第18章

I have several times since had occasion to note the carelessness of National and State conventions in nominating a candidate for the second place upon the ticket--whether Vice-President or Lieutenant-Governor. It would seem that the question of questions--the nomination to the first office--having been settled, there comes a sort of collapse in these great popular assemblies, and that then, for the second office, it is very often anybody's race and mainly a matter of chance. In this way alone can be explained several nominations which have been made to second offices, and above all, that of John Tyler. As a matter of fact, he was not commended to the Whig party on any solid grounds. His whole political life had shown him an opponent of their main ideas; he was, in fact, a Southern doctrinaire, and frequently suffered from acute attacks of that very troublesome political disease, Virginia metaphysics. As President he attempted to enforce his doctrines, and when Whig leaders, and above all Henry Clay attempted, not only to resist, but to crush him, he asserted his dignity at the cost of his party, and finally tried that which other accidental Presidents have since tried with no better success, namely, to build up a party of his own by a new distribution of offices. Never was a greater failure. Mr. Tyler was dropped by both parties and disappeared from American political life forever.

I can now see that he was a man obedient to his convictions of duty, such as they were, and in revolt against attempts of Whig leaders to humiliate him; but then, to my youthful mind, he appeared the very incarnation of evil.

My next recollections are of the campaign of 1844.

Again the Whig party took courage, and having, as a boy of twelve years, acquired more earnest ideas regarding the questions at issue, I helped, with other Whig boys, to raise ash-poles, and to hurrah lustily for Clay at public meetings. On the other hand, the Democratic boys hurrahed as lustily around their hickory poles and, as was finally proved, to much better purpose. They sang doggerel which, to me, was blasphemous, and especially a song with the following refrain:

``Alas poor Cooney Clay, Alas poor Cooney Clay, You never can be President, For so the people say.''

The ash-poles had reference to Ashland, Clay's Kentucky estate; and the hickory poles recalled General Jackson's sobriquet, ``Old Hickory.'' For the Democratic candidate in 1844, James Knox Polk, was considered heir to Jackson's political ideas. The campaign of 1844 was not made so interesting by spectacular outbursts of tom-foolery as the campaign of 1840 had been. The sober second thought of the country had rather sickened people of that sort of thing; still, there was quite enough of it, especially as shown in caricatures and songs. The poorest of the latter was perhaps one on the Democratic side, for as the Democratic candidates were Polk of Tennessee and Dallas of Pennsylvania, one line of the song embraced probably the worst pun ever made, namely--``PORK in the barrel, and DOLLARS in the pocket.''

It was at this period that the feeling against the extension of slavery, especially as indicated in the proposed annexation of Texas, began to appear largely in politics, and though Clay at heart detested slavery and always refused to do the bidding of its supporters beyond what he thought absolutely necessary in preserving the Union, an unfortunate letter of his led great numbers of anti-slavery men to support a separate anti-slavery ticket, the candidate being James G. Birney. The result was that the election of Clay became impossible. Mr. Polk was elected, and under him came the admission of Texas, which caused the Mexican War, and gave slavery a new lease of life. The main result, in my own environment, was that my father and his friends, thenceforward for a considerable time, though detesting slavery, held all abolitionists and anti-slavery men in contempt,--as unpatriotic because they had defeated Henry Clay, and as idiotic because they had brought on the annexation of Texas and thereby the supremacy of the slave States.

But the flame of liberty could not be smothered by friends or blown out by enemies; it was kept alive by vigorous counterblasts in the press, and especially fed by the lecture system, which was then at the height of its efficiency. Among the most powerful of lecturers was John Parker Hale, senator of the United States from New Hampshire, his subject being, ``The Last Gladiatorial Combat at Rome.'' Taking from Gibbon the story of the monk Telemachus, who ended the combats in the arena by throwing himself into them and sacrificing his life, Hale suggested to his large audiences an argument that if men wished to get rid of slavery in our country they must be ready to sacrifice themselves if need be. His words sank deep into my mind, and I have sometimes thought that they may have had something to do in leading John Brown to make his desperate attempt on slavery at Harper's Ferry.

How blind we all were! Henry Clay, a Kentucky slave-holder, would have saved us. Infinitely better than the violent solutions proposed to us was his large statesman-like plan of purchasing the slave children as they were born and setting them free. Without bloodshed, and at cost of the merest nothing as compared to the cost of the Civil War, he would thus have solved the problem; but it was not so to be. The guilt of the nation was not to be so cheaply atoned for. Fanatics, North and South, opposed him and, as a youth, I yielded to their arguments.

Four years later, in 1848, came a very different sort of election. General Zachary Taylor, who had shown ster-ling qualities in the Mexican War, was now the candidate of the Whigs, and against him was nominated Mr.