhoun, and Webster.—Parallels do not always run at equal
  Distances.—Three Fates.—Original Anecdote of Webster.—Of Lewis Cass
  and Thomas H. Benton.—Why double-chinned Persons are satisfactory.—The
  Plutocrats Girard and Astor; how they made Fortunes, and how
  much.—John Marshall as a Judge, and John Trumbull as a Painter.—Albert
  Gallatin skims American Cream.—Rembrandt Peale and Washington Allston
  described.—Why Felix Grundy, S. S. Prentiss, J. J. Crittenden, Samuel
  Houston, D. D. Tompkins, and Others, were like Shoots grafted upon
  hardy Native Stocks.—The Senate illuminated by J. M. Berrien, S. L.
  Southard, W. C. Preston, etc., Legaré, and Butler.—A full-length
  Portrait of Winfield Scott.—Irving delineated.—Drake, Halleck, and
  Paulding.—Fenimore Cooper descanted upon.—Science illustrated by
  Silliman, Hare, and Rush.—Descriptions of Prescott, Mrs. Sedgwick,
  Greenough, and Hawthorne.—How well the Second Set persuaded the
  Eighteenth Century over into the Nineteenth.

Between the death of Washington and the middle of the nineteenth century
grew up a second and numerous generation of great men. Although nearer
to us in time, they are not so near to our affections as the elder set.
Most of this younger race some of us have seen; and they have thus lost
a certain historic grandeur and magnified proportion, always lent by
hazy distance to far-off objects. Most of them have been the subjects of
newspaper attack, of conversational controversy, of party assault and
defence equally damaging, and so have become doubtfully, perhaps
disagreeably, familiar. Many of them have been brought into the
jurisdiction of our partisan praises and censures for offences against
our political principles or passing tastes. Some have been despatched
thence with Arizona justice, others by New York equity. Now we have
reluctantly dismissed some with Scotch verdicts of “not proven,” with
lurking suspicions more injurious than a positive Saxon condemnation of
“guilty”; and anon, we have banished others to the penal settlements of
our criminal domain.

Ingenious biographers, taking up characters hitherto surrendered to the
public executioner, asking for reviews of judgments alleged to be hasty,
and setting forth, in an attractive way, features which even criminals
share with the unindicted and facts unstained, perhaps, with the one
great crime which slew their reputations, have recently argued for new
trials with a convincing sophistry that few can resist after dinner, and
which captivates by its audacious novelty. All of us have discovered
what Tacitus long ago so tersely expressed,—our readiness to listen to
scandal, and our proneness to praise ourselves for our leniency to the
maligned:—

“Livor et obtrectatio pronis auribus accipiuntur; quippe adulationi
fœdum crimen servitutis, malignitati falsa species libertatis inest.”

If the puzzled are generally unsafe, the censorious are usually unfair
judges.

Members of the same family, too, are among each other as likely to do
injustice to a fellow-member by their jealous criticisms, as they are
apt before strangers to make themselves and their fellows ridiculous by
undiscriminating praise.

Over many mounds in our national cemetery the time-stains are growing
very dark and the moss thick and undisturbed. As we wander among these
with lips less pressed and stern, with perhaps a feeling of repenting
forgiveness, slow though it be, towards those from whom politically or
otherwise we have differed, and with occasional touches of tenderness,
reluctant though at first they may come, for those who nobly erred, if
err they did, straining for the right but missing it from the dimness of
the light which they carried, let us be sure that in strolling often
amid these head-stones, we shall thereby and thereafter be better
prepared, by turning out our lower selves, to turn over profitably and
pleasantly the pages of our newer National Album which holds a few of
their portraits. If on its first leaves we are confronted by the faces
of those whose lineaments—like Clay’s, Calhoun’s, Webster’s, Grundy’s,
Van Buren’s, Quincy Adams’s, Jackson’s, and others—are associated with
watch-words that touch party animosities that were born in us we know
not how or when, and survive we know not why, we can, at least, learn to
be justly proud of what has floated out from the drift-wood and dirty
foam of ephemeral politics, which now no longer conceal their sturdy and
solid timber growths.

CLAY, CALHOUN, and WEBSTER! How much good ink was thrown uselessly away
in bespattering them with blame or praise for the half-century during
which they actively and industriously braided the public history of
America through their triple biographies. Of this triumvirate, Mr. Clay
was born in 1777, the two others five years later; Mr. Calhoun received
the baptism of death in 1850, two years before his life-long
competitors. They were the three American Fates, holding the distaff,
the thread, and the shears of its history and administration. Utterly
dissimilar in the place and circumstances of their births, educations,
trainings, cultures, and courses, they yet supplied for each other the
only parallels over that wide tract of time through which their
prolonged lives reached.

In the House and in the Senate, sometimes on the same side, but oftener
congenially opposed, yet ever divided from each other by rival
ambitions, they ennobled the scenes in which they spent such large
forces. The American Titans, they tossed heavy bars of logic with such
ease, wrestled with such matching-power and balanced success, that we,
growing up to the gigantic spectacles, almost lose the consciousness of
the unwonted masteries that have so grandly played before us. And yet,
somehow, for all this, comparatively little love gathers in our hearts
as we look at those well-remembered faces; the large, continental visage
of Henry Clay, mapping a hemisphere of vast thoughts and generous though
partisan currents of action; the lofty sternness of John C. Calhoun,
cast in a Cato-like mould, heroic and defiant; and the square-blocked,
cubical, almost repulsive mass, outlined into the head of Daniel
Webster, which looks, or rather is looked at, as if it had for several
centuries capped the pyramid of Cheops, and had been finally taken down
with state ceremonies and transplanted by the Pasha to America, as a
testimony of his conception of our large exceptional growth.

  THE INTELLIGENT JURY.
  (p. 468)
]

Sadder than a professed comedy or a prepared funeral oration over a rich
but bad man is the unsatisfied ambition of such tough athletes in the
political arena, who, after a long life of great rough play, break up
into common earth, and form the subjects for Commencement day or prize
compositions in an open grove, where young ladies in white, bound in
blue-belting-ribbons, summon their uneasy ghosts before the dull-eyed
umpires. From what a cold well-depth sprang to the curb of Webster’s
lips those soliloquizing words which, a few days before his death,
overflowed from a disappointed life. Sitting in an open doorway at
Marshfield, propped up by pillows, he looked out upon his favorite herd
of cattle, which were driven up for the last inspection of their
attached owner. As the fine animals passed and turned their large eyes
upon him,—some pausing and looking a fond recollection into his scarcely
wasted face,—he ejaculated, as his thoughts turned backward over the
slights of party and the disappointments of an unsatisfied life: “I love
the honest faces of animals. _They_ look what they mean.”

Arriving in the world the same year with Mr. Webster, Mr. Calhoun, and
each other, LEWIS CASS, portly in presence as in learning, varied
capacity, and many-sided culture, and THOMAS H. BENTON, as solid as the
bullion which a dim tradition mentions as formerly found in these United
States, meet us with that full-orbed spherical satisfaction which
double-chinned persons are fortunate in imparting, if not of feeling
themselves. The “Recollections of Thirty Years in the Senate” would, one
would think, be enough to reduce any mortal to very attenuated
proportions. Fortunate is the memory of any M. C. which is constructed
like a mining-sieve, letting through the superabundant dirt and
retaining only the loosely silted ore.

ANDREW JACKSON and JOHN QUINCY ADAMS, destined to be rivals for the
Presidency in the fifty-seventh and again in the sixty-first years of
their lives, were severally born nine years before the Declaration of
Independence. Their lives were as unlike as their faces. The former
passed his first score of years in the hard struggles for a livelihood,
and mostly amid the scenes made memorable by the cavalry swords of
Marion and Sumter and the pen of William Gilmore Sims; the latter spent
his in the study of what could best round up a capable mind by
discipline and learning, and in the equally advantageous culture derived
from the society of his accomplished mother and experienced father.
While the stormy incidents of an eventful military life in Florida and
Georgia, intercalated with court-martials and official censures, scored
in Jackson’s face the notches which, until his death in 1845, kept
truthful tally with his warm, violent, generous, resentful, and stern
history; over the round, uncreased face of Adams ran the smoothing-iron
of literary tastes and pursuits, keeping down the ruffling disturbances
of a naturally passionate nature, and the ridges which the excitements
from 1824 to 1828, and the antislavery agitations in the latter part of
his life, would have otherwise left. Jackson’s virtues deserve signal
praise, and Adams’s vices emphatic censure; since the former grew up
under circumstances as unfavorable to their existence as a young ladies’
seminary for modesty, or a New York sheriff’s office for integrity; and
the latter amid forces as unassailing as a prayer-meeting to piety or
sleep to pure thoughts.

Types of American character in many respects are the originals of the
two thin-faced portraits to which we next turn,—types in their foreign
birth, their obscure social belongings, and their shrewd and successful
business ventures,—STEPHEN GIRARD, coming into life in 1750, at
Bordeaux, France, as acid as the claret of his native city, and
commanding, like it, very profitable prices by transportation to this
country, a sailor’s son, and until his nineteenth year himself a sailor;
and JOHN JACOB ASTOR, his junior by thirteen years, offspring of a
poverty-worried peasant, ushered first into a cabin at Waldorf, near
Heidelberg, where black bread and small hopped beer were all that
incessant labor could procure. The former lived eighty-one, the latter
eighty-five years upon our planet; and by faithfully gathering up from
its surface, water and land, from its ships, stores, and offices, and
from its furred and unfurred animals, the gains which persistent early
rising, industry, and ceaseless penny-turning accumulate, left fortunes,
the first of nine, the last of twenty millions of dollars.

                          “Sic itur ad Astra.”

The Astral-lamp Library, obtained by funds bequeathed by a benefaction,
like Girard’s College, appreciative of what its donor had himself
missed, sheds its genial light on many a poor scholar’s desk. If each
legacy has been somewhat diverted from its testamentary direction,
perhaps the best excuse may be found in the reason why married women
were not allowed to have their wills after death, because they had them
so much while living.

JOHN MARSHALL, to whose unmistakably pure-minded face we turn in safe
admiration, was one of those types of leadership, one of those
representatives of schools, who, violently liked or disliked when
living, has by the touch of death been canonized among the white-robed
of the nation. An incarnation, when alive, of Federalism, his ermine has
become so white under the fulling of time and by contrast with robes
since worn, and his grasp of the judicial balances was, as is now seen,
so firm, so unimpassioned and unshaken by a nervous partisanship, that
he has already passed into the very small list of judges, whose lofty
character, stainless purity, large judicial capacities and force, are
like solid cool rocks amid the ever-shifting scenes and temperatures of
a varied landscape.

An artist’s head sits manifestly on the shoulders of JOHN TRUMBULL, born
in 1756, a year after John Marshall, and living eight years beyond him.
At his death in 1843, he left but few as aged. His busy pencil dropped
in 1775 for the musket, and, resumed in 1777, has perpetuated in
fifty-seven historical pictures, with the fidelity and love of personal
friendship, the portraitures of most of the leading actors in the first
period of our national story. He was President of the Academy of Fine
Arts, from its formation, in 1816, until it gave place, in 1825, to the
Academy of Design. His dress, it will be observed, was formally and
scrupulously in the mode; his address was as dressy as his wristbands
and frills. Quick-eyed mothers would at once, as he took his seat, warn
the children, always attracted towards clean vestments, “not to dirty
the gentleman’s clothes.”

In 1761 ALBERT GALLATIN was born. Related to Neckar, he seems to have
borrowed at the same time much of the financial ability of the French
minister, and the ready wit, graceful imagination, and forceful
word-power of the minister’s brilliant daughter, Madame de Staël. He
crammed eighty-eight years full of remarkable activities, as ambassador
to Russia, France, Great Britain, and Holland, as member of Congress,
and as a weighty yet captivating and vivacious writer on banks, public
credit, currency, and those subjects, ever rising, like cream, on the
public pans, which are skimmed by the most skilfully handled ladles.

Turning the page, we meet the thought-bearing faces of REMBRANDT PEALE,
born in 1778, and below, that of his brother artist, WASHINGTON ALLSTON,
the American Paul Veronese, who, Peale’s junior by a year, ceased his
earthly work in 1853, seven years before him. The serenity of congenial
pursuits gilds their portraitures, and lingers like an aureola around
their heads. Upon Allston’s face there seems spread a listening look, as
if straining to catch far-off notes, mingled with that gentle hush and
composure, as if stilled by that music so subtily described by
Wordsworth, which

          “Born of murmuring sound, had passed into his face.”

A tree does not show more markedly than man the results of ancestral
care, wealth, and leisurely culture. Numerous are the faces and
histories scattered all through our national album, which are signalized
by a curious mixture of original forest wildness and park growths newly
begun, cultivated shoots grafted upon hardy native stocks, and giving
off large unsymmetrically shaped fruits,—fruits less sour than the
natural, but less genial, plump, mellow, and blooming than the
full-nursed growth. Of these were, in oratory, FELIX GRUNDY, whose
exposed youth shot up on the wilderness frontier of Kentucky, where
“death was in almost every bush, and an ambuscade in every thicket,” and
who attained, in Tennessee, a large altitude and breadth; SARGEANT S.
PRENTISS, transplanted from among the pines of Maine to the coarse
richness of a Mississippi soil, and through whose waving tops swept
sometimes the storm of invective, sometimes the æolian strains of
tenderest, soul-trembling breathings; JOHN J. CRITTENDEN, a farmer’s
boy, born in 1785, whose prickly logic sheathed, like a burr, the
smooth-meated chestnut; and, among statesmen, Samuel Houston of Texas,
shaggy-barked, yet with much tasselling wealth of flower at the top;
DANIEL D. TOMPKINS of New York, and a large number of others, strong
saplings, pushing up in brave defiance of adversities, some wrought into
bureaus, others inlaying cabinets,—American woods, some still sappy and
cross-grained, but making as good state furniture as an untechnical
taste has hitherto been content to demand or use.

Glancing through our book,—in which we treasure only the portraits of
the departed,—we dwell with satisfaction upon a group of high-toned,
conscientious, Christian statesmen, who honored public office in their
persons, and shed upon the Senate a light so effulgent, that the many
opaque substances, so often thrust into it, have not been able wholly to
absorb: JOHN MACPHERSON BERRIEN, born in 1781; THEODORE FRELINGHUYSEN
and SAMUEL L. SOUTHARD, in 1787; and WILLIAM C. PRESTON in 1794; with
whom are worthily associated HUGH S. LEGARÉ, whose fine face brought its
welcome into every company, as his radiant mind sparkled and
scintillated over every subject; and BENJAMIN F. BUTLER of New York,
whose clear-cut physiognomy, like an antique on a fine stone, shows
handsomely in every setting.

WINFIELD SCOTT came into life in 1786, and so crystallized about himself
each of the three wars in which he was the principal magnet,—the
maritime contest of 1812, the Mexican war in 1847, and the opening of
the Rebellion in 1861,—that his calm front and majestic presence would
readily single him out as the model figure for our American Mars. Like a
great elm in the Berkshire valley he stands, massive in strength of
trunk, spreading out in varied branches of learning, special study, and
active experience, and dropping his pendulous, wide-circuiting limbs and
generous foliage over a broad expanse of rich meadow. Under this vast,
wide-reaching, many-dropping banyan-tree history seems to gather in a
sleepy, contented calm.

Dearly do we all love to pause over the beautifully bordered page which
holds the genial, sunny-faced visage of WASHINGTON IRVING. He was four
years old when Washington delivered his first Inaugural. Through all the
nineteenth century he shines, like a blessed presence, until his
eclipse, in 1859. How our landscapes, the lives of our best and
worthiest, the graceful legends of our rivers, mountains, prairies, and
historical sites,—barren, voiceless, and dumb before, warm into life,
and stretch out their living hands in tender entreaty, instinct and
round with charms of persuasive beauty, as, like the prophet over the
child, he stretches himself over them!

Of some of his associates and compeers, still happily spared to us, we
cannot speak; for the living are too numerous to be enumerated, and too
near to be sketched; but of JOSEPH RODMAN DRAKE, whose brief twenty-five
years of life exhaled such beautiful and deathless creations as the
Culprit Fay; of FITZ-GREENE HALLECK, his companion and fellow-laborer,
whose rare humor stole into delicious song, as sprites are said to play
hide-and-seek in buttercups and honeysuckles; and of JAMES R. PAULDING,
linked in literary work as by family ties with Irving, and whose
diversified genius gives him a large, if not a choice place in our
Walhalla,—of all these kindly faces we delight to keep copies in our
album.

Like Irving, fortunate in the enjoyment of a wide European reputation,
but less fortunate than he in securing the undivided hearts of his
countrymen,—whose early history, aboriginal legends, forest scenery, and
naval characters he has so well tapestried in novels, essay, biography,
and history,—JAMES FENIMORE COOPER, born in 1789, has, by his sea tales,
caused many a mother’s heart to yearn after her runaway boy, and by his
land stories, garnered up many of our best sheaves of fiction into a
national stack. As we gaze on his large, square, massive forehead, we
forget his sharply feathered arrows, aimed at our national faults, which
generally, of course, missed the conscience and touched only the liver.
Remembering “The Pioneers,” “The Last of the Mohicans,” “The Spy,”
“Pilot,” and “Red Rover,” we fall to blessing the creations which stalk
over our rough fences, and brush away our raw villages, uproarious with
faces of civilized red-men, and so endeavor to get by, as boys do a
haunted place at nightfall, the recollection of those twenty-two libel
suits, whose damages he found, like most plaintiffs in that species of
legal fiction, to end in the payment of the costs out of his own pocket.

Others there are, too, whose physiognomies recall to us pleasantly the
explorers in science, workers amid Nature’s secrets, earlier than those
who now push their daring way into her very robing-room: BENJAMIN
SILLIMAN, the elder, who came in 1779, and through a long life lectured
so many into the pleasant idea that they knew something of geology and
chemistry, and through his “Journal of Science,” established in 1818,
gathered up the mental products of his fellow-harvesters; ROBERT HARE,
two years younger, who, at the age of twenty, invented the compound
blow-pipe, and up to his death, in 1858, continued his discoveries,
until he left, by his spiritual explorations, his scientific brethren
behind him; and BENJAMIN RUSH, born in 1780, who by his tasteful style,
made boluses less distasteful, and even gave the muses such a draught
that they became delirious over his medical pages.

WILLIAM H. PRESCOTT, reserved until nearly the close of the eighteenth
century ere he was born, and becoming blind in outward vision at the age
of eighteen, so clarified his inner sight and quickened it to the
perception of new beauties, and so perfected himself by the grace,
gentleness, and cheerful gayety of a happy nature, that Peru, Mexico,
the times of Ferdinand, Isabella, and Philip II., filtrated through
them, glow in splendor and are inwrought and outwrought in such delicacy
of color and such noble boldness as to make him stand out in singularly
beautiful proportions to thousands of loving eyes, that have never
rested, and will now never rest, upon his fine classic head.

Stop we a moment to admire the intellectual features of CATHERINE M.
SEDGWICK, born in 1798, whose wise essays and wiser fictions lie upon so
many tables; the calm head of HORATIO GREENOUGH, who produced his first
work, the “Chanting Cherubs,” upon a commission from Fenimore Cooper,
brought out the earliest American group in marble, and became a very
Medusa, turning many Americans into stone; and finally the grand, quaint
physiognomy of NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, given to us in 1804, and just
withdrawn, whose genial tales and humorous descriptions will keep his
memory as odorous as woodbines around the porches of houses
seven-gabled, mossed, newly Gothic, or indifferently green-shuttered,
and up to their eaves in white paint.

Unwillingly we close the list; for many are worthy to be added, who have
laid their aching brains away, and more who are coining from their
living thoughts a mintage more national than greenbacks and not half so
soiled.

All but two who are named in this our newer album were born in the last
century, and drew over its wealth with them and piled it up on our side.
Few of them lived less than three, and several more than fourscore
years; showing that the possession of intellect often preserves their
owners to a longevity as great as office or a life estate.

                              CHAPTER XIX.

       THE WAR OF IDEAS AND MUSKET; OR, LINCOLN’S ADMINISTRATION.

                               1861–1865.

                          IN THREE DIVISIONS.

                            DIVISION FIRST.

COTTON VEILS HIDE THE UNION. MARCH 4, 1861, TO JANUARY 1, 1862.

Striking Historical Contrasts of professed Virtue and cruel
  Enforcement.—The American Fetich; its strange, passionate Worship and
  armed Adoration.—The Freshet of Slavery traced from its small
  Beginnings.—Mr. Lincoln over its Ridges lands in Washington.—A
  Striking Announcement, and who it struck.—Of Seward, Cameron, and
  Chase.—A Naval Joke.—A Wry Fort makes Wry Faces.—An American
  Nightmare.—Watching with the Sleeper.—Sparing the Rod and getting the
  Ramrod.—Call for Seventy-five Thousand Ramrods.—Massachusetts Boys and
  Baltimore Hards.—Busses and Blunderbusses.—Few Office-Seekers, but
  many Gun-Holders in Washington in April, 1861.—The English Telescope
  and the Wonders it discovered.—A Dual View.—An Official Talk between
  two Lords.—A Proclamation to restrain Englishmen.—A Parallel.—War
  Materials, Forts, etc., generously given away by Loose-handed
  Custodians.—Twiggs inclined as Tree is bent.—Cotton Curtain before
  Washington; and a near View of it by General Mansfield.—Colonel
  Ellsworth.—Butler and Bethel.—Lyons in Missouri.—McClellan moves into
  Virginia; what he found.—A Wise Man flees when a real Man
  pursueth.—Bull’s Run and General Run.—A Discovery and Noise over
  it.—Stonewall Jackson and Praying Soldiers.—Piety and Powder.—A
  Drill-Ground near Washington.—General Lee’s First Kicks against the
  Pricks.—Du Pont at Port Royal.—Mason, Slidell, and Vigilant
  Friends.—John C. Breckenridge a striking Sign-Board.—War in the
  Mississippi Valley.—Kentucky and her coy Ways.—A Spartan Leonidas and
  Greek Ulysses.—Christmas Eve, 1861.

“Robespierre,” says a terse, sentence-packing essayist, “would slay one
half of France to get the other half to follow his principles of
virtue.”

The cotton rebellion is another illustration of the same horrible
tenderness, the same selfish loveliness, the same unsentimental
sentimentalism.

Like the strange histories of Scylla, of Marius, of Simon de Montfort
and his helmed soldiery against the Waldenses, of Alva in the
Netherlands, of Philip II., and of Claverhouse, in Scotland, it exhibits
a courage, endurance, sacrifices, and heroism which exalt, to compass
ends which debase and brutalize human nature.

Setting up in the second half of the nineteenth century, and in free,
much-reading America, a fetich for worship, brought from Africa, slimy
with snakes, foul, cruel, deformed, and misshapen, its singularly
enthusiastic votaries, after insisting by books, tracts, primers, by
philosophic essay, bound treatise, and unbound poetry, in Congress,
conventions, lecture-rooms, prayer-meetings, horse-races, and in all
places, seasonable or unseasonable, thirsty or wet, that the fetich,
though repudiated by all civilized people, was the true and undoubted
patron of government, society, wealth, progress, and human, i. e.
white-skinned happiness, at last seized musket and sword to maintain and
perpetuate her horrid rites, although this maintenance should overturn
and waste all other shrines.

The cotton-gin struck, in 1793, springs all over the slave States, whose
multiplying flows so gathered head in 1821 as to require damming back.
The Missouri dike was erected. The pent waters, however, were found so
profitable for foreign mill-owners, for over-shot feeders to Northern
shelves, for commercial pockets, and political ballot-boxes, as well as
such wealth-distributing streams over the growing breadths and easy
luxuries of their Southern owners, that expedients were devised to swell
their volume, area, and back-water power. The dike, cut in 1854, let out
the accumulated deluge into new sluice-ways, which promised to some
increased profits, but which produced great ravages in many ways, and at
last set towards maelstroms, down whose gurgling throats were sucked,
not only the passive and floating citizen, and the compromising, timid
politician, but much of the life and wealth of the nation at large.

Over the angry ridges, rapidly rising on the 4th of March, 1861, Mr.
Lincoln, uneasy at the white caps crisping the dark swells, and himself
in disguise, landed at the national wharf in Washington. Without
disguise, however, he at once, in a distinct, calm voice, announced the
principles upon which he proposed to meet the menacing flood, namely,
not to interfere with its black tides in States where they were legally
channelled, nor to create any new courses in Territories in which they
had not surged, and steadily to enforce, in spite of all obstructions,
the existing rules, regulations, and laws both North and South.

  COTTON SUPREME.
  (p. 483)
]

This announcement struck the knob of the national shield, and its
metallic notes quivered through the air. The three commissioners,
despatched from the somehow gathered Confederate assemblage at
Montgomery, heard the vibrations the morning of their arrival, March
5th, but failed to shout loud enough to be heard themselves, and
returned speedily with their cross-barred message.

Attention was immediately directed to the ravelled American stocking
rapidly running down. The blue yarn of the navy was taken up stitch by
stitch. The threads of the little army were picked up, lying loosely
around at a distance from the capital, and, by much knotting and
splicing, were put upon the old, rusty, war-needles for work. It was
very sad business for the gentle-minded Lincoln, although helped by Mr.
Seward in the State Department,—a very vigorous and manifold
letter-writer,—by the wide-headed Chase in the Treasury, by the
strong-knuckled Cameron in the noisy War Bureau, and by that
long-bearded Gideon Welles, whose unthatched upper story became in time,
like a naval depot, the receptacle of a great deal of odd material, most
of it too old to be serviceable. In truth, with his funny ways, dropping
anchor when he should be making steam, bothered with new inventions, gun
bores and spiral devices, which he had never seen at Hartford, and quite
incomprehensible often by any one, puzzled by stern duties and running
about to know where the ship’s waste was, the latter old gentleman was
about the only joke which went about for four years.

Notice by the government of its intention to add to the eighty men in
Fort Sumter drew upon that little stone pentagon a lively cannonade of
thirty-six hours, by General Beauregard, the Confederate military
leader, distorting its resolute visage, and causing wry faces everywhere
throughout the North, and very many among the strikers at the South.

The first whizzing shot was the first uneasy spasm in that horrible
nightmare which crept over America and held it bound for four years.

For the sake of human nature; for the sake of our common past, and our
now dawning brighter future, we would fain draw over the face of the
disturbed sleeper a veil, which should but dimly delineate, if it did
not altogether hide from view, the uncoffined ghastliness. The purposes
of history, however, forbid us, nurses as we are in trouble, as boon
companions in feasting, to quit the room; and so holding still, as best
we can, the hand of genial Humor, we sit down amid the uncomic scenes of
a fratricidal struggle.

Through the evening silences which followed the evacuation of Fort
Sumter, April 14, 1861, were heard at Montgomery and in other
Confederate cities rhetorical voices of gratulation at the humbled
pride, flag, and prosperity of the North, and predictions of bold
equestrian sallies into Washington, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston;
at the North, wails of sorrow, sudden questions of the causeless blows
on the tingling national cheek, mixed with remorseful self-accusations
at the weak petting, which had so encouraged unrestrained tempers as to
invite to this public breaking of the family crockery and this
unconcealable family disgrace. “Had not the rod been so long
spared,”—was the general feeling,—“we should now be spared the use of
the ramrod.” The next morning, however, Mr. Lincoln proclaimed the need
of seventy-five thousand ramrods, with good men to accompany them to
Washington. At the same time he asked the wise men to meet at the
capital in July for consultation. Ere the next daybreak, a thousand
Massachusetts lads were on their way towards the Potomac, shining in
new-burnished steel and new polished love for that old Union mother,
whose goodness had been so steady and uniform as hitherto to excite no
manifested return. On the 19th of April they reached Baltimore, and were
passing through in the horse-cars, when they were set upon by a bad lot
of hards and softs of that city,—as others before and since have
frequently been assailed in their transit, by railway and hotel runners.
Other regiments soon followed from “the teeming North, through all her
unfrozen loins.” Guns were got down from rusted hooks; shoulder-straps
straightened; blunderbusses and other busses given and taken; officers
beaten up from behind ploughshares to be beaten in first skirmishes into
good leaders; and shields from all the free States were clasped around
the waist of the capital. Never were there so many gun-holders, nor so
few office-seekers, at Washington in the month of April.

The soft velveted hand which caressed was now stiffened into the steel
gauntlet to smite.

Meanwhile the English government, employed since 1783 in looking across
at us through the large end of its telescope, suddenly got its eye at
the other extreme, and discovered the monstrous size of this country,
the large population, and unmanifested pluck of the nine somehow seceded
States, and, to her, the very obvious absence of any ties or mutual
necessity between two such admirably designed single nations. This was
the almost unanimous opinion, too, of the well-dressed classes; although
some Bright Englishmen, and especially the hard toilers in the
manufacturing districts,—although working in smoke,—saw more clearly the
object and design as well as the final end of the commencing difficulty
than those whose near-sightedness spread a film over all their American
observations.

“The Hunited States ’ave too many people,” said Lord John.

“Haltogether, yes,” replied Lord Palmerston.

“Suppose that they should fight?” inquired Lord John.

“Well, two heads are better than one,” replied the facetious Palmerston.

“And so are two customers,” rejoined Lord John, wiping his nose with a
cotton pocket-handkerchief.

And forthwith they issued a proclamation of neutrality in the name of
the Queen, whose heart was no more in its sentiments than her hand in
its composition. It was thought at the time by many people to be very
smart; and so it was very smart, altogether too smart. It was a state
fiction,—a fancy creation, looking in legal phrase as if all the English
were bent on rushing into the prophesied something,—a buffalo-hunt, a
Long Island race, or steamboat explosion;—for what the little flurry was
about, or would be when the solemn state warning was given, no one
knew,—unless they were violently restrained by the British government.
It was the unnecessarily vehement declaration of the very disinterested
old maid to the unsuspecting, quiet young man, quite innocent of such
audacious thoughts as her fears excited and suggested: “Now, if you kiss
me I shall resist. I shall. Don’t you try it. Now, there, don’t come
towards me. Don’t make such a noise, for everybody will hear you. Hands
off. Don’t try it. I shall scream. Quit now. Don’t disturb the
neighborhood. Hands off, I tell you. I won’t have anything to do with
it.” The warning was as piquant and promotive of the practice
deprecated, as the landlord’s to the ostler, never to grease the teeth
of traveller’s horses, for if he should they could not eat oats.

The strikers in Arkansas and North Carolina, in May, contrived somehow
to get up delegates to meet those from the other Southern States at
Richmond, the newly selected gathering-place of Confederated
counsellors.

The insurrection commenced to grow. The warned boy began seriously to
think of the audacity from which he was so solemnly conjured to desist.

Federal war stores, magazines, and naval materials were handed over to
the new State claimants by their loose-wristed custodians, who, although
educated by the Federal government, generously gave away her property on
the principle of that testator, who requested his own debtors, forthwith
after his decease, to pay what they owed to his executors, and nobly
forgave his creditors the debts which he owed them. Floydism became as
fashionable South as cotton, butternut-colored clothing and long hair.
Just as the tree was bent the Twiggs inclined. At Little Rock,
Pensacola, Portsmouth, Virginia, and in Texas, large masses of stores,
cannon, guns, and naval materials were transferred, like the allegiance
of the officers in charge, to the strange African fetich. It looked as
if the American people were moving out of the lower story of their
large, constitutional bazaar into the upper lofts, and were giving away
generously a part of the expensive fixtures to the new incoming tenant.

In May some Confederate cotton curtains, striped with rough military
lines, were hung before Washington. They concealed much real weakness
and want of furniture behind them, and enabled those, who kept up a
confused shouting in the darkened recesses and away from the front, to
convey an impression of numbers which did not exist.

Thirteen thousand Federal troops,—part of the seventy-five thousand,—led
by General Mansfield, desiring to get a nearer view of the curtain,
crossed over the Potomac to Arlington Heights. The Virginia soil, it was
found, no more spurned Northern feet than its cultivation was spurned by
the hands of its white owners. The next day Colonel Ellsworth, with a
Zouave regiment, entered the ancient town of Alexandria. Seeing the new
flag swaying in its sluggish air, he tore down, as he supposed, the
fetich symbol; but received almost on the instant a fatal shot, and was
borne away with slow requiems to the vast Northern cemetery, in which
new graves were soon rapidly to be opened. The struck symbol of the
Confederacy was not cut down, but only lowered to half-mast, emblem of
American hopes and pride.

May 9, Mr. Lincoln made a new call for forty-two thousand men. As
quickly as May blossoms come to the expected call of the shower they
came in rosy-hearted responses. General Butler hastened with twelve
thousand men to Fortress Monroe, whence on the 9th of June he sent a
detachment to Big Bethel. No wrestling-match, however, came off there,
and no pillar of stone, of course, set up. Meanwhile, Missouri,
Maryland, and Kentucky,—resisting the second secession cleavage, started
by Virginia, and which had drawn after her Tennessee, Arkansas, and
North Carolina,—trembled with the forces contending for ascendency in
their several borders. In the first State, General Jackson attempted in
vain to mesmerize Lyons. Failing in these passes, he made several upward
strokes, destroying railroads, bridges, and telegraph wires. But the
Federal commander, pursuing him to Boonesville, disabled his arm from
renewing such tricks. Uniting his forces with General Sigel’s,—making
from their junction six thousand men,—General Lyons attacked at Wilson’s
Creek, near Springfield, Ben McCullough and Sterling Price, with a force
of twenty thousand.

The attacking party was repulsed, and its brave leader killed, but the
followers of the Ranger were too weary to pursue them.

In Virginia, early in July, General George B. McClellan, then in his
thirty-sixth year, and General Rosecrans, in his forty-second,
collecting the cream of their little armies, skimmed the Confederate
pans at Rich Mountain, while immediately after, the Confederate pails
were completely upset or seized by General Morris, assisted by some help
from Ohio and Indiana, at Carrick’s Ford. General Rosecrans, flowing
towards the Southwest, came down like a mountain torrent in the Kanawha
valley, even flooding such water-logged estrays as Henry A. Wise and the
indicted Floyd. The salt springs of the valley, towards which they sped,
could not preserve them from becoming spoiled, and held ever afterward,
even by their friends, in bad odor.

A few days afterwards, the troops near Washington, numbering about
35,000 under General McDowell, were moved in a body towards the
curtain,—which was drawn back and back by its supporters to Manassas
Junction,—where Beauregard, intrenched with 27,000 men, assisted by
General Joseph E. Johnston and 16,000 more close at hand in Winchester,
steadied and upheld it. As the 35,000 thousand went forward, the three
months’ men, whose time had expired, went backward, seeking the far rear
to the sound of the enemy’s cannon, until the Federal inspecting force
was reduced to 18,000. As they approached that historic little rill,
Bull Run, they met the combined forces of the Confederates, and after
holding the field against them and even advancing upon it, until late in
the afternoon, they fell into one of those panics, not unfrequent among
troops, raw or seasoned, in which the wild run of frightened bulls or
the disordered summersaulting and tumbles of a herd of buffaloes is an
orderly march. A mass of huddling soldiers, civilians, teamsters,
members of Congress, and other muddled material was thrown upon
Washington. The puzzled Confederates, unconscious of victory and of
course unpursuing, at length got back to their capital. Discovering at
last their stupendous victory, they made up for lost time by shouts so
loud that every European echo repeated it, like a very Lurlei. In this
big scare were many of the leading generals on either side,—among those
on the Federal, Sherman, Burnside, and Heintzelman; and on the
Confederate, Longstreet, Ewell, Early, Bonham, and that praying soldier,
Stonewall Jackson, then thirty-five years old, and whose saintly,
fanatical bravery recalls the gallant slaughterers in the civil wars of
Scotland, who tempered their prayers with bayonet-pushing amens, and
ended their fervid hacking of enemies with hearty thanksgivings to
Heaven.

The losses on either side in men were nearly balanced,—the Federal dead
amounting to 481, and the Confederate to 378; the Federal wounded to
1011, the Confederate to 1489; but in prestige, self-respect, and that
subtle moral force which cannot be weighed even by grains or scruples,
the advantage was greatly with the insurrectionists.

Congress immediately voted to raise 500,000 men for the army, two
hundred and fifty millions of dollars in money, and to issue fifty
millions of treasury-notes. The Confederate gathering determined to set
400,000 men to help the existing 210,000 hold up the cotton veil, now
becoming so heavy and thick with dust and clots, that even Mr. Seward
began to doubt whether it could be lifted in thirty days.

In August, Forts Hatteras and Clark were pulled by Commodore Stringham
into Pamlico Sound.

For many months the country in front of Washington was converted into a
vast drill-ground, over which Drill-Sergeant McClellan exercised the
weary feet of over one hundred thousand soldiers, and the wearier
patience of many millions of citizens. During this time the echoes of
Bull Run, as numerous and diversified as an Irishman’s, haunted the
consciences and journals of America, and the hollow faith of Europe. If
it was all quiet on the Potomac, it was very unquiet elsewhere. General
McClellan was always a believer in the Italian proverb,

                            “Chi va piano.
                            Va sano:
                            Chi va forte,
                            Va alla morte,”

and so he held his ground near Washington.

In September, a series of severe skirmishes, lasting three days, between
General Robert E. Lee, now fifty-three years old, and General Reynolds,
at Cheat Mountain and Elk Water, Virginia, followed by another October
3d at Greenbrier, disagreeably shook up the Confederate commander. These
first attempts to turn against his countrymen the science and skill
which he had gained at their expense and in their service, were
creditable to his conscience, if not to his head and skill.

The sleeper turned over with a sense of smothering, as in his nightmare
horror he saw the drawn sword of his favorite sons pointed at him.

On the 29th of October a fleet under Commodore Du Pont, with General T.
W. Sherman and twenty thousand men on board, sailed for Port Royal, and
after three elliptical turnings in the harbor, threw out such pills as
they passed that Forts Walker and Beauregard, suddenly swallowing them,
fell into such a vertigo, that they lost their heads, and tumbled
helpless upon the ground. To balance this fatal bill of mortality,
however, the Confederate General Evans, defeated with great loss a
detachment of two thousand one hundred men under General Stone, at
Ball’s Bluff, when Oregon lost one of her best senators and citizens,
Colonel E. D. Baker.

The cotton veil was becoming very soiled and flecked. November brought
out a variety of colors in American affairs, some light with yellow
hues, others as dark as the gusty season loves to whirl over a surface
ever freezing and thawing. General Scott retired from the chief command
of the army, to which General McClellan succeeded; the lean Davis was
made high-priest for six years to the Southern fetich, and Mason and
Slidell, Confederate commissioners, hurriedly shunning Mr. Welles and
his cruisers, were captured by Captain Wilkes off the Trent. They were
of course promptly spied by the large, vigilant English telescope,
which, in its rapid shifting for the occasion, read English
international law backwards, and spelled out our duty from our own
precedents. The alacrity with which their surrender was demanded showed
that the still anxious young lady had survived the alarm, caused by the
unwilling kiss six months before, and was desirous to escape, in
precisely the same way, any further impertinences.

John C. Breckenridge now climbed down to grasp the depraved prize he had
at last so well earned. Elected a Senator of the United States at the
close of the Vice-Presidency in the preceding March, he readily took a
voluntary oath to support the Constitution of an undivided land; played
the spy upon the efforts of its government to thwart the attempts to
dissever it; and at the close of the session, unable longer to profit by
his office and oath, took a brigadier’s commission and a new oath
against a country which had loaded his family and himself with its
highest honors. Once the cherished type of a chivalrous gentleman, he
engrafted upon the abused name of chivalry definitions more reproachful
than those which spring from the addled eccentricities of Don Quixote;
his old friends, if any such survive, must long have desired to feel
that he had only lost an arm in a service which, undistinguished by any
advantage brought to it by a man who had deserted everything for it,
sunk the remains of a character once high, and an intellect once
brilliant, to a depth compared with which history refuses an example.
Others may plead some excuse, more or less admissible, for their armed
heresies: Davis, that his was a logical sequence to his lifelong
convictions of State supremacy; Toombs, Cobb, Stephens, and others, that
their States dragged them out; Floyd, the necessity of putting money in
his purse; Wise, the loss of a guiding intelligence. But to not one of
these can John C. Breckenridge point to mitigate the just severities of
that moral verdict which, in cases of such cumulated guilt, can only
appease the general uneasiness at the exhibition of depravity so
fathomless, by the most exemplary damages. Looking into the dreadful
chasms, down which his example cast so many others; the maimed cripples,
the hollow-eyed widows, Justice slain by stabs in the back, exiles from
poor homes smitten by the bludgeons of secret agents, even humorous
History grows stern-featured and allows a saddening pity to cloud her
habitual smile, as she flings her knotted whip over the shoulders of
high-born guilt.

As the year 1861 drew towards its close, the war, dropping in the old
traditional path of empire, trended westward and seated itself in the
valley of the Mississippi. Ulysses S. Grant, then thirty-nine years old,
newly assigned to the District of Cairo, took Paducah, Kentucky; and
settled on Belmont,—not August, the banker, but a small town in
Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi, opposite Columbus, Kentucky.
This latter place was then held by that mitred Spartan warrior, Leonidas
Polk, who had left the light of the star which guided wise men to the
Babe, for the hazy star of the major-general,—one of the dim twinklers
in that milky-way which, after four years’ watering, disappeared from
the sight of even telescopic gazers.

Gradually large forces were drawn to the State of Kentucky,—nicely
balancing on neutral ground,—while her reluctant hand was coyly
withdrawn from any Union by her guardian, Governor Magoffin, and was
thereby sought with greater ardor by each suitor. The Confederates
offered her a bridal Pillow, but the Federals sent Ulysses, that wise
and silent Greek, whose manly deeds soon effectually won her affections.

Christmas eve, 1861, put a million of armed men and two millions of
diurnal debt into the long stocking of iron-ridden America.

                            DIVISION SECOND.

COTTON MIXED. JANUARY 1,1862, TO JANUARY 1,1864.

The Road to Peace.—Distance thither illustrated.—What certain Knights
  might have learned.—The Difficulties created by losing Battles in
  Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, and Arkansas detailed.—What Grant,
  Thomas, Curtis, and others did; and what Crittenden, Zollicoffer, etc,
  had done unto them.—Whistling in the Woods.—Wonderful Story-telling
  Powers of J. Davis.—How he repeated Tales with charming Variation.—A
  Sea Story in which Iron enters.—Farragut and Porter up the
  Mississippi.—Received at New Orleans with Illuminations and
  Bonfires.—Butler deals with effervescing Materials.—The Peninsular
  Campaign traced.—Spading and Fighting.—The Glories and Disasters of
  the Army of the Potomac.—The American Pope fallible.—Lee’s Trip into
  Maryland.—Accidents at South Mountain and Antietam.—Difficult
  Questions besiege Mr. Lincoln in Washington.—His New-Year’s Gift to
  the Slaves.—Getting rich on Paper.—Cotton mixed.—A Depraved
  Currency.—Hooker gets at Lee’s Rear at Chancellorsville.—What
  followed.—Lee at Gettysburg; gets the Advertising its Springs
  want.—The Sorrows of Vicksburg, July 4,1863.—The Mississippi
  open.—Mortar-boat Building.—Valor of Colored Regiments at Charleston;
  and of discolored Irish in New York.—Contrasts.—Grant Transfigured at
  Missionary Ridge and Look-Out Mountain without Bragging of it.

“How far is it, my boy, by this road to Drainsville?” asked a
mud-spattered traveller of a shrewd lad by the roadside. “If you keep on
the way that you are heading,” replied the boy, “and can manage the
Atlantic and Pacific on horseback, it is 23,999 miles; if you turn your
horse’s head and go right back it is one mile.”

Such were the comparative distances which the Equestrian Knights of the
Woolly Order—had they inquired on New-Year’s morning, 1862—would have
found parted them from that desirable end of their weary journey, the
pleasant village of Peace. Looking, however, only at the delusive
finger-boards which cottonized brains had set up along that way; singing
jaunty songs of Southern superiority and Northern low-down manners; and
listening to a confused distant cheer, occasionally borne to them by
certain winds out of the North and by easterly breezes from Europe, they
rode on, fancying that they would soon dismount at their journey’s end,
give their splashed animals into the accustomed charge of the old
faithful, colored ostlers, and set down to the old dishes of glorious
hominy and glorifying homily. Instead, however, of this experience, they
met interminable difficulties,—Generals Crittenden and Zollicoffer,
jostled out of saddle by General Thomas at Mill Spring, and floundering
badly through Kentucky into Tennessee; another set captured at and with
Fort Henry, February 6th, by Flag-Officer Foote, whose flotilla kept on,
as if little conscious of its impertinent doings, up the Tennessee River
as far as Florence, with encouraging shouts from loyal throats on either
bank; Fort Donelson so surrendered to the silent-lipped Grant, February
16th, and its twelve thousand men and forty pieces of cannon so
thoroughly taken up by him as to furnish no stopping-place for the tired
party; Missouri, constipated under the empiric treatment of Van Dorn and
Price, and evacuated under the drastic prescriptions of General Curtis,
too weak to entertain the travellers; Pea Ridge, Arkansas, so shelled
out by the Union pickers March 6, 7, and 8, 1862, that Ben McCullough
and numerous rangers had gone into dead silences when called upon for
help; New Madrid given up with six thousand butternut-colored troops to
the constraining faith in the American Pope; Shiloh delivered in April
to the armed Emanuel of Union expectations; Island Number Ten, in the
Mississippi, with its seven thousand hosts and vast supplies, taken
possession of April 7th, so as to afford no shelter to the equestrians;
the restoration of all Kentucky and Tennessee back into the soft bands
of the Union; the destruction of the Confederate flotilla in Albemarle
Sound, and the taking of Roanoke Island, Forts Macon and Pulaski,—these
unexpected incidents, as they advanced on the long trip, were rude
shocks to the sight, the comfort, and the spirits of the hard-whistling
equestrians. Whistle however they did and must, to keep up their courage
through the gloomy woods, while to stimulate the flagging tempers of
some of the riders, the leading horseman, Davis, told them in a high
voice—loud enough to be heard all over Europe—some very exciting stories
about Northern atrocities, made-up tales that beat everything in the way
of romance since the Scottish Chiefs and Thaddeus of Warsaw. These
stories always seemed to entertain the hard-travelling party, who
frequently called upon him to repeat them, which he did with some
charmingly horrible variations.

Suddenly, however, on the 8th of March, a novel sight greeted the eyes
of all in Hampton Roads. The steam-frigate Merrimac, raised from her
salty bed near Portsmouth, receiving a new coat of mail, an ugly looking
iron rhinoceros-shaped snout, and the soft, new pet name of Virginia,
rolled out in ungainly strength into the wide bay; and commenced goring
the Federal herd of wooden frigates, fatally ripping up the Cumberland
and Congress, and cruelly gashing the St. Lawrence and Roanoke. Unhurt
herself, her scaly armor undented, she slunk back gorged to her lair,
prepared for a more savage repast on the rest of the frightened gunboats
and ships on the following morning; when lo! on the morrow, tumbling out
for her cruel pastime, she met the little, pert, saucy Monitor, one
fifth her size only, and also clothed in steel, which stepped up close
by her side and delivered two unexpected, round messages, each weighing
one hundred and sixty-eight pounds. Indignant at this interference with
her intended lunch, the masculine Virginia commenced flinging iron bolts
and round indignities, but the pert little thing hurled heavier blows
back. The Virginia then punched her five times with her indignant snout;
but the wee one only laughed at her impotent raillery, and pitched back
at her such crashing logic, that she rolled back again with her maw
wholly unsated. On the part of the Monitor it was a Word-en-a blow. The
well-hammered arguments, taught by the new system of military logic,
carried alarming weight wherever maritime questions are chopped.

  THE CORONER’S INQUEST.
  (p. 500)
]

Farragut and Porter soon after got up a yachting party, consisting of
forty-five vessels, to cruise through the Gulf and up to New Orleans.
Forty miles up from the river’s mouth they encountered Forts Philip and
Jackson, great chains, anchored hulks, and batteries, from which came
very loud talk, and earnest protestations against any farther proceeding
on the part of the yachtsmen. At length, however, by cutting the chain,
the entire party, except two, pushed through in a terrible iron
hail-storm, and reached the Crescent City, where they were received with
terrific demonstrations, bonfires of fifteen thousand bales of cotton,
illuminated blockade-runners, shipping, sugar, turpentine, molasses, and
other loose-lying combustibles.

Such an incendiary place had to be well secured; and on the 1st of May
it was put into the firm charge of the Union Butler, who occasionally
uncorked its riotous effervescence, and bottled up some of the more
fermenting qualities.

Meanwhile the long waiting public called for the fine drilling party in
front of Washington, numbering nearly two hundred thousand, faithfully
schooled for eight months, to take the intensely desired trip to
Richmond. Early in April, headed by General McClellan, it reached the
old Revolutionary camping-ground at Yorktown. Although, in fact, only
five thousand Confederates were stationed there, the Federal leader
suspected traps ahead, and so went for a month to vigorous spading,
road-making, and mining, resuming in this way his early occupations and
tastes. These gratified, and no traps found, the army began on the 3d of
May to move towards the Chickahominy,—a sluggish, soupy stream,
thickened by swamp muds and miasma,—which was reached May 20th and
crossed. There was now more spading, and in sight of the Richmond
spires.

For six weeks, alas! the spade was busy, not for the living only,
through this Golgotha of the war; for now commenced a series of
death-dealing combats seldom equalled in our well-mounded planet: May
27th the battle of Hanover Court-House, the Confederates losing;
followed by four days of severe skirmishes; succeeded by the gigantic
struggle of forty-eight unceasing hours of death-heaping on both sides,
at Fair Oaks Station, between the corps of Sumner, Heintzelman, Kearny,
and Hooker, on one side, and Joseph E. Johnston, the Confederate
commander, Longstreet, and the two Hills, on the other; then three weeks
of intrenching, sickness, and decimation; and then on the 25th of June,
the retreat to the James, crowded with six days of ceaseless combats,
embroidering in gloriously ensanguined characters on the shredding flag
of the Potomac the well-fought but disastrous battles of Mechanicsville,
Gaines’s Mills, Savage’s Station, White-Oak Swamp, and Malvern Hill, in
which fifteen thousand Union lives were spent.

General Lee was placed in command of the Confederates in the place of
General Johnston, wounded at Fair Oaks; and General Halleck displaced
General McClellan, wounded before he left Washington in his military
reputation, and, though unhurt bodily, more severely injured by his
Peninsular campaign.

General Pope was assigned to the head of the Army of the Potomac, but
showed in fifteen days of fighting along the Rappahannock that, like
another Pope on the Tiber, he was not at all infallible.

In September General Lee took a trip into Maryland, which he hoped to
extend to Philadelphia. He was, however, followed by General McClellan,
reinstated to the leadership of his old army. Their meetings at South
Mountain and Antietam swept thirty thousand Confederates under ground or
into hospitals, largely counterbalancing the Peninsular losses.

Cotton had become very mixed, and its skeins tangled and knotted.

Difficult and dark questions now travelled to Washington, and closely
besieged Mr. Lincoln. Calmly, patiently, and good-humoredly he sat down
with them in a conference to which his own good sense and large-hearted
wisdom were invited. The result was that on New-Year’s day, 1863, free
papers were plumped into the lean, slave stockings throughout all the
somehow seceded States.

During this period history and paper money were both made in large
quantities; and the paper business became very lucrative. We were
getting rich very fast after the European fashion. In the midst of the
armed clash, however, a very Pacific act was committed,—the passage in
July, 1862, of the Pacific Railroad charter, which gave one hundred
millions of reasons why the Union could not be broken. So far from
giving up the South, Congress provided for making Japan and China
American dependencies; reaching out with steel fingers for their teas,
silks, and almond-eyed live productions.

The year 1863 dawned cheerfully upon the hitherto sombre whites North,
as well as upon the more sombre sable loyalists at the South. Blockades
on the coast, a currency as depraved as Breckenridge; railroads
undulating as saws, over which phthisicy engines groaned, as they drew
the ever-lessening transportation; and a population rapidly sieved by
repeated drafts, signalled the ravages to which the Confederacy was
subjected, and its lessening means constantly clipped and pared away.
The curious stories of Mr. Davis had neither wrought a faith beyond his
own equestrian escort, nor drawn any recognition from foreign
spectators.

Little was done through the winter in the field.

Early in May, General Hooker, successor to Burnside, and the fifth
leader of the Potomac Army, having gained Lee’s rear at
Chancellorsville, kicked it severely for three hot days; but was in turn
kicked roundly. Each army lost about sixteen thousand men,—losses which,
if united, would equal the entire number of the American troops engaged
in the four principal battles of the Revolution,—Bunker Hill, Princeton,
Saratoga, and Yorktown. While this prolonged fight was going forward,
Stoneman and Kilpatrick showed some astounding feats of horsemanship, in
swinging around Fredericksburg and Richmond; cutting the Confederate
lines with such nimble swords that it delighted an enthusiastic
audience.

In June, Lee, masking large designs on Washington, Baltimore, and
Philadelphia, crossed the Potomac and showed his own face with uncounted
others at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania, where, for the first three days in
July, he was so handled by Meade, that he left 30,000 dead and wounded,
14,000 prisoners, and 27,000 stand of arms, to add attractions, that
need no special advertising to Springs that receive so much.

The next day, July 4, Vicksburg, fruitlessly assailed during 1862, and
beleaguered from May 4, 1863, by the reticent, self-contained,
ever-pounding, never-compounding Grant,—who had inextricably tangled it
by parallels and lines unparalleled,—surrendered its army of 30,000 men,
70,000 small arms, 200 cannon, without reckoning those dangerous
edge-tools, for the use of which its desperate gamblers had so long been
famous. Fortunately the surrender came too late to be abused by the
orators of that patient and long-suffering day.

The Mississippi River once more bore all its pipes in peace. The
mortar-boat masons, clearing away the ruins which the strikers had
caused, had prepared anew the foundations for the prosperity of that
noble valley, whose exuberant wealth is hereafter to be rolled adown it
by unshackled hands.

While the troops were absent from New York, repelling Lee’s invasion of
Pennsylvania, and the black regiments before Charleston were assisting
Gilmore to execute the stern Federal judgment upon that place, the
anti-war Irish in New York, largely left away from the front by their
own consent, gained the peaceful rear of the native-born colored men,
women, and children of that city, and took a safe hand in the only kind
of contest which they coveted. The valor which for three days they
displayed, in destroying property wholly unowned, of course, by
themselves, in chasing and hanging colored people, and in robbing all
who had watches or purses to furnish lines for their avaricious bravery
to attack, was, by a few, almost as much admired as the heroic courage
of the regiments before Charleston.

At Chattanooga, Grant, in the latter part of November, by a
heaven-touching struggle of three days, drove away the Confederate
forces out of the cloud-hidden heights of Missionary Ridge and Lookout
Mountain. From this Tabor he himself came down, but not to Bragg of the
transfiguration there.

All now admitted that cotton was very mixed and seedy.

                            DIVISION THIRD.

          COTTON WORSTED. JANUARY 1, 1864, TO APRIL 14, 1865.

What the Confederate Stool—not of Repentance, but of Mars—stood on, and
  how braced and steadied.—The Daisies and Corn-blooms beneath it.—The
  broken Industries, harried Life, and disrupted Ties of Unionists in
  the Border States.—Tragedies.—Grant Commander-in-Chief.—His Plan to
  break up the Nightmare.—Work ahead.—Jubal E. Early and his Raids.—The
  Year of Jubal E.—Sherman at Atlanta.—The Southern Knob seized, and the
  main Door burst open.—An unprotecting Hood; how it was pounded and
  cleft.—Sherman’s Swath through Georgia.—A Christmas Gift to Mr.
  Lincoln of a Sheaf.—The Scorpion Alabama; its Hatching out; its slimy,
  wriggling Course, and sulphureous End.—The Iron Jaws of Mobile pried
  open, and its Teeth drawn.—Autumn brands at the North.—Tokens of the
  coming Fall.—Andrew Johnson and the Goose.—Grant breaks Things at
  Petersburg and disturbs J. Davis in Church at Richmond.—Flight of the
  Latter with corruptible Treasures.—Negro Troops enter Richmond.—Light
  Suggestions thereupon.—A Meeting at Appomattox Court-House.—Leaving
  bloody Instructions, Lee goes to College.—J. Davis in Court and his
  Sentence.—A Thunder-Clap and its Victim.—Death of Abraham Lincoln.

The Confederate stool—not of repentance, but the iron stool of grim
Mars—now stood on three legs. One rested on Southern Arkansas, braced by
some eighty thousand regular soldiers; one on Georgia, propped by
General Johnston and a large force, drawing their supplies from the
corn-cribs of that empire State of the South; and the third and
strongest, planted on the Rapidan, and steadied up by the well-sinewed
arm of General Lee. Between these rude legs, however, were springing
already along the furrows made by the ploughshare of strife the
sweet-eyed daisies. Corn gathered its golden blooms out of the dreadful
phosphates which had been strewn over so many fields.

Yet while nature’s healings were already anointing the ragged wounds of
incisive war, over other and wide districts came ills which almost
defied the bungling surgeries and irregular apothecary appliances that
were wasted upon or unwisely aggravated them. In these districts
predatory bands hovered over and constantly lit upon disorganized and
broken industries, as crows cawingly follow a disrupted herd of
buffaloes or swoop upon the wounded which fall out of the straggling
march. The harryings of cattle; the plunder of farmsteads, of
bean-patches,—nursed by the patient labor of suddenly made widows,—and
even of houses seemingly secure from their proximity to villages;
wayside murders from concealed coverts; midnight shots at men asleep in
bed, or treacherously called out on pretended errands of charity, and
hewn down, frayed and fretted the lives of those who still clung to the
Union throughout the Border States. There were daily tragedies, sadder
than the tinselled shows of the stage. There were masqueraders who
danced through desultory cruelties at which even the readers of novels,
languid over ordinary stories, enkindle into activity and excitement,
and family feuds encrimsoning their way into living sorrows and
eventually into tales, which in mercy we call fictions.

The winter and spring of 1864 pendulated with balanced successes and
reverses to either combatant.

In March, General Grant was made Commander-in-Chief, and immediately set
on foot a plan to wake up the uneasy sleeper and free him from the
nightmare. This plan was to start simultaneously, and to keep in motion,
the various corps of the Federal army; Sherman’s one hundred thousand at
Chattanooga against Johnston’s army in Georgia; Banks’s and Farragut’s
in conjunction against Mobile; and Grant himself, united with Meade,
against Lee and Richmond: thus shredding, at the same time, the still
suspended cotton curtain, and preventing its busy stitchers at one point
from assisting those making repairs at another. Meade crossed the
Rapidan, May 4th, and advanced towards Richmond, giving Lee a very
lively hunt through the Wilderness for a month, and at length driving
him over the soupy and astonished Chickahominy. At the same time Grant,
holding his spirited team well in hand, drove up also towards the
Confederate capital, until he halted on the south side of the James.

Soon after, in order to divert attention from that long-coveted spot,
Richmond, General Jubal E. Early made into Maryland a raid, which he
repeated in July, but from which he was sent whirling back into the
Shenandoah valley. He renewed his experiments again in September and
October, but was finally chased out by Sheridan and his centaurs, who
seemed to mount the wind, and, on their rapid and supperless rides to
live off condensed night air.

Along the hyperborean lines rang the warning after the discomfited
Confederate:—

                  “The year of Jubal E. is come,
                  Return, ye wandering sinners, home.”

In the Southeast, Sherman, flanking Johnston at Dalton in Georgia,
forced him through May and June southwards, delivering battles and
defeats,—which were not ordered,—at Resaca, Dallas, Pine Lost, and
Kenesaw Mountains, until at last he shoved him behind the great southern
knob, Atlanta, whose converging iron lines held the main door of the
Lower Confederacy. Here Johnston disappeared, and the Confederate powers
put a Hood over the head of the assailed Southeast; but all in vain.
Sherman, pounding about the iron-covered Hood with heavy blows through
July and August, cleft the head-piece in two; and on the 2d of September
cast him out, and, seizing the great iron knob, opened wide the door.

On the 15th of November Sherman advanced through Georgia to the sea,
taking a swath sixty miles wide, rolling up winrows at Milledgeville,
cutting down thistles, burdocks, and noxious weeds with his well-whetted
scythe, until, on the 21st of December, he reached the farther side of
his great hay-field at Savannah. Gathering its crop into one bundle, he
despatched it to Mr. Lincoln with this epistle: “I beg to present you,
as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty
guns, plenty of ammunition, and also about twenty-five thousand bales of
cotton.” Truly cotton now had become very worsted.

In June, that British scorpion, the Alabama,—which had been hatched out
at Liverpool in the spring and summer of 1862, while the British
telescope was steadily turned in another direction, and which for two
years had left its red slime all over the seas, stinging to death, as it
wriggled in its venomous course, sixty-four peaceful American
vessels,—was, by a single blow from the Kearsarge, sent to a sulphureous
grave in the Channel which washed its birthplace. Diplomatic naturalists
have ever since been disputing over the species and quality of this
reptile; while all agree, that, whether warm blooded or cold, it is not
desirable that its kind be perpetuated. Its poisonous carcass is still
coiled in offensive knots around the international diplomatic
lattice-work of the two nations.

During August, Admiral Farragut pried open the iron-set jaws of Mobile
Harbor, drawing its teeth,—Forts Morgan, Gaines, and Powell,—real molars
as they were, producing spasms which threatened lockjaw to the obstinate
patient.

While the red autumn leaves were falling through the North, Confederate
brands were whirled, some out of Canada, others from Northern cities,
upon the bank of St. Alban’s, in Vermont, on warehouses in Buffalo,
Detroit, and New York, on hotels in Cleveland, and on steamboats on the
Lakes. The real sap in the Davis tree was now running down, and the top
branches were shedding their crimson colors earthward.

While these paling evidences of the fall were multiplying, Mr. Lincoln
was re-elected President, by two hundred and twelve votes out of two
hundred and thirty-three. Andrew Johnson, then fifty-six years old, who
had both early and late in life handled the goose,—the one kind as
acceptably as the other,—and had been himself cruelly plucked through
the war by the masked plunderers in Tennessee, was placed in the easy
nest of the Vice-Presidency. His first getting in was so awkward, that
it was manifest something had turned his head.

Sherman, taking breath at Savannah, again swung his effective scythe
through the thin crop, lying between that city and Charleston, which was
cut down, like a rank burdock, February 18, 1865. Then turning
northwards, he gathered in Columbia, the capital of South Carolina;
turned up to the sunlight dank villages, all unused to Northern
implements,—cheered as he went by sable faces,—until at last he halted
at Fayetteville, March 11, 1865, to take a hearty shake of the hand with
his fellow-mowers, General Terry and Admiral Porter. From Wilmington, he
again whetted up his keen blade and cleared the Southern field.
Johnston, Beauregard, Bragg, and Hardee manifested a disposition to stop
him at Bentonville; but a blow sent them reeling from his path, and he
went vigorously forward, garnering blessed harvests for his country and
himself.

  COTTON DOWN.
  (p. 512)
]

Meanwhile Grant, through the autumn of 1864, was encompassing Petersburg
and drawing zigzag lines around it, that were too much like the short
epistles that creditors send to unwilling debtors, to be agreeable. The
autumn leaves here fell on busy workers; and among the busiest, the
Silent Man, who was casting up long accounts in his head, which only
opened to let out smoke. In him, however, there was much fire, American
and Greek.

On the 24th of March, the Silent Man issued an order for a centripetal
movement on Richmond. Lee, in every way tried to break the converging
fate. Along the Appomattox River, at Fort Stedman, and at every
weak-looking place, he hurled himself against the links of a chain, now
slowly drawing around him; but all to no purpose. On the 2d of April
Grant broke through Lee’s intrenched lines about Petersburg; and Lee at
once disturbed J. Davis, although at church in Richmond, by a sudden
notice that Petersburg and Richmond were insecure places, and that he
must flee to other refuges, than his old ones. Neither sitting nor lying
would now do; and accordingly the head of the Confederacy took to his
feet, and fled with the few depraved treasures which had not gone
already to corruption. Hurrying through Richmond, he got away as fast as
a very un-express train would carry him, over railroads hacked by
Sheridan, Stoneman, and Grierson. The next morning General Weitzel
entered the capital of the dissolving Confederacy—so long held by brave
men—with a body of colored troops,—representatives of that fate which
four years before had been ignorantly invoked, and now rapidly
fulfilling,—representatives, too, of those one hundred and eighty
thousand others, with skins colored like their own, who had given
themselves to the service of a Union, whose stripes they had often felt,
and whose stars for them had just peeped above the eastern hills and
were beginning to sing for joy.

Lee at once commenced a retreat towards the Southwest, hoping to unite
his broken forces with Johnston, who, however, was too actively taken up
by Sherman to reciprocate his intentions. At Amelia Court-House Sheridan
and his centaurs suddenly appeared before the astonished Confederates on
the 6th of April, and cut seven thousand away from them. The remainder
General Lee dragged forward to Appomattox Court-House, and there
delivered them over to the generous justice of his brother-in-arms, the
silent-lipped, whose magnanimity was a fit type of the large forbearance
of a country, which, wronged by a causeless war,—generated for ends that
in other lands would have brought its authors to the place where all
ropes terminate,—has to look back on no crosses, but for itself.

A really fine character, a great strategist, and personally brave man,
the chief of the Confederate Army, who had delivered such “bloody
instructions” to the fathers, became the head of a college, and deals
out, it is to be hoped, better lessons to the sons.

This surrender was followed, on the 26th of April by that of Johnston;
on the 4th of May, by the remaining Confederate forces under General
Dick Taylor; by the miscellaneous taking of Mobile, Selma, Tuscaloosa,
and Montgomery, and the unfortunate capture of Mr. J. Davis, whose lean
head—made valuable to his captors by a useless expense to the
treasury—was, at an additional expense, taken several times to Richmond,
and shown to the court in satisfaction of his bail bond, and at last
dismissed—to the gibbet of history.

The black cloud, charged with such thunderous bolts, had dissolved, and
the blue sky was showing through the rifted masses, when a sudden clap,
a hissing sound, a sharp wrenching cry, and there lay the straightened
form of Abraham Lincoln.

The victories which he had helped to organize were forgotten; cotton
worsted was unheeded; even the terrible struggles with the long,
wrestling nightmare, were all lost sight of in the grief for the Great
and the Good, whose patriotism had warmed, whose integrity had
strengthened, and whose genial humor had kept warm and mellow, the heart
and hope of a brave and self-sacrificing nation through the contest just
closed,—closed to open upon questions which had need, too, of a Solomon
rather than a Jeroboam.

                              CHAPTER XX.

                              VELOCIPEDAL.

How mixed Blood effervesces.—Of the Causes and Developments of
  American Fastness.—Unrest in Prisons and at Home.—Time lost in
  Sleep, etc.—The distressing Hurry of Brains.—Compressing a Cow in
  a Milk-Pot.—Of Doctors’ Gigs and Apoplectic Whirligigs.—American
  Stomachs considered.—A general Stomach; how employed and hired
  out.—Doctors’ Bills.—Clothes Wringers and State Wringers.—“Speedy
  Trials” secured.—The Common and Un-common Law of the United States
  considered at length.—Of Dower, and how taken.—Property
  administered before Death.—Heirs cheated.—Injunctions
  used.—Illinois Divorces.—Of Prohibited Degrees of Marriage.—Of Fat
  People and Servants.—Boarding-Houses and Hotels.—American Trade
  and its Feats at diminishing Quantities.—Fast Americans in
  Europe.—How they overcome Distances, History, and Landlords.—The
  Paris _Genus_.

If “in the midst of life we are in debt,” so in the midst of debt
Americans are always lively. Mixed blood seems to discharge rapidly its
effervescing ingredients.

Fastness, except in the colors of our cheeks and chintzes and in the
movement of our mails, works its curious ways through all manifestations
of American civilization. Over a small, old, long-cultivated territory,
like most of the European, life moves respectably slow, careful of its
savings, gathered up by centuries of work and put out at low rates of
interest; across continental stretches like ours, sweeping in wide
districts and materials of unbundled, aching plenty, it hastens with
panting speed, and can afford to lose everything except time. Our great
areas, therefore, make us lively, their vast opportunities, restless,
wide-talking, and manifesting the generous coarseness of a large-grained
breadth. Out of these alone would come marked characteristics; but when
these are further quickened by accelerating activities of discovery in
all departments, and by mechanical inventions of vast power in
translating man and his products over the earth, the result is rapid
brain-work, stimulating action, quick combinations, eruptive and
vivacious speech.

M. Varet, a French savan, has ascertained that a fly caught by him in
France made three hundred and thirty movements of his wings in a second.
This is rapid work; but a Wall Street bull will toss his horns twice as
fast.

The larger trains of thought thus started will run of themselves with
time-table exactness. We shall only accompany a few special excursion
ideas a short distance from the main depot.

An impatient unrest under discipline and restrictions, while kept below
fever heat by the wet bandages of a self-imposed law, makes jails double
punishments for American criminals, and homes often houses for the
detention of juveniles under sixteen. Confinements, except to a small
class of our married population, is an abridgment of enterprising work,
which, if continued beyond a natural law that prescribes sleep to all
and a longer period of inactivity to the special class just named, would
be a grievance, calling at least for a convention, addresses, and
agitation to get rid of.

The distress of hurry which vexes the _vis inertiæ_ out of our brains,
stirs our intellectual pans continually, so that we do not always get
the natural cream of ideas. An American is always working for condensed
milk processes; to compress a cow into a milk-pot, or utilize all the
herds in his neighborhood on his breakfast-table, in a way unheard of
elsewhere. Of course this wide-reaching hurry, which grasps large
results and scorns the domestic economies, that occupy the thoughts of
people elsewhere, refuses to be concerned for any length of time with
the importunities of suffering stomachs.

American stomachs have not time enough to wait on nature. Hence doctors’
gigs and apoplectic whirligigs. A patent stomach that should grind grist
for a neighborhood or village, and leave the unstomached worker to avail
himself of his accelerating opportunities, would command a high price.
It would be hired out around the neighborhood, like a threshing-machine
or corn-sheller. In fact, American households might in general be
advantageously grouped around or framed into one of these mechanical
digesters, with attachments for washing out, ironing, and starching
their clothes, and for doing up the wasteful processes of visiting, to
economic advantages that would tell on the census. One of the
disadvantages would be the discouragement of that branch of American
industry, now so largely prosperous, of doctors’ bills, chasing in vain
after many of the living and at last only overtaking the administrator
of the estate, clean out of breath.

Of course, the benefits of associated wealth and skill have not been
overlooked as levers to move enterprises, people’s purses, and sometimes
those low-down, coarse adjectives, volcanic in their origin, which, in
case of dissatisfaction, erupt over the surface. Universal
clothes-wringers are the product of this observation. So other
combinations have been and are rapidly forming to wring money out of
city, State, and Federal exchequers. It is curious to see how the
handles of these joint pumping and pocket-exhausting companies all lie
towards the great cities.

Most of the business in the United States, north of Washington, is
carried on after an express and accelerated fashion, which is impatient
of holidays, and rides over the Fourth of July even, as ruthlessly as an
express-train over the human obstruction which thus gets forwarded on
his journey out of the United States with a despatch almost enviable to
the survivors. Even the Federal Constitution prescribes “speedy trials”
as a right, and treats a man as injured who does not go it in a capital
way, when on that precipitous road, with a final rush.

The common law of the United States presumes that all are minute-men,
and know the quick step; while the uncommon law in Wyoming, Idaho,
Nevada, and Colorado dispenses with the tedious confinement between the
apprehension of the accused and his transporting sentence and uprising.
“Delays are dangerous,” is their condensed code.

  MEMBERS OF CONGRESS IN A. D. 1900.
  (p. 520)
]

The law of dower, as practically enforced, is shaped by the same rapidly
revolving lathe, which makes so much of our domestic hollow-ware. The
wife spends the principal before her husband’s death, and thus shuns the
tedious complications of legal proceedings, which admeasures the dower
often to the enterpising lawyer, the bailiffs, and the court clerks.

A marked improvement has also been made in the distribution of estates
generally. Among the slow nations of Europe the children generally wait
for the unfortunate old people to die before taking their property. This
tardy habit is now found to be often productive of great injury to
children, especially to those who, snatched away by rapid manners before
their begettors, are thus defrauded of their shares. “A bird in the
hand” is no longer a _rara avis_, but a domestic fowl cultivated by
rapid feeding. Gifts to the living avoid the taxes and discomforts of
probate courts, in which it is disagreeable for a family, covered with
crape, to sit and see a politician assess the estate upon the heirs.

Fast progress has been made, also, in preventive justice. Injunctions,
behind whose shields such old fogies as Lord Eldon, Lord Somers, Lord
Thurlow, John Marshall, or William Story were accustomed to hide
threatened rights until the danger was over-past, have recently been
turned edgewise, and cut down corporations and others obnoxious
Fisc-ally or otherwise, or else pressed against them so that they
perspired away their adipose stock until they were comfortably ready for
a receiver.

The doctrine of divorce, which has puzzled the learned John Miltons in
all the sleepy ages that have dozed before us, has been, in many States,
simplified, so that he who runs through them may read a decree. Some
people have uncharitably supposed that the premiums offered to
individual disunions by such States as Illinois and Indiana, were
devices to draw speculators thither for a day or so; but these are
vagrant suspicions that ought not to be allowed on our trains.

In feudal countries, where purity of blood is carefully
guarded,—inasmuch as the descents to property are the rule and not
descents from it as in America,—legists declare that a woman may not
marry her cousin, her uncle, her grandfather, or even her father,—a wise
enough restriction, perhaps, for such benighted folks, and where care in
marrying often leaves the female part of the household to the dangerous
company of these relations until far on in life. But with us women are
not shut up to any such necessities, except in Utah, where they may, in
the course of a respectably long life, marry through every genealogical
degree without knowing it. In other parts they are as necessary as
insurance companies, and so marry very soon; so that silver weddings are
often seen at an early age, while golden matrimonies are more frequent
than maternities or patrimonies. To every thoughtful man, who moves
about our rapidly dissolving surfaces, where the railroad car is the
kaleidoscope which turns up the bits of humanity in new combinations, a
wife is necessary to put up a monument over him; for moving on is such a
fixed law,—the only fixed thing in America, except debt and live
corruption,—that while he was turning his majority, all his family
relations would have gone to other States.

The two curiosities in the United States are fat people and servants.
Both run away in a velocipedal hurry; the former into sharp bargains,
and the latter into independent powers which dictate treaties and make
alliances like other self-governing communities. An American family is
like a South Carolina regiment, all officers and no privates; a
boarding-house, a Swiss confederacy, in which the cantons, wedged into
neutralizing elements, get forward like a stool braced every-way and
equipoised into an aching discomfort; and a hotel, like twenty German
_Bunds_ entangled by contrarious independent interests that knot
themselves into teasing discontents, and fret into jars which hold a
variety of unpreserved, acidulating fruits. The freest joke in all
America is one of its large hotels, which fancies Axminster carpets and
chandeliers in a large parlor, and numerous discomforts packed in
ever-dwindling rooms, to be happiness. But then the “gentlemanly
proprietor” makes up for all this in the bills, which convince all the
guests, that they must have enjoyed themselves and at an American rate
of speed.

Trade has also had its great advances, not only in the figures which
stand in merchants’ magazines like pyramids, with bases always widening
downwards, but in the dwindling measures, quarts, gallons, pecks, and
bushels, and the waning qualities which sharpen upwards to steady
apexes. How to make up in the bill what is taken from the body is a
critical study, in which most tradesmen have, without any prizes offered
by outsiders, become great proficients. If that man is a public
benefactor who makes two blades grow in the place of one, surely he may
be rewarded with a passing notice, who takes all the steel out of the
one sent to him for repairs, and then divides up the instrument into
several blades. Making water into wine, chalk into milk, chemicals into
as many varieties of drinkables as there are days of the year, and
diluting articles deemed too strong when left to their raw native vigor,
so as to adapt them to our weakened constitutions, attest the beneficent
designs of manufacturers and merchants upon Americans of plethoric
habits. Peabodies shelling out to poorbodies furnish examples of
abundant charity not so widely touching as these.

To make a small measure go twice as far as a large one is more than a
feat; it approaches creation. What may in time be considered a double
bed, it is impossible yet to foresee; but certain it is, that while
single beds are increasing to an alarmingly wide extent, their
narrowness is becoming such as to require a new definition of a line to
avoid disagreeable collisions.

Mercantile failures, elsewhere hurtful, are with us hurried on into
vivacious benefits, dividing up, before the expiration of the credits
given, the accumulated profits which otherwise might accumulate in
stagnating dulness in the firm. A steady increase of wages is solving,
too, those perplexing theories how to balance capital and labor; a
weekly distribution of earnings keeping down injudicious balances in the
bank.

The frequent jumps of men from low places into high ones, with a
celerity very pleasing to their families and often to their creditors,
show that the world is governed too much; for acting on this
Jeffersonian maxim, most of these ready leapers leave off the governing
part and expend their activities in securing, along with their weak
salaries, strong flying benefits, which only light on the vigilant.

While the velocipedal ways of Americans thus cut across their own
country, it is in foreign fields that they are most striking and
cutting. Crossing the well-worn paths of Europe, scattering high-premium
gold on those jolly fellows, landlords and waiters, they ridge its old
historic surfaces with little histories which the facetious persons, who
catch sight of them as they whiz through histories, which they leave
grandly behind them and all unknown, retail with as much glee, as the
travellers themselves once did saleratus, fine-cut nails, or bobinet.
Their scant intellectual stores and unfurnished stock of knowledge, so
far from embarrassing, only enable them to spin on faster. Mythology,
paintings, biographies, architecture, are soon wound up on their clean
spindles.

Another class, like aeronautic vessels, have gaseous heads and heavy
undergearing, which enable them to run over and run down everything
abroad by swift-moving slangs. They always float by the bad air of their
own heads, and are apt to anchor in vicious soils. These they can-can.
The spent money surprises the hotel squeezers; the spent morals astonish
themselves by the ease with which they lose their little all.

But of all the fast classes in America, that is the most velocipedal
which, having expressed themselves through the modish follies of the
largest American cities, are transported to the stronger vices of Paris.
Tired of tapping the younger trees of American growth, they spend the
rest of their precious lives in pecking assiduously the rotten parts of
foreign woods, content with the phosphoric slime of decay and dissolving
maturities.

                              CHAPTER XXI.

       PUZZLES AND CROSS-READINGS; OR, JOHNSON’S ENTERTAINMENTS.

                   APRIL 14, 1865, TO MARCH 4, 1869.

Puzzles about Hemp and Paper.—Weak Brains at rest.—The Return of the
  Holders of Sabres and Guns.—Our Dead.—Fighters become Workers.—A
  Modern Sisyphus rolls a Stone up Hill.—How it rolled back.—The
  Interpretation by Congress of its own Rights.—Southern Delegates
  declined.—Puzzles solved.—Vetoing made easy.—The New Orleans
  Riots.—The Zigzag Journey of the President to the Tomb of Douglas.—The
  Fenian Republic in Union Square.—The Sham-rock compared with other
  Rocks.—The French Moths in Mexico; and how they were singed.—Amnesties
  and Pardons.—Scripture outdone.—Forgiveness forced upon the
  Unrepenting.—Results of Congressional Reconstruction.—The President
  tried and one found wanting.—Value of one Vote.—Alaska and St.
  Thomas.—Chicago, unalarmed, goes on dis-pairing but not
  despairing.—The Narrow Escapes of New York.—Fiske-Ville.—Johnson gets
  Mudd out of the Dry Tortugas.

Where to find hemp enough to suspend those who had supported the
overwhelmed Confederacy was the first puzzle that presented itself to
the furious patriotism of the constitutional Substitute. This, however,
soon gave place to the still more difficult one, where to find paper
enough to pardon them.

Four of the assassins of the good man were effectively deprived of any
further earthly abuse of their weak brains, maudlin sentiments, and
passions; the others were sent between stone walls or to the dry sands
of the Tortugas.

The heroic holders of the sabre and musket,—their stern, sad work now
done, bore them back,—draped in sable for the comrades who slept in
trenched glory along the furrowed parallel, in the storm-swept field, or
on the banks of the Mississippi, the Chickahominy and James,—back to the
plough, to the workshop, to the peaceful businesses of life, to reunions
with those whose busy fingers and busier hearts had forwarded to them
love messages and mindful tokens while absent.

The army of fighters was disbanded into battalions of workers.

On the 29th of May the new President commenced the Sisyphus business of
Southern reconstruction; first rolling to the top of the hill the stone
of a provisional government for North Carolina, which, of course, rolled
back again, covered by the old shells of the Confederacy. By the middle
of July he had tugged up the same stone under different names, as
Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, Alabama, Florida, and South Carolina, only
to find it rolling down speedily, hurting the colored people and Union
whites, and creating a butternut-colored atmosphere all around it. The
entertainment was too often repeated to be jocose, except to Mr.
Johnson, who believed in a detached idea industriously pursued. The
delegates to Congress under his scheme, who presented themselves at
Washington, in December, 1865, were found to be all of the saffron
complexion and hue. They had already forgotten that there had been any
war, and only remembered their ancient rights, and were ready to draw
back pay, or anything else back, except declarations of not having been
in the least wrong in the late little unpleasantness. Congress read
their own privileges, rights, and duties in quite a different way;
declared their exclusive right, as representatives of the people, to
deal with the new puzzles; passed the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill for the
protection of the colored property of the South, the Civil Rights Bill,
and the proposed Fourteenth Constitutional Amendment. While they
believed in the dead past burying its dead, they did not embrace the
idea of its burying the living with them.

Mr. Johnson now studied the Art of Vetoing Made Easy; and from his
cross-readings began to add immensely to the American official archives
by Xanthippe messages, whose unlovely words have greatly embossed the
rich cabinets of vituperative specimens, for a long time accumulating at
Washington.

  THE IRISH REPUBLIC IN AMERICA.
  (p. 529)
]

In July, 1866, a riot was created in New Orleans,—the counterpart of the
pat-riot disturbances in New York three years before,—in which
thirty-four loyal colored and three loyal colorless people were added to
the Crescent cemeteries. The citizens who had participated in the
bonfires and illuminations, on the arrival of Farragut and Porter in
1862 were mercifully spared. In August following, the acting President,
accompanied by Mr. Seward,—whose wonderful pen through the silent
diplomatic struggle abroad, which ran parallel with the armed strife at
home, cannot be alluded to with scant praise,—set out for Chicago, to
lay the corner-stone of a monument to the powerful dike-breaker. Never
was a journey so long. The road thither seemed to have got intoxicated
and reeled and tumbled all over the West; while the jerky speeches,
hiccuping along the wavy ways, endeavored in vain to catch up with and
to find the President.

This year was made memorable by the establishment of a wonderful
republic for Ireland in Union Square, New York, and the quiet election,
without any votes, of Mr. Roberts to be its head; an Irish invention,
for the easy solution of that perplexing question of how to get enough
votes, most praiseworthy. The novel mode of raising an army, and of
replenishing a treasury, whose invisible outflow was so steady and well
regulated that it never perplexed Wall Street, were admirable
illustrations of the good-nature of the friendly sons and daughters of
Saint Patrick.

The sham-rock, on which they touched poured out streams as abundant as
the rock which Moses struck. Indeed, it was almost as good a milch cow
as Plymouth Rock.

In February, 1867, the French moths,—hatched out in 1862 in a Napoleonic
fancy nest, and darting off into Mexico, through whose chronic flames
they played with the usual results,—were terribly scorched in a candle
sent out by Mr. Seward. The head moth, Maximilian, fascinated by the
gilt of an imperial candelabra, was so burnt, that he disappeared like
the vagaries of South American empire, which hovered on the wings of
that other Gallic moth, that now flits around the gas-jets of the
Tuileries.

Mr. Johnson’s amnesties and pardons are too numerous for anything but a
calculating-machine. He began May 29, 1865, and only ended March 4,
1869. Tired of cross-reading the Constitution, he betook himself to
Scripture, and, with his mode of interpretation, spelt out a duty to
forgive all of the unrepentant, including Mr. J. Davis, the prize-taking
Breckenridge, and other conspicuous sinners.

In spite of the semi-weekly vetoes, however, which obliged Congress to
pass all laws twice, it contrived to reconstruct all of the lately
disorganizing and disorganized States except Virginia, Mississippi, and
Texas. Some very poor Northern timber and unconstitutional braces were
wrought into the hastily constructed and urgently needed fabrics, which,
however, it is to be hoped, will be speedily removed. Angry with the
solution of the puzzles, the President attempted to read athwart the
Tenure of Office Act Mr. Stanton’s war duties, for which, March 5, 1869,
he was requested by the House of Representatives to appear before the
Senate and make answer. From March 29th to May 16th his trial lasted,
interflecked by some fine veins of forensic eloquence, and at last
bringing out the value of a single vote,—that which prevented
conviction,—for the benefit of future electoral harangues.

The restless, lever pen of Mr. Seward pried up new territory for the
screaming eagle to light upon,—the distant and hazy Alas-ka, rich in
ices and other cool reasons, and St. Thomas the Danish, whose abundant
lemons may, when well mixed, allay, without quenching, our thirst for
foreign drinks.

These speculations did not, it is needless to add, discourage Chicago.
Always dis-pairing individuals, she never despaired for herself. Her
courts granted four hundred and sixty-eight divorces during 1868; but
notwithstanding the untoward fact, her unchecked population sang on more
loudly consoling lullabies to her well-rocked and increasing cradles of
grain. Efforts were made the same year to annex New York to the Erie
Railway and to change its name to Fisk-ville. These efforts might have
succeeded, but that the attention of the leading proprietor was diverted
to the Pacific; and the motion for the expected change was postponed to
a later term of the Supremest Court in the city of New York.

The last feat of Mr. Johnson was to get Mudd out of the Dry Tortugas.

  GETTING MUDD OUT OF THE DRY TORTUGAS.
  (p. 533)
]

                             CHAPTER XXII.

   TAKEN FOR GRANTED; OR, WHAT IS EXPECTED OF GRANT AND THE AMERICAN
                                FUTURE.

                         MARCH 4, 1869, TO ——.

The supposed Difficulties of writing History in advance considered, and
  the Popular Delusions on the Subject disposed of.—Lively Expectations
  of what our future Presidents, Cabinet Members, Foreign Ministers,
  etc., etc., will be and do.—What Citizens will be exempt from
  Executing and Garroting the Laws.—The Public Debt to disappear.—The
  Ways considered.—Cut up into Dividends and no more heard of.—What is
  expected of Common Schools and Sunday Schools in improving Public Men
  and their Speeches.—Certain Occupations to be dispensed with.—The Uses
  to which their Pursuers are to be put.—Improvements in Judges,
  Injunctions, and Court-Houses.—Extension of Efforts of Society for
  preventing Cruelty to Animals, to Employers, etc.—Woman’s Rights
  discussed from various Aspects.—Men and Women equal,—especially
  Women.—How any Differences between them are to be disposed of.—How
  Children are to be utilized before they get to be Twenty-one and lose
  their Activities.—The new Arts and Sciences to be taught.—Secretary of
  the Treasury to regulate the Fashions, and how.—The President and
  Sunday Schools.—All Mining to be transferred to Wall Street.—Advance
  Sheets of Reports for 1969.—What our Railway System is to
  be.—Grumbling and Patriotism.—Of the Future of Chicago, New York,
  Philadelphia, and Boston.—_A Pax Vobiscum._

Most people suppose that it is difficult to write history in advance.
There is no greater delusion. Facts—even when we can get at them and are
sure of them, which seldom happens—are great obstructions to a
narrative. They involve sudden leaps into unforeseen depths of human
action, perplexing struggles through very dynastic uncertainties, or
ascents to unexpected developments of character, trying to one’s
judgment and patience, and often hurtful to one’s pride of opinion. Our
preconceptions, unverified by a set of obstinate facts, are distressed
by the unsatisfactory contradictions. We halt dissatisfied on a dusty
road, which the tramp of events has worn smooth, and left nothing to
novelty or an industrious fancy.

Besides, the great majority of readers are partisans, and have a right
to be disappointed at and to blame those unreasoning conclusions, which
slide inevitably out of realities. They confront sternly those facts,
which affront them, by insisting on happening in a way or order
different from their expectations or wishes. Hitherto, we have been
obliged to conform to the hard conditions thus inherent in actual
chronicles, and have been forced to submit our readers to these annoying
certainties.

We can, however, now dismiss these tantalizing fixities of events, which
have run before us, and left us the wearisome business of catching up to
them; and leaving them to overtake us, if they can, to write up a future
history of events, which ought to happen, and which will greatly
disappoint the sanguine expectations of Americans if they do not. The
excuse for failure will be lessened by the outlined path which we here
stretch downward into the wooded future.

We take it for granted, then, that all our future Presidents will be the
very best and most competent men in the nation, spontaneously acclamated
to the office, and not wrung out by industrious party conventions for
political ends. Uncommitted to committees or political sponsors, and
unweighted by onerous gratitude to ex-working party canvassers, they
will naturally hereafter pensively appoint to Cabinet places and
diplomatic posts statesmen of pre-eminent ability, patriotism, and
integrity, who will as modestly wait to be invited in, as the same class
now, when in, stand as if hopelessly deaf, to be distinctly invited out.
That they will reluctantly, if at all, subject weak citizens to the
pains and penalties of executing and garroting the laws, or the slow and
unpractised, to the heavy tasks of carrying the public burdens.

The public debt will naturally disappear. Perhaps some fortunate
speculator in petroleum or Erie stock will pay it off, rather than have
it in the way, or see it left to bear the market inopportunely. The
secret of making money scarce will lead doubtless to the discovery of
making it plenty; and then the public debt, being of no use to anybody,
will naturally stand aside, as poor relations in times of plenty.
Besides, gentlemen being selected, not for their own interests, but for
the public good, will, it is to be expected, donate their salaries to a
sinking fund, which will carry it off, as some companies do their
stockholders’ dividends, to unfathomed bottoms. In fact, if the debt
could be cut up into dividends, nothing more would be heard of it. If
the whole truth may be safely told, the difficulty in the extinguishment
of the debt will not be so much in its undoubted disappearance, as in
settling upon that plan among the numbers presented, which will be
permitted to hurry it out of sight.

Of course, when the Federal obligations quit, the State and city debts
will not have the face to remain behind.

These subjects out of the way, members of Congress, being then
gentlemen, as well as educated, capable, and honest men, dragged
unwillingly from and not into business, will deal with the few remaining
topics with a wise silence,—and this course we take for grant-ed now; or
else will discuss them and not each other, or the encyclopædia of
unrelated questions, the publication of which now so enhances the price
of paper.

This improvement in our Congressional debates will have a corresponding
advantage, also, to those foreigners who, desirous of learning our
system, venture upon the speeches made at the Capitol, and, hopelessly
misled by the terms employed, and the ferocious adjectives that commit
horrible murders on almost every paragraph, confound our geography with
that of the Cannibal Islands. We also take it for granted, that our
public men will wait for events to justify the crude speculations, which
they toss out in conversations with reporters, before cruelly amusing
the good-natured public with their vaticinations. Possibly, too, the
spread of common schools and Sunday schools, teaching grammar and
morality, may lead to the disuse by our print-rushing politicians of
styles of speech quite incomprehensible, and of words so raw in outline
and so destitute of middle letters as to lead profane people to fancy
that they are imitations of their own heedless expressions. Of course,
in the better days now dawning, “rings” will only be used to tie
quadrupeds to posts, or to restrain vicious bipeds in state prisons.
Combinations to do good and increase the general happiness will
naturally supplant those curious American circles, whose peripheries are
not equidistant from the centre, but which consist in fact only of a
centre, and that centre, self.

Happiness, and not wealth, being thus the main pursuit, of course many
kinds of occupations, now called business, such as brokers,
money-lenders, etc., will cease, and those now engaged in these
so-called pursuits—of others, will look after the poor to minister unto
them and not to take them in. The superior claims of charity upon the
fortunate, who are now living, will naturally be enhanced by the fact
that, being at present in the world, they cannot reasonably expect to
live much longer than 1970, and may quit much earlier, leaving some
selfish heirs not disposed to divide except for an equivalent.

Many judges being released from their present arduous duties of so
administering law as to get re-elected—for then no one will value an
office so much a sinecure—will have some time, especially in New York,
to study law; and some courts of appeal can be repealed. The only
injunctions issued will be oral, delivered, not to railroad speculators,
but to indiscreet juveniles, unwarily betrayed into their first and last
offence. The expense of court-houses being thus partially saved, it is
expected, that the small unventilated places in which law is peddled out
will be enlarged, and a humane effort be thus made to save the exposed
lives of suitors, lawyers, jurors, and judges.

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals will
naturally, with larger means, extend its operations, and embrace
employers, suffering from servants of independent ways, from domestics
who take six evenings in the week out, and allow their mistress one, and
who, for certain discreet considerations, not worth mentioning here,
permit those, who divide their estates with them, to occupy a portion of
the same house, on condition of not interfering with their separate
apartments.

We also take it for granted, that woman’s rights will not be wrongfully
urged or withheld; but will be so adjusted, that the public will
ascertain what some people would ask for, if they did not become
incomprehensible through abundant talking, or what—considering the
modesty of the applicants—they really ought to have, although they do
not clamor for it in a way that makes some suspect, that men are either
to be extinguished outright, or else kept for a few hundred years on
probation, until they shall have learned to be respectful, just, and
unmanlike.

In this coming good time, men and women are to be equal,—especially the
women. If any differences are discovered in any way between them, these
differences are to be submitted to conventions chosen by the wisest
women, and the differences either to be entirely suppressed, or the
dissenters all expelled from the United States. Uniformity is to be
secured at all hazards. If necessary, ballot-boxes will be attached to
cradles; and women, by any cause confined from active canvassing, will
be allowed to vote twice at the next election, in order to bring up
their rights to a point where nature left them.

We further take it for granted, that children will then be content to be
vivacious; will be left to the witching ways, the pulpy and dewy
freshness of the morning glory of life, until they shall have gradually
come to the ripe maturities of action; that they will not fall from
grace into the condemnation of mischievous notice; will not daily burst
into astonishing feats of memory or attainment before reluctant,
domestic audiences, nor carry on social insurrections against the United
States of their begettors until they have achieved their independence,
nor hold a Fourth of July every day in the year.

Should reform in this direction not take place as just anticipated, then
we shall expect that infantile precocities will be utilized before they
shall have evaporated into the insipidities of manhood and womanhood. At
present, it is well understood, children are anachronisms, sadly out of
place, squandering uselessly their best powers without any corresponding
responsibilities; legally treated as minors, when they are in fact
majors; denied the legal rights to marry until they reach a period when
marriage is tame and idle, and the means to support a wife are
exhausted; prohibited from going to Congress and being Presidents, while
full of original ideas and administrative ability, and allowed to go
when they have oozed away through the leakages of active growths all
capacity, and become just—what we see them at Washington; and wasting in
pantalets the money which, if suffered, they might earn better than the
old heads which are now only figure-heads.

We shall not be surprised to see, if not during Grant’s time, at least
before the century runs out, a constitutional amendment relieving aged
Americans—those, for example, who have attained the ripe, very ripe age
of twenty-one—from the duties and cares of office, and securing to the
public the benefit of young vigorous intellects, varying from twelve to
seventeen years of age.

The happy results of this change will be apparent—to any infant mind.
Short-jacketed M. C.’s will impart new vivacity to Congressional debate;
young ministers to foreign courts will be able to acquire, if they do
not know, some language beside the American, and be able to converse
with those with whom they have business,—an un-speakable luxury now.
Active, bustling infants will give a new ardor to journalism, and
produce a more enterprising corps of wide-awake, newspaper
correspondents, to keep up the stock of telegraph companies by
information which, being constantly in advance of the facts, would
fairly represent and be fitting types of, the infantile correspondents
themselves, and necessitate additional contradictions. As territorial
governors, obliged to take hazardous journeys on our railways,—which
often intervene and prevent older men from reaching their
destination,—they would be nimble enough to get out of the wreck, or
perhaps smart enough to keep their deaths secret, and have their
ancestors draw their salary,—thus accomplishing, although not present,
the principal business of that office. Then, too, how much livelier
would things go on in our churches, if, instead of the dull, old elders,
deacons, or vestrymen, now seldom elected before they reach the great
age of thirty, and who, when they were boys, were smart enough, although
not as alert as their own boys now, were allowed to rest their stiffer
awkward limbs in their pews, and ecclesiastical affairs were managed by
their youngers? The sick would be visited by cheerful, round-faced
persons, bright with the health which would be brought as a living fact
to the invalid; widows would be comforted by the presence of dark-haired
and hopeful youths, and not depressed by the aspect of people encumbered
with wives and the chilling experience of at least a score and a half of
years; while the poor would receive liberally from those who well know,
that the best use for money is to keep it in vigilant circulation.

  SCHOOL TEACHING FROM 1869 ONWARDS.
  (p. 542)
]

Business would also be conducted on youthful principles, in consonance
with the other rapid ways of the times; capital would be nimble and
alert, creating profits so lively that they would leap back into the
common and rapidly running current. Old legislative peculators, bank and
trust defaulters, would soon, in the natural course of things, and
without the shocks of legal trials,—which generally produce no
results,—be displaced; while young iniquity would scarcely acquire the
rime and rust which now incrust so many of the old instruments of
corruption, making them almost respectable. Biographies, now often
running tediously through so many chapters, would be brief; as an
American life might be assumed to close up substantially at twenty-five
at least, and we should get the rich morning cream, without wearying
ourselves with collecting the thin globules that float on the pan of
age.

In the better times to which of course everybody looks, we take it for
granted, also, that the every-day arts and the familiar sciences, now
taught in schools and colleges, will be laid aside; and that Greek,
Latin, French, German, Italian, Irish, and other tongues,—those sad
reminders of Babels and other polyglot attempts and results,—will give
place to more practical studies. How to cook, so as not to destroy the
remnants of stomachs left by candy-eating, hot breads, and other
delectable addictions of the old barbarous times which America has
passed dyspeptically through; how to get a husband or wife, in every way
suited to the expectations and ideas of different members of the family,
and on a scale mathematically adjusted to the pecuniary latitude and
longitude calculated from the paternal meridian; how to scale a tariff
for conductors, which shall not raise the market price of gold rings,
studs, and heavy watches, and yet leave something for the directors to
operate the stock with; the best methods of acquiring a fortune without
the stale process of failure and settling with creditors; the mode of
conducting railway collisions and steamboat explosions, without ruining
whole families and destroying rising communities at a blow, and without
leaving so many facetious questions to funny coroners and irresistibly
comic jurors; a method of advertising wares and leaving some praiseful
adjectives not used up; a system which should graduate the decrease in
weights and measures to the price; and how to make an hour’s work go as
far as ten old-fashioned absurd hours,—these will help to furnish out a
curriculum of study for institutions high and low.

The fashions will be regulated by the Secretary of the Treasury, who
will issue a daily telegraphic bulletin, so that no one shall have any
advantage over another.

The President of the United States, by way of keeping his hand in, may
practise on a Sunday school every Sunday, addressing them in rotation,
and going over those in New Jersey and Texas several times, if a safe
pass can be secured. The antique modes of mining will be abolished
altogether. A central bureau, located in Wall Street, will so work all
kinds of veins and arteries, auriferous, argentiferous, and
verdibackish, as to entice out all their values on call.

The traditions about gold are to be wrought up into poetry, and thus
forever forgotten.

We have been put in possession of the advance sheets of several reports,
to be made to the various State legislatures in 1969, on “The Absence of
Legislative Corruption,” from which it is manifest, that nothing with
money in it ever reaches the capitals of that day, and that the members
are left to the tedious business of practical legislation, their spare
time being amused with antiquarian researches into the capital chances
for money-making between 1860 and 1870. It is also apparent from these
coming reports that great amusement is to be afforded by a study of the