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Sketches and Studies

by Nathaniel Hawthorne · English · Gutenberg #8091 · 457,961 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Sketches and Studies

Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne


        
Release date: May 1, 2005 [eBook #8091]
                Most recently updated: December 15, 2016

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8091

Credits: Produced by Tapio Riikonen and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SKETCHES AND STUDIES ***




Produced by Tapio Riikonen and David Widger








SKETCHES AND STUDIES

by

Nathaniel Hawthorne



CONTENTS

 Life of Franklin Pierce
 Chiefly about War Matters
 Alice Doane’s Appeal
 The Ancestral Footstep





LIFE OF FRANKLIN PIERCE.


PREFACE.

The author of this memoir--being so little of a politician that he
scarcely feels entitled to call himself a member of any party--would not
voluntarily have undertaken the work here offered to the public.  Neither
can he flatter himself that he has been remarkably successful in the
performance of his task, viewing it in the light of a political
biography, and as a representation of the principles and acts of a public
man, intended to operate upon the minds of multitudes during a
presidential canvass.  This species of writing is too remote from his
customary occupations--and, he may add, from his tastes--to be very
satisfactorily done, without more time and practice than he would be
willing to expend for such a purpose.  If this little biography have any
value, it is probably of another kind--as the narrative of one who knew
the individual of whom he treats, at a period of life when character
could be read with undoubting accuracy, and who, consequently, in judging
of the motives of his subsequent conduct, has an advantage over much more
competent observers, whose knowledge of the man may have commenced at a
later date.  Nor can it be considered improper (at least, the author will
never feel it so, although some foolish delicacy be sacrificed in the
undertaking) that when a friend, dear to him almost from boyish days,
stands up before his country, misrepresented by indiscriminate abuse on
the one hand, and by aimless praise on the other, he should be sketched
by one who has had opportunities of knowing him well, and who is
certainly inclined to tell the truth.

It is perhaps right to say, that while this biography is so far
sanctioned by General Pierce, as it comprises a generally correct
narrative of the principal events of his life, the author does not
understand him as thereby necessarily indorsing all the sentiments put
forth by himself in the progress of the work.  These are the author’s own
speculations upon the facts before him, and may, or may not, be in
accordance with the ideas of the individual whose life he writes.  That
individual’s opinions, however,--so far as it is necessary to know them,
--may be read, in his straightforward and consistent deeds, with more
certainty than those of almost any other man now before the public.

The author, while collecting his materials, has received liberal aid from
all manner of people--Whigs and Democrats, congressmen, astute lawyers,
grim old generals of militia, and gallant young officers of the Mexican
war--most of whom, however, he must needs say, have rather abounded in
eulogy of General Pierce than in such anecdotical matter as is calculated
for a biography.  Among the gentlemen to whom he is substantially
indebted, he would mention Hon. C. G. Atherton, Hon. S. H. Ayer, Hon.
Joseph Hall, Chief Justice Gilchrist, Isaac O. Barnes, Esq., Col. T. J.
Whipple, and Mr. C. J. Smith.  He has likewise derived much assistance
from an able and accurate sketch, that originally appeared in the “Boston
Post,” and was drawn up, as he believes, by the junior editor of that
journal.

CONCORD, MASS., August 27, 1852.




CHAPTER I.

HIS PARENTAGE AND EARLY LIFE.


Franklin Pierce was born at Hillsborough, in the State of New Hampshire,
on the 23d of November, 1804.  His native county, at the period of his
birth, covered a much more extensive territory than at present, and might
reckon among its children many memorable men, and some illustrious ones.
General Stark, the hero of Bennington, Daniel Webster, Levi Woodbury,
Jeremiah Smith, the eminent jurist, and governor of the state, General
James Miller, General McNeil, Senator Atherton, were natives of old
Hillsborough County.

General Benjamin Pierce, the father of Franklin, was one of the earliest
settlers in the town of Hillsborough, and contributed as much as any
other man to the growth and prosperity of the county.  He was born in
1757, at Chelmsford, now Lowell, in Massachusetts.  Losing his parents
early, he grew up under the care of an uncle, amid such circumstances of
simple fare, hard labor, and scanty education, as usually fell to the lot
of a New England yeoman’s family some eighty or a hundred years ago.  On
the 19th of April, 1775, being then less than eighteen years of age, the
stripling was at the plough, when tidings reached him of the bloodshed at
Lexington and Concord.  He immediately loosened the ox chain, left the
plough in the furrow, took his uncle’s gun and equipments, and set forth
towards the scene of action.  From that day, for more than seven years,
he never saw his native place.  He enlisted in the army, was present at
the battle of Bunker Hill, and after serving through the whole
Revolutionary War, and fighting his way upward from the lowest grade,
returned, at last, a thorough soldier, and commander of a company.  He
was retained in the army as long as that body of veterans had a united
existence; and, being finally disbanded, at West Point, in 1784, was left
with no other reward, for nine years of toil and danger, than the nominal
amount of his pay in the Continental currency--then so depreciated as to
be almost worthless.

In 1780, being employed as agent to explore a tract of wild land, he
purchased a lot of fifty acres in what is now the town of Hillsborough.
In the spring of the succeeding year, he built himself a log hut, and
began the clearing and cultivation of his tract.  Another year beheld him
married to his first wife, Elizabeth Andrews, who died within a
twelvemonth after their union, leaving a daughter, the present widow of
General John McNeil.  In 1789, he married Anna Kendrick, with whom he
lived about half a century, and who bore him eight children, of whom
Franklin was the sixth.

Although the Revolutionary soldier had thus betaken himself to the
wilderness for a subsistence, his professional merits were not forgotten
by those who had witnessed his military career.  As early as 1786, he was
appointed brigade major of the militia of Hillsborough County, then first
organized and formed into a brigade.  And it was a still stronger
testimonial to his character as a soldier, that, nearly fifteen years
afterwards, during the presidency of John Adams, he was offered a high
command in the northern division of the army which was proposed to be
levied in anticipation of a war with the French republic.  Inflexibly
democratic in his political faith, however, Major Pierce refused to be
implicated in a policy which he could not approve.  “No, gentlemen,” said
he to the delegates who urged his acceptance of the commission, “poor as
I am, and acceptable as would be the position under other circumstances,
I would sooner go to yonder mountains, dig me a cave, and live on roast
potatoes, than be instrumental in promoting the objects for which that
army is to be raised!”  This same fidelity to his principles marked every
public, as well as private, action of his life.

In his own neighborhood, among those who knew him best he early gained an
influence that was never lost nor diminished, but continued to spread
wider during the whole of his long life.  In 1789, he was elected to the
state legislature and retained that position for thirteen successive
years, until chosen a member of the council.  During the same period he
was active in his military duties, as a field officer, and finally
general, of the militia of the county; and Miller, McNeil, and others
learned of him, in this capacity, the soldier-like discipline which was
afterwards displayed on the battle-fields of the northern frontier.

The history, character, and circumstances of General Benjamin Pierce,
though here but briefly touched upon, are essential parts of the
biography of his son, both as indicating some of the native traits which
the latter has inherited, and as showing the influences amid which he
grew up.  At Franklin Pierce’s birth, and for many years subsequent, his
father was the most active and public-spirited man within his sphere; a
most decided Democrat, and supporter of Jefferson and Madison; a
practical farmer, moreover, not rich, but independent, exercising a
liberal hospitality, and noted for the kindness and generosity of his
character; a man of the people, but whose natural qualities inevitably
made him a leader among them.  From infancy upward, the boy had before
his eyes, as the model on which he might instinctively form himself, one
of the best specimens of sterling New England character, developed in a
life of simple habits, yet of elevated action.  Patriotism, such as it
had been in Revolutionary days, was taught him by his father, as early as
his mother taught him religion.  He became early imbued, too, with the
military spirit which the old soldier had retained from his long service,
and which was kept active by the constant alarms and warlike preparations
of the first twelve years of the present century.  If any man is bound by
birth and youthful training, to show himself a brave, faithful, and able
citizen of his native country, it is the son of such a father.

At the commencement of the war of 1812, Franklin Pierce was a few months
under eight years of age.  The old general, his father, sent two of his
sons into the army; and as his eldest daughter was soon afterwards
married to Major McNeil, there were few families that had so large a
personal stake in the war as that of General Benjamin Pierce.  He
himself, both in his public capacity as a member of the council, and by
his great local influence in his own county, lent a strenuous support to
the national administration.  It is attributable to his sagacity and
energy, that New Hampshire--then under a federal governor--was saved the
disgrace of participation in the questionable, if not treasonable,
projects of the Hartford Convention.  He identified himself with the
cause of the country, and was doubtless as thoroughly alive with
patriotic zeal, at this eventful period, as in the old days of Bunker
Hill, and Saratoga, and Yorktown.  The general not only took a prominent
part at all public meetings, but was ever ready for the informal
discussion of political affairs at all places of casual resort, where--in
accordance with the custom of the time and country--the minds of men were
made to operate effectually upon each other.  Franklin Pierce was a
frequent auditor of these controversies.  The intentness with which he
watched the old general, and listened to his arguments, is still
remembered; and, at this day, in his most earnest moods, there are
gesticulations and movements that bring up the image of his father to
those who recollect the latter on those occasions of the display of
homely, native eloquence.  No mode of education could be conceived,
better adapted to imbue a youth with the principles and sentiment of
democratic institutions; it brought him into the most familiar contact
with the popular mind, and made his own mind a part of it.

Franklin’s father had felt, through life, the disadvantages of a
defective education; although, in his peculiar sphere of action, it might
be doubted whether he did not gain more than he lost, by being thrown on
his own resources, and compelled to study men and their actual affairs,
rather than books.  But he determined to afford his son all the
opportunities of improvement which he himself had lacked.  Franklin,
accordingly, was early sent to the academy at Hancock, and afterwards
to that of Francestown, where he was received into the family of
General Pierce’s old and steadfast friend, Peter Woodbury, father of
the late eminent judge.  It is scarcely more than a year ago, at the
semi-centennial celebration of the academy, that Franklin Pierce, the
mature and distinguished man, paid a beautiful tribute to the character
of Madam Woodbury, in affectionate remembrance of the motherly kindness
experienced at her hands by the school-boy.

The old people of his neighborhood give a very delightful picture of
Franklin at this early age.  They describe him as a beautiful boy, with
blue eyes, light curling hair, and a sweet expression of face.  The
traits presented of him indicate moral symmetry, kindliness, and a
delicate texture of sentiment, rather than marked prominences of
character.  His instructors testify to his propriety of conduct, his
fellow-pupils to his sweetness of disposition and cordial sympathy.  One
of the latter, being older than most of his companions, and less advanced
in his studies, found it difficult to keep up with his class; and he
remembers how perseveringly, while the other boys were at play, Franklin
spent the noon recess, for many weeks together, in aiding him in his
lessons.  These attributes, proper to a generous and affectionate nature,
have remained with him through life.  Lending their color to his
deportment, and softening his manners, they are, perhaps, even now, the
characteristics by which most of those who casually meet him would be
inclined to identify the man.  But there are other qualities, not then
developed, but which have subsequently attained a firm and manly growth,
and are recognized as his leading traits among those who really know him.
Franklin Pierce’s development, indeed, has always been the reverse of
premature; the boy did not show the germ of all that was in the man, nor,
perhaps, did the young man adequately foreshow the mature one.

In 1820, at the age of sixteen, he became a student of Bowdoin College,
at Brunswick, Maine.  It was in the autumn of the next year that the
author of this memoir entered the class below him; but our college
reminiscences, however interesting to the parties concerned, are not
exactly the material for a biography.  He was then a youth, with the boy
and man in him, vivacious, mirthful, slender, of a fair complexion, with
light hair that had a curl in it: his bright and cheerful aspect made a
kind of sunshine, both as regarded its radiance and its warmth; insomuch
that no shyness of disposition, in his associates, could well resist its
influence.  We soon became acquainted, and were more especially drawn
together as members of the same college society.  There were two of these
institutions, dividing the college between them, and typifying,
respectively, and with singular accuracy of feature, the respectable
conservative, and the progressive or democratic parties.  Pierce’s native
tendencies inevitably drew him to the latter.

His chum was Zenas Caldwell, several years older than himself, a member
of the Methodist persuasion, a pure-minded, studious, devoutly religious
character; endowed thus early in life with the authority of a grave and
sagacious turn of mind.  The friendship between Pierce and him appeared
to be mutually strong, and was of itself a pledge of correct deportment
in the former.  His chief friend, I think, was a classmate named Little,
a young man of most estimable qualities and high intellectual promise;
one of those fortunate characters whom an early death so canonizes in the
remembrance of their companions, that the perfect fulfilment of a long
life would scarcely give them a higher place.  Jonathan Cilley, of my own
class,--whose untimely fate is still mournfully remembered,--a person of
very marked ability and great social influence, was another of Pierce’s
friends.  All these have long been dead.  There are others, still alive,
who would meet Franklin Pierce, at this day, with as warm a pressure of
the hand, and the same confidence in his kindly feelings as when they
parted from him nearly thirty years ago.

Pierce’s class was small, but composed of individuals seriously intent on
the duties and studies of their college life.  They were not boys, but,
for the most part, well advanced towards maturity; and, having wrought
out their own means of education, were little inclined to neglect the
opportunities that had been won at so much cost.  They knew the value of
time, and had a sense of the responsibilities of their position.  Their
first scholar--the present Professor Stowe--has long since established
his rank among the first scholars of the country.  It could have been no
easy task to hold successful rivalry with students so much in earnest as
these were.  During the earlier part of his college course it may be
doubted whether Pierce was distinguished for scholarship.  But, for the
last two years, he appeared to grow more intent on the business in hand,
and, without losing any of his vivacious qualities as a companion, was
evidently resolved to gain an honorable elevation in his class.  His
habits of attention and obedience to college discipline were of the
strictest character; he rose progressively in scholarship, and took a
highly creditable degree.  [See note at close of this Life.]

The first civil office, I imagine, which Franklin Pierce ever held was
that of chairman of the standing committee of the Athenaean Society, of
which, as above hinted, we were both members; and, having myself held a
place on the committee, I can bear testimony to his having discharged
not only his own share of the duties, but that of his colleagues.  I
remember, likewise, that the only military service of my life was as a
private soldier in a college company, of which Pierce was one of the
officers.  He entered into this latter business, or pastime, with an
earnestness with which I could not pretend to compete, and at which,
perhaps, he would now be inclined to smile.  His slender and youthful
figure rises before my mind’s eye, at this moment, with the air and step
of a veteran of the school of Steuben; as well became the son of a
revolutionary hero, who had probably drilled under the old baron’s
orders.  Indeed, at this time, and for some years afterwards, Pierce’s
ambition seemed to be of a military cast.  Until reflection had tempered
his first predilections, and other varieties of success had rewarded his
efforts, he would have preferred, I believe, the honors of the
battle-field to any laurels more peacefully won.  And it was remarkable
how, with all the invariable gentleness of his demeanor, he perfectly
gave, nevertheless, the impression of a high and fearless spirit.  His
friends were as sure of his courage, while yet untried, as now, when it
has been displayed so brilliantly in famous battles.

At this early period of his life, he was distinguished by the same
fascination of manner that has since proved so magical in winning him an
unbounded personal popularity.  It is wronging him, however, to call this
peculiarity a mere effect of manner; its source lies deep in the
kindliness of his nature, and in the liberal, generous, catholic
sympathy, that embraces all who are worthy of it.  Few men possess any
thing like it; so irresistible as it is, so sure to draw forth an
undoubting confidence, and so true to the promise which it gives.  This
frankness, this democracy of good feeling, has not been chilled by the
society of politicians, nor polished down into mere courtesy by his
intercourse with the most refined men of the day.  It belongs to him at
this moment, and will never leave him.  A little while ago, after his
return from Mexico, he darted across the street to exchange a hearty
gripe of the hand with a rough countryman upon his cart--a man who used
to “live with his father,” as the general explained the matter to his
companions.  Other men assume this manner, more or less skilfully; but
with Frank Pierce it is an innate characteristic; nor will it ever lose
its charm, unless his heart should grow narrower and colder--a misfortune
not to be anticipated, even in the dangerous atmosphere of elevated rank,
whither he seems destined to ascend.

There is little else that it is worth while to relate as regards his
college course, unless it be that, during one of his winter vacations,
Pierce taught a country school.  So many of the statesmen of New England
have performed their first public service in the character of pedagogue,
that it seems almost a necessary step on the ladder of advancement.




CHAPTER II.

HIS SERVICES IN THE STATE AND NATIONAL LEGISLATURES.


After leaving college, in the year 1824, Franklin Pierce returned to
Hillsborough.  His father, now in a green old age, continued to take a
prominent part in the affairs of the day, but likewise made his declining
years rich and picturesque with recollections of the heroic times through
which he had lived.  On the 26th of December, 1825, it being his
sixty-seventh birthday, General Benjamin Pierce prepared a festival for
his comrades in arms, the survivors of the Revolution, eighteen of whom,
all inhabitants of Hillsborough, assembled at his house.  The ages of
these veterans ranged from fifty-nine up to the patriarchal venerableness
of nearly ninety.  They spent the day in festivity, in calling up
reminiscences of the great men whom they had known and the great deeds
which they had helped to do, and in reviving the old sentiments of the
era of ‘seventy-six.  At nightfall, after a manly and pathetic farewell
from their host, they separated--“prepared,” as the old general expressed
it, “at the first tap of the shrouded drum, to move and join their
beloved Washington, and the rest of their beloved comrades, who fought
and bled at their sides.”  A scene like this must have been profitable
for a young man to witness, as being likely to give him a stronger sense
than most of us can attain of the value of that Union which these old
heroes had risked so much to consolidate--of that common country which
they had sacrificed everything to create; and patriotism must have been
communicated from their hearts to his, with somewhat of the warmth and
freshness of a new-born sentiment.  No youth was ever more fortunate than
Franklin Pierce, through the whole of his early life, in this most
desirable species of moral education.

Having chosen the law as a profession, Franklin became a student in the
office of Judge Woodbury, of Portsmouth.  Allusion has already been made
to the friendship between General Benjamin Pierce and Peter Woodbury, the
father of the judge.  The early progress of Levi Woodbury towards
eminence had been facilitated by the powerful influence of his father’s
friend.  It was a worthy and honorable kind of patronage, and bestowed
only as the great abilities of the recipient vindicated his claim to it.
Few young men have met with such early success in life, or have deserved
it so eminently, as did Judge Woodbury.  At the age of twenty-seven, he
was appointed to the bench of the Supreme Court of the state, on the
earnest recommendation of old General Pierce.  The opponents of the
measure ridiculed him as the “baby judge;” but his conduct in that high
office showed the prescient judgment of the friend who had known him from
a child, and had seen in his young manhood already the wisdom of ripened
age.  It was some years afterwards when Franklin Pierce entered the
office of Judge Woodbury as a student.  In the interval, the judge had
been elected governor, and, after a term of office that thoroughly tested
the integrity of his democratic principles, had lost his second election,
and returned to the profession of the law.

The last two years of Pierce’s preparatory studies were spent at the law
school of Northampton, in Massachusetts, and in the office of Judge
Parker at Amherst.  In 1827, being admitted to the bar, he began the
practice of his profession at Hillsborough.  It is an interesting fact,
considered in reference to his subsequent splendid career as an advocate,
that he did not, at the outset, give promise of distinguished success.
His first case was a failure, and perhaps a somewhat marked one.  But it
is remembered that this defeat, however mortifying at the moment, did but
serve to make him aware of the latent resources of his mind, the full
command of which he was far from having yet attained.  To a friend, an
older practitioner, who addressed him with some expression of condolence
and encouragement, Pierce replied,--and it was a kind of self-assertion
which no triumph would have drawn oat,--“I do not need that.  I will try
nine hundred and ninety-nine cases, if clients will continue to trust me,
and, if I fail just as I have today, will try the thousandth.  I shall
live to argue cases in this court house in a manner that will mortify
neither myself nor my friends.”  It is in such moments of defeat that
character and ability are mot fairly tested; they would irremediably
crush a youth devoid of real energy, and, being neither more nor less
than his just desert, would be accepted as such.  But a failure of this
kind serves an opposite purpose to a mind in which the strongest and
richest qualities lie deep, and, from their very size and mass, cannot at
once be rendered available.  It provokes an innate self-confidence,
while, at the same time, it sternly indicates the sedulous cultivation,
the earnest effort, the toil, the agony, which are the conditions of
ultimate success.  It is, indeed, one of the best modes of discipline
that experience can administer, and may reasonably be counted a fortunate
event in the life of a young man vigorous enough to overcome the
momentary depression.

Pierce’s distinction at the bar, however, did not immediately follow; nor
did he acquire what we may designate as positive eminence until some
years after this period.  The enticements of political life--so
especially fascinating to a young lawyer, but so irregular in its
tendencies, and so inimical to steady professional labor--had begun to
operate upon him.  His father’s prominent position in the politics of the
state made it almost impossible that the son should stand aloof.  In
1827, the same year when Franklin began the practice of the law, General
Benjamin Pierce had been elected governor of New Hampshire.  He was
defeated in the election of 1828, but was again successful in that of the
subsequent year.  During these years, the contest for the presidency had
been fought with a fervor that drew almost everybody into it, on one side
or the other, and had terminated in the triumph of Andrew Jackson.
Franklin Pierce, in advance of his father’s decision, though not in
opposition to it, had declared himself for the illustrious man whose
military renown was destined to be thrown into the shade by a civil
administration, the most splendid and powerful that ever adorned the
annals of our country, I love to record of the subject of this memoir
that his first political faith was pledged to that great leader of the
democracy.

I remember meeting Pierce about this period, and catching from him some
faint reflection of the zeal with which he was now stepping into the
political arena.  My sympathies and opinions, it is true,--so far as I
had any in public affairs,--had, from the first, been enlisted on the
same side with his own.  But I was now made strongly sensible of an
increased development of my friend’s mind, by means of which he possessed
a vastly greater power than heretofore over the minds with which he came
in contact.  This progressive growth has continued to be one of his
remarkable characteristics.  Of most men you early know the mental gauge
and measurement, and do not subsequently have much occasion to change it.
Not so with Pierce: his tendency was not merely high, but towards a point
which rose higher and higher as the aspirant tended upward.  Since we
parted, studious days had educated him; life, too, and his own exertions
in it, and his native habit of close and accurate observation, had
likewise begun to educate him.

The town of Hillsborough, in 1829, gave Franklin Pierce his first public
honor, by electing him its representative in the legislature of the
state.  His whole service in that body comprised four years, in the two
latter of which he was elected Speaker by a vote of one hundred and
fifty-five against fifty-eight for other candidates.  This overpowering
majority evinced the confidence which his character inspired, and which,
during his whole career, it has invariably commanded, in advance of what
might be termed positive proof, although the result has never failed to
justify it.  I still recollect his description of the feelings with which
he entered on his arduous duties--the feverish night that preceded his
taking the chair--the doubt, the struggle with himself--all ending in
perfect calmness, full self-possession, and free power of action when the
crisis actually came.

He had all the natural gifts that adapted him for the post; courtesy,
firmness, quickness and accuracy of judgment, and a clearness of mental
perception that brought its own regularity into the scene of confused and
entangled debate; and to these qualities he added whatever was to be
attained by laborious study of parliamentary rules.  His merit as a
presiding officer was universally acknowledged.  It is rare that a man
combines so much impulse with so great a power of regulating the impulses
of himself and others as Franklin Pierce.  The faculty, here exercised
and improved, of controlling an assembly while agitated by tumultuous
controversy, was afterwards called into play upon a higher field; for,
during his congressional service, Pierce was often summoned to preside in
committee of the whole, when a turbulent debate was expected to demand
peculiar energy in the chair.

He was elected a member of Congress in 1833, being young for the station,
as he has always been for every public station that he has filled.  A
different kind of man--a man conscious that accident alone had elevated
him, and therefore nervously anxious to prove himself equal to his
fortunes--would thus have been impelled to spasmodic efforts.  He would
have thrust himself forward in debate, taking the word out of the mouths
of renowned orators, and thereby winning notoriety, as at least the
glittering counterfeit of true celebrity.  Had Pierce, with his genuine
ability, practised this course; had he possessed even an ordinary love of
display, and had he acted upon it with his inherent tact and skill,
taking advantage of fair occasions to prove the power and substance that
were in him, it would greatly have facilitated the task of his
biographer.

To aim at personal distinction, however, as an object independent of the
public service, would have been contrary to all the foregone and
subsequent manifestations of his life.  He was never wanting to the
occasion; but he waited for the occasion to bring him inevitably forward.
When he spoke, it was not only because he was fully master of the
subject, but because the exigency demanded him, and because no other and
older man could perform the same duty as well as himself.  Of the copious
eloquence--and some of it, no doubt, of a high order--which Buncombe has
called forth, not a paragraph, nor a period, is attributable to Franklin
Pierce.  He had no need of these devices to fortify his constituents in
their high opinion of him; nor did he fail to perceive that such was not
the method to acquire real weight in the body of which he was a member.
In truth, he has no fluency of words, except when an earnest meaning and
purpose supply their own expression.  Every one of his speeches in
Congress, and, we may say, in every other hall of oratory, or on any
stump that he may have mounted, was drawn forth by the perception that it
was needed, was directed to a full exposition of the subject, and (rarest
of all) was limited by what he really had to say.  Even the graces of the
orator were never elaborated, never assumed for their own sake, but were
legitimately derived from the force of his conceptions, and from the
impulsive warmth which accompanies the glow of thought.  Owing to these
peculiarities,--for such, unfortunately, they may be termed, in reference
to what are usually the characteristics of a legislative career,--his
position before the country was less conspicuous than that of many men
who could claim nothing like Pierce’s actual influence in the national
councils.  His speeches, in their muscular texture and close grasp of
their subject, resembled the brief but pregnant arguments and expositions
of the sages of the Continental Congress, rather than the immeasurable
harangues which are now the order of the day.

His congressional life, though it made comparatively so little show, was
full of labor, directed to substantial objects.  He was a member of the
judiciary and other important committees; and the drudgery of the
committee room, where so much of the real public business of the country
is transacted, fell in large measure to his lot.  Thus, even as a
legislator, he may be said to have been a man of deeds, not words; and
when he spoke upon any subject with which his duty, as chairman or member
of a committee, had brought him in relation, his words had the weight of
deeds, from the meaning, the directness, and the truth, that he conveyed
into them.  His merits made themselves known and felt in the sphere where
they were exercised; and he was early appreciated by one who seldom erred
in his estimate of men, whether in their moral or intellectual aspect.
His intercourse with President Jackson was frequent and free, and marked
by friendly regard on the part of the latter.  In the stormiest periods
of his administration, Pierce came frankly to his aid.  The confidence
then established was never lost; and when Jackson was on his death-bed,
being visited by a gentleman from the North (himself formerly a
democratic member of Congress), the old hero spoke with energy of
Franklin Pierce’s ability and patriotism, and remarked, as with prophetic
foresight of his young friend’s destiny, that “the interests of the
country would be safe in such hands.”

One of President Jackson’s measures, which had Pierce’s approval and
support, was his veto of the Maysville Road Bill.  This bill was part of
a system of vast public works, principally railroads and canals, which it
was proposed to undertake at the expense of the national treasury--a
policy not then of recent origin, but which had been fostered by John
Quincy Adams, and had attained a gigantic growth at the close of his
Presidency.  The estimate of works undertaken or projected, at the
commencement of Jackson’s administration, amounted to considerably more
than a hundred millions of dollars.  The expenditure of this enormous
sum, and doubtless other incalculable amounts, in progressive increase,
was to be for purposes often of unascertained utility, and was to pass
through the agents and officers of the federal government--a means of
political corruption not safely to be trusted even in the purest hands.
The peril to the individuality of the states, from a system tending so
directly to consolidate the powers of government towards a common centre,
was obvious.  The result might have been, with the lapse of time and the
increased activity of the disease, to place the capital of our federative
Union in a position resembling that of imperial Rome, where each once
independent state was a subject province, and all the highways of the
world were said to meet in her forum.  It was against this system, so
dangerous to liberty and to public and private integrity, that Jackson
declared war, by the famous Maysville veto.

It would be an absurd interpretation of Pierce’s course, in regard to
this and similar measures, to suppose him hostile either to internal or
coastwise improvements, so far as they may legitimately be the business
of the general government.  He was aware of the immense importance of our
internal commerce, and was ever ready to vote such appropriations as
might be necessary for promoting it, when asked for in an honest spirit,
and at points where they were really needed.  He doubted, indeed, the
constitutional power of Congress to undertake, by building roads through
the wilderness, or opening unfrequented rivers, to create commerce where
it did not yet exist; but he never denied or questioned the right and
duty to remove obstructions in the way of inland trade, and to afford it
every facility, when the nature and necessity of things had brought it
into genuine existence.  And he agreed with the best and wisest statesmen
in believing that this distinction involved the true principle on which
legislation, for the purpose here discussed, should proceed.

While a member of the House of Representatives, he delivered a forcible
speech against the bill authorizing appropriations for the Military
Academy at West Point.  He was decidedly opposed to that institution as
then, and at present organized.  We allude to the subject in illustration
of the generous frankness with which, years afterwards, when the battle
smoke of Mexico had baptized him also a soldier, he acknowledged himself
in the wrong, and bore testimony to the brilliant services which the
graduates of the Academy, trained to soldiership from boyhood, had
rendered to their country.  And if he has made no other such
acknowledgment of past error, committed in his legislative capacity, it
is but fair to believe that it is because his reason and conscience
accuse him of no other wrong.

It was while in the lower house of Congress that Franklin Pierce took
that stand on the slavery question from which he has never since swerved
a hair’s breadth.  He fully recognized, by his votes and by his voice,
the rights pledged to the South by the Constitution.  This, at the period
when he so declared himself, was comparatively an easy thing to do.  But
when it became more difficult, when the first imperceptible movement of
agitation had grown to be almost a convulsion, his course was still the
same.  Nor did he ever shun the obloquy that sometimes threatened to
pursue the northern man who dared to love that great and sacred reality--
his whole, united, native country--better than the mistiness of a
philanthropic theory.

He continued in the House of Representatives four years.  If, at this
period of his life, he rendered unobtrusive, though not unimportant,
services to the public, it must also have been a time of vast
intellectual advantage to himself.  Amidst great national affairs, he was
acquiring the best of all educations for future eminence and leadership.
In the midst of statesmen, he grew to be a statesman.  Studious, as all
his speeches prove him to be, of history, he beheld it demonstrating
itself before his eyes.  As regards this sort of training, much of its
good or ill effect depends on the natural force and depth of the man.
Many, no doubt, by early mixture with politics, become the mere
politicians of the moment,--a class of men sufficiently abundant among
us,--acquiring only a knack and cunning, which guide them tolerably well
through immediate difficulties, without instructing them in the great
rules of higher policy.  But when the actual observation of public
measures goes hand in hand with study, when the mind is capable of
comparing the present with its analogies in the past, and of grasping the
principle that belongs to both, this is to have history for a living
tutor.  If the student be fit for such instruction, he will be seen to
act afterwards with the elevation of a high ideal, and with the
expediency, the sagacity, the instinct of what is fit and practicable,
which make the advantage of the man of actual affairs over the mere
theorist.

And it was another advantage of his being brought early into the sphere
of national interests, and continuing there for a series of years, that
it enabled him to overcome any narrow and sectional prejudices.  Without
loving New England less, he loved the broad area of the country more.  He
thus retained that equal sentiment of patriotism for the whole land with
which his father had imbued him, and which is perhaps apt to be impaired
in the hearts of those who come late to the national legislature, after
long training in the narrower fields of the separate states.  His sense
of the value of the Union, which had been taught him at the fireside,
from earliest infancy, by the stories of patriotic valor that he there
heard, was now strengthened by friendly association with its
representatives from every quarter.  It is this youthful sentiment of
Americanism, so happily developed by after circumstances, that we see
operating through all his public life, and making him as tender of what
he considers due to the South as of the rights of his own land of hills.

Franklin Pierce had scarcely reached the legal age for such elevation,
when, in 1837, he was elected to the Senate of the United States.  He
took his seat at the commencement of the presidency of Mr. Van Buren.
Never before nor since has the Senate been more venerable for the array
of veteran and celebrated statesmen than at that time.  Calhoun, Webster,
and Clay had lost nothing of their intellectual might.  Benton, Silas
Wright, Woodbury, Buchanan, and Walker were members; and many even of the
less eminent names were such as have gained historic place--men of
powerful eloquence, and worthy to be leaders of the respective parties
which they espoused.  To this dignified body (composed of individuals
some of whom were older in political experience than he in his mortal
life) Pierce came as the youngest member of the Senate.  With his usual
tact and exquisite sense of propriety, he saw that it was not the time
for him to step forward prominently on this highest theatre in the land.
He beheld these great combatants doing battle before the eyes of the
nation, and engrossing its whole regards.  There was hardly an avenue to
reputation save what was occupied by one or another of those gigantic
figures.

Modes of public service remained, however, requiring high ability, but
with which few men of competent endowments would have been content to
occupy themselves.  Pierce had already demonstrated the possibility of
obtaining an enviable position among his associates, without the windy
notoriety which a member of Congress may readily manufacture for himself
by the lavish expenditure of breath that had been better spared.  In the
more elevated field of the Senate, he pursued the same course as while a
representative, and with more than equal results.

Among other committees, he was a member of that upon revolutionary
pensions.  Of this subject he made himself thoroughly master, and was
recognized by the Senate as an unquestionable authority.  In 1840, in
reference to several bills for the relief of claimants under the pension
law, he delivered a speech which finely illustrates as well the
sympathies as the justice of the man, showing how vividly he could feel,
and, at the same time, how powerless were his feelings to turn him aside
from the strict line of public integrity.  The merits and sacrifices of
the people of the Revolution have never been stated with more earnest
gratitude than in the following passage:--

“I am not insensible, Mr. President, of the advantages with which claims
of this character always come before Congress.  They are supposed to be
based on services for which no man entertains a higher estimate than
myself--services beyond all praise, and above all price.  But, while warm
and glowing with the glorious recollections which a recurrence to that
period of our history can never fail to awaken; while we cherish with
emotions of pride, reverence, and affection the memory of those brave men
who are no longer with us; while we provide, with a liberal hand, for
such as survive, and for the widows of the deceased; while we would
accord to the heirs, whether in the second or third generation, every
dollar to which they can establish a just claim,--I trust we shall not,
in the strong current of our sympathies, forget what becomes us as the
descendants of such men.  They would teach us to legislate upon our
judgment, upon our sober sense of right, and not upon our impulses or our
sympathies.  No, sir; we may act in this way, if we choose, when
dispensing our own means, but we are not at liberty to do it when
dispensing the means of our constituents.

“If we were to legislate upon our sympathies--yet more I will admit--if
we were to yield to that sense of just and grateful remuneration which
presses itself upon every man’s heart, there would be scarcely a limit
for our bounty.  The whole exchequer could not answer the demand.  To the
patriotism, the courage, and the sacrifices of the people of that day, we
owe, under Providence, all that we now most highly prize, and what we
shall transmit to our children as the richest legacy they can inherit.
The War of the Revolution, it has been justly remarked, was not a war of
armies merely--it was the war of nearly a whole people, and such a people
as the world had never before seen, in a death struggle for liberty.

“The losses, sacrifices, and sufferings of that period were common to all
classes and conditions of life.  Those who remained at home suffered
hardly less than those who entered upon the active strife.  The aged
father and another underwent not less than the son, who would have been
the comfort and stay of their declining years, now called to perform a
yet higher duty--to follow the standard of his bleeding country.  The
young mother, with her helpless children, excites not less deeply our
sympathies, contending with want, and dragging out years of weary and
toilsome days and anxious nights, than the husband in the field,
following the fortunes of our arms without the proper habiliments to
protect his person, or the requisite sustenance to support his strength.
Sir, I never think of that patient, enduring, self-sacrificing army,
which crossed the Delaware in December, 1777, marching barefooted upon
frozen ground to encounter the foe, and leaving bloody footprints for
miles behind then--I never think of their sufferings during that terrible
winter without involuntarily inquiring, Where then were their families?
Who lit up the cheerful fire upon their hearths at home?  Who spoke the
word of comfort and encouragement?  Nay, sir, who furnished protection
from the rigors of winter, and brought them the necessary means of
subsistence?’

“The true and simple answer to these questions would disclose an amount
of suffering and anguish, mental and physical, such as might not have
been found in the ranks of the armies--not even in the severest trial of
that fortitude which never faltered, and that power of endurance which
seemed to know no limit.  All this no man feels more deeply than I do.
But they were common sacrifices in a common cause, ultimately crowned
with the reward of liberty.  They have an everlasting claim upon our
gratitude, and are destined, as I trust, by their heroic example, to
exert an abiding influence upon our latest posterity.”

With this heartfelt recognition of the debt of gratitude due to those
excellent men, the senator enters into an analysis of the claims
presented, and proves them to be void of justice.  The whole speech is a
good exponent of his character; full of the truest sympathy, but, above
all things, just, and not to be misled, on the public behalf, by those
impulses that would be most apt to sway the private man.  The mere
pecuniary amount saved to the nation by his scrutiny into affairs of this
kind, though great, was, after all, but a minor consideration.  The
danger lay in establishing a corrupt system, and placing a wrong
precedent upon the statute book.  Instances might be adduced, on the
other hand, which show him not less scrupulous of the just rights of the
claimants than careful of the public interests.

Another subject upon which he came forward was the military establishment
and the natural defences of the country.  In looking through the columns
of the “Congressional Globe,” we find abundant evidences of Senator
Pierce’s laborious and unostentatious discharge of his duties--reports of
committees, brief remarks, and, here and there, a longer speech, always
full of matter, and evincing a thoroughly-digested knowledge of the
subject.  Not having been written out by himself, however, these speeches
are no fair specimens of his oratory, except as regards the train of
argument and substantial thought; and adhering very closely to the
business in hand, they seldom present passages that could be quoted,
without tearing them forcibly, as it were, out of the context, and thus
mangling the fragments which we might offer to the reader.  As we have
already remarked, he seems, as a debater, to revive the old type of the
Revolutionary Congress, or to bring back the noble days of the Long
Parliament of England, before eloquence had become what it is now, a
knack, and a thing valued for itself.  Like those strenuous orators, he
speaks with the earnestness of honest conviction, and out of the fervor
of his heart, and because the occasion and his deep sense of it constrain
him.

By the defeat of Mr. Van Buren, in the presidential election of 1840, the
administration of government was transferred, for the first time in
twelve years, to the Whigs.  An extra session of Congress was summoned to
assemble in June, 1841, by President Harrison, who, however, died before
it came together.  At this extra session, it was the purpose of the whig
party, under the leadership of Henry Clay, to overthrow all the great
measures which the successive democratic administrations had established.
The sub-treasury was to be demolished; a national bank was to be
incorporated; a high tariff of duties was to be imposed, for purposes of
protection and abundant revenue.  The whig administration possessed a
majority, both in the Senate and the House.  It was a dark period for the
Democracy, so long unaccustomed to defeat, and now beholding all that
they had won for the cause of national progress, after the arduous
struggle of so many years, apparently about to be swept away.

The sterling influence which Franklin Pierce now exercised is well
described in the following remarks of the Hon. A. O. P. Nicholson:--

“The power of an organized minority was never more clearly exhibited than
in this contest.  The democratic senators acted in strict concert,
meeting night after night for consultation, arranging their plan of
battle, selecting their champions for the coming day, assigning to each
man his proper duty, and looking carefully to the popular judgment for a
final victory.  In these consultations, no man’s voice was heard with
more profound respect than that of Franklin Pierce.  His counsels were
characterized by so thorough a knowledge of human nature, by so much
solid common sense, by such devotion to democratic principles, that,
although among the youngest of the senators, it was deemed important that
all their conclusions should be submitted to his sanction.

“Although known to be ardent in his temperament, he was also known to act
with prudence and caution.  His impetuosity in debate was only the result
of the deep convictions which controlled his mind.  He enjoyed the
unbounded confidence of Calhoun, Buchanan, Wright, Woodbury, Walker,
King, Benton, and indeed of the entire democratic portion of the Senate.
When he rose in the Senate or in the committee room, he was heard with
the profoundest attention; and again and again was he greeted by these
veteran Democrats as one of our ablest champions.  His speeches, during
this session, will compare with those of any other senator.  If it be
asked why he did not receive higher distinction, I answer, that such men
as Calhoun, Wright, Buchanan, and Woodbury were the acknowledged leaders
of the Democracy.  The eyes of the nation were on them.  The hopes of
their party were reposed in them.  The brightness of these luminaries was
too great to allow the brilliancy of so young a man to attract especial
attention.  But ask any one of these veterans how Franklin Pierce ranked
in the Senate, and he will tell you, that, to stand in the front rank for
talents, eloquence, and statesmanship, he only lacked a few more years.”

In the course of this session he made a very powerful speech in favor of
Mr. Buchanan’s resolution, calling on the President to furnish the names
of persons removed from office since the 4th of March, 1841.  The Whigs,
in 1840, as in the subsequent canvass of 1848, had professed a purpose to
abolish the system of official removals on account of political opinion,
but, immediately on coming into power, had commenced a proscription
infinitely beyond the example of the democratic party.  This course, with
an army of office-seekers besieging the departments, was unquestionably
difficult to avoid, and perhaps, on the whole, not desirable to be
avoided.  But it was rendered astounding by the sturdy effrontery with
which the gentlemen in power denied that their present practice had
falsified any of their past professions.  A few of the closing paragraphs
of Senator Pierce’s highly effective speech, being more easily separable
than the rest, may here be cited.

“One word more, and I leave this subject,--a painful one to me, from the
beginning to the end.  The senator from North Carolina, in the course of
his remarks the other day, asked, ‘Do gentlemen expect that their friends
are to be retained in office against the will of the nation?  Are they so
unreasonable as to expect what the circumstances and the necessity of the
case forbid?’  What our expectations were is not the question now; but
what were your pledges and promises before the people.  On a previous
occasion, the distinguished senator from Kentucky made a similar remark:
‘An ungracious task, but the nation demands it!’  Sir, this demand of the
nation,--this plea of STATE NECESSITY,--let me tell you, gentlemen, is as
old as the history of wrong and oppression.  It has been the standing
plea, the never-failing resort of despotism.

“The great Julius found it a convenient plea when he restored the dignity
of the Roman Senate, but destroyed its independence.  It gave countenance
to and justified all the atrocities of the Inquisition in Spain.  It
forced out the stifled groans that issued from the Black Hole of
Calcutta.  It was written in tears upon the Bridge of Sighs in Venice,
and pointed to those dark recesses upon whose gloomy thresholds there was
never seen a returning footprint.

“It was the plea of the austere and ambitious Strafford, in the days of
Charles I.  It filled the Bastile of France, and lent its sanction to the
terrible atrocities perpetrated there.  It was this plea that snatched
the mild, eloquent, and patriotic Camillo Desmoulins from his young and
beautiful wife, and hurried him to the guillotine with thousands of
others equally unoffending and innocent.  It was upon this plea that the
greatest of generals, if not men,--you cannot mistake me,--I mean him,
the presence of whose very ashes within the last few months sufficed to
stir the hearts of a continent,--it was upon this plea that he abjured
the noble wife who had thrown light and gladness around his humbler days,
and, by her own lofty energies and high intellect, had encouraged his
aspirations.  It was upon this plea that he committed that worst and most
fatal acts of his eventful life.  Upon this, too, he drew around his
person the imperial purple.  It has in all times, and in every age, been
the foe of liberty and the indispensable stay of usurpation.

“Where were the chains of despotism ever thrown around the freedom of
speech and of the press but on this plea of STATE NECESSITY?  Let the
spirit of Charles X. and of his ministers answer.

“It is cold, selfish, heartless, and has always been regardless of age,
sex, condition, services, or any of the incidents of life that appeal to
patriotism or humanity.  Wherever its authority has been acknowledged, it
has assailed men who stood by their country when she needed strong arms
and bold hearts, and has assailed them when, maimed and disabled in her
service, they could no longer brandish a weapon in her defence.  It has
afflicted the feeble and dependent wife for the imaginary faults of the
husband.  It has stricken down Innocence in its beauty, Youth in its
freshness, Manhood in its vigor, and Age in its feebleness and
decrepitude.  Whatever other plea or apology may be set up for the
sweeping, ruthless exercise of this civil guillotine at the present day,
in the name of LIBERTY let us be spared this fearful one of STATE
NECESSITY, in this early age of the Republic, upon the floor of the
American Senate, in the face of a people yet free!”

In June, 1842, he signified his purpose of retiring from the Senate.

It was now more than sixteen years since the author of this sketch had
been accustomed to meet Frank Pierce (that familiar name, which the
nation is adopting as one of its household words) in habits of daily
intercourse.  Our modes of life had since been as different as could well
be imagined; our culture and labor were entirely unlike; there was hardly
a single object or aspiration in common between us.  Still we had
occasionally met, and always on the old ground of friendly confidence.
There were sympathies that had not been suffered to die out.  Had we
lived more constantly together, it is not impossible that the relation
might have been changed by the various accidents and attritions of life;
but having no mutual events, and few mutual interests, the tie of early
friendship remained the same as when we parted.  The modifications which
I saw in his character were those of growth and development; new
qualities came out, or displayed themselves more prominently, but always
in harmony with those heretofore known.  Always I was sensible of
progress in him; a characteristic--as, I believe, has been said in the
foregoing pages--more perceptible in Franklin Pierce than in any other
person with whom I have been acquainted.  He widened, deepened, rose to a
higher point, and thus ever made himself equal to the ever-heightening
occasion.  This peculiarity of intellectual growth, continued beyond the
ordinary period, has its analogy in his physical constitution--it being a
fact that he continued to grow in stature between his twenty-first and
twenty-fifth years.

He had not met with that misfortune, which, it is to be feared, befalls
many men who throw their ardor into politics.  The pursuit had taken
nothing from the frankness of his nature; now, as ever, he used direct
means to gain honorable ends; and his subtlety--for, after all, his heart
and purpose were not such as he that runs may read--had the depth of
wisdom, and never any quality of cunning.  In great part, this
undeteriorated manhood was due to his original nobility of nature.  Yet
it may not be unjust to attribute it, in some degree, to the singular
good fortune of his life.  He had never, in all his career, found it
necessary to stoop.  Office had sought him; he had not begged it, nor
manoeuvred for it, nor crept towards it--arts which too frequently bring
a man, morally bowed and degraded, to a position which should be one of
dignity, but in which he will vainly essay to stand upright.

In our earlier meetings, after Pierce had begun to come forward in public
life, I could discern that his ambition was aroused.  He felt a young
man’s enjoyment of success, so early and so distinguished.  But as years
went on, such motives seemed to be less influential with him.  He was
cured of ambition, as, one after another, its objects came to him
unsought.  His domestic position, likewise, had contributed to direct his
tastes and wishes towards the pursuits of private life.  In 1834 he had
married Jane Means, a daughter of the Rev. Dr. Appleton, a former
president of Bowdoin College.  Three sons, the first of whom died in
early infancy, were born to him; and, having hitherto been kept poor by
his public service, he no doubt became sensible of the expediency of
making some provision for the future.  Such, it may be presumed, were the
considerations that induced his resignation of the senatorship, greatly
to the regret of all parties.  The senators gathered around him as he was
about to quit the chamber; political opponents took leave of him as of a
personal friend; and no departing member has ever retired from that
dignified body amid warmer wishes for his happiness than those that
attended Franklin Pierce.

His father had died three years before, in 1839, at the mansion which he
built, after the original log-cabin grew too narrow for his rising family
and fortunes.  The mansion was spacious, as the liberal hospitality of
the occupant required, and stood on a little eminence, surrounded by
verdure and abundance, and a happy population, where, half a century
before, the revolutionary soldier had come alone into the wilderness, and
levelled the primeval forest trees.  After being spared to behold the
distinction of his son, he departed this life at the age of eighty-one
years, in perfect peace, and, until within a few hours of his death, in
the full possession of his intellectual powers.  His last act was one of
charity to a poor neighbor--a fitting close to a life that had abounded
in such deeds.  Governor Pierce was a man of admirable qualities--brave,
active, public-spirited, endowed with natural authority, courteous yet
simple in his manners; and in his son we may perceive these same
attributes, modified and softened by a finer texture of character,
illuminated by higher intellectual culture, and polished by a larger
intercourse with the world, but as substantial and sterling as in the
good old patriot.

Franklin Pierce had removed from Hillsborough in 1838, and taken up his
residence at Concord, the capital of New Hampshire.  On this occasion,
the citizens of his native town invited him to a public dinner, in token
of their affection and respect.  In accordance with his usual taste, he
gratefully accepted the kindly sentiment, but declined the public
demonstration of it.




CHAPTER III.

HIS SUCCESS AT THE BAR.


Franklin Pierce’s earliest effort at the bar, as we have already
observed, was an unsuccessful one; but instead of discouraging him, the
failure had only served to awaken the consciousness of latent power, and
the resolution to bring it out.  Since those days, he had indeed gained
reputation as a lawyer.  So much, however, was the tenor of his legal
life broken up by the months of public service subtracted from each year,
and such was the inevitable tendency of his thoughts towards political
subjects, that he could but very partially avail himself of the
opportunities of professional advancement.  But on retiring from the
Senate he appears to have started immediately into full practice.  Though
the people of New Hampshire already knew him well, yet his brilliant
achievements as an advocate brought him more into their view, and into
closer relations with them, than he had ever before been.  He now met his
countrymen, as represented in the jury box, face to face, and made them
feel what manner of man he was.  Their sentiment towards him soon grew to
be nothing short of enthusiasm; love, pride, the sense of brotherhood,
affectionate sympathy, and perfect trust, all mingled in it.  It was the
influence of a great heart pervading the general heart, and throbbing
with it in the same pulsation.

It has never been the writer’s good fortune to listen to one of Franklin
Pierce’s public speeches, whether at the bar or elsewhere; nor, by
diligent inquiry, has he been able to gain a very definite idea of the
mode in which he produces his effects.  To me, therefore, his forensic
displays are in the same category with those of Patrick Henry, or any
other orator whose tongue, beyond the memory of man, has moulded into
dust.  His power results, no doubt, in great measure, from the
earnestness with which he imbues himself with the conception of his
client’s cause; insomuch that he makes it entirely his own, and, never
undertaking a case which he believes to be unjust, contends with his
whole heart and conscience, as well as intellectual force, for victory.
His labor in the preparation of his cases is said to be unremitting; and
he throws himself with such energy into a trial of importance as wholly
to exhaust his strength.

Few lawyers, probably, have been interested in a wider variety of
business than he; its scope comprehends the great causes where immense
pecuniary interests are concerned--from which, however, he is always
ready to turn aside, to defend the humble rights of the poor man, or give
his protection to one unjustly accused.  As one of my correspondents
observes, “When an applicant has interested him by a recital of fraud or
wrong, General Pierce never investigates the man’s estate before engaging
in his business; neither does he calculate whose path he may cross.  I
have been privy to several instances of the noblest independence on his
part, in pursuing, to the disrepute of those who stood well in the
community, the weal of an obscure client with a good cause.”

In the practice of the law, as Pierce pursued it, in one or another of
the court houses of New Hampshire, the rumor of each successive struggle
and success resounded over the rugged hills, and perished without a
record.  Those mighty efforts, into which he put all his strength, before
a county court, and addressing a jury of yeomen, have necessarily been,
as regards the evanescent memory of any particular trial, like the
eloquence that is sometimes poured out in a dream.  In other spheres of
action, with no greater expenditure of mental energy, words have been
spoken that endure from age to age--deeds done that harden into history.
But this, perhaps the most earnest portion of Franklin Pierce’s life, has
left few materials from which it can be written.  There is before me only
one report of a case in which he was engaged--the defence of the
Wentworths, at a preliminary examination, on a charge of murder.  His
speech occupied four hours in the delivery, and handles a confused medley
of facts with masterly skill, bringing them to bear one upon another, and
making the entire mass, as it were, transparent, so that the truth may be
seen through it.  The whole hangs together too closely to permit the
quotation of passages.

The writer has been favored with communications from two individuals, who
have enjoyed the best of opportunities to become acquainted with General
Pierce’s character as a lawyer.  The following is the graceful and
generous tribute of a gentleman, who, of late, more frequently than any
other, has been opposed to him at the bar:--

“General Pierce cannot be said to have commenced his career at the bar in
earnest until after his resignation of the office of senator, in 1842.
And it is a convincing proof of his eminent powers that he at once placed
himself in the very first rank at a bar so distinguished for ability as
that of New Hampshire.  It is confessed by all who have the means of
knowledge and judgment on this subject, that in no state of the Union are
causes tried with more industry of preparation, skill, perseverance,
energy, or vehement effort to succeed.

“During much of this time, my practice in our courts was suspended; and
it is only within three or four years that I have had opportunities of
intimately knowing his powers as an advocate, by being associated with
him at the bar; and, most of all, of appreciating and feeling that power,
by being opposed to him in the trial of causes before juries.  Far more
than any other man, whom it has been my fortune to meet, he makes himself
felt by one who tries a case against him.  From the first, he impresses
on his opponent a consciousness of the necessity of a deadly struggle,
not only in order to win the victory, but to avoid defeat.

“His vigilance and perseverance, omitting nothing in the preparation and
introduction of testimony, even to the minutest details, which can be
useful to his clients; his watchful attention, seizing on every weak
point in the opposite case; his quickness and readiness; his sound and
excellent judgment; his keen insight into character and motives, his
almost intuitive knowledge of men; his ingenious and powerful
cross-examinations; his adroitness in turning aside troublesome
testimony, and availing himself of every favorable point; his quick sense
of the ridiculous; his pathetic appeals to the feelings; his sustained
eloquence, and remarkably energetic declamation,--all mark him for a
‘leader.’

“From the beginning to the end of the trial of a case, nothing with him
is neglected which can by possibility honorably conduce to success.  His
manner is always respectful and deferential to the court, captivating to
the jury, and calculated to conciliate the good will even of those who
would be otherwise indifferent spectators.  In short, he plays the part
of a successful actor; successful, because he always identifies himself
with his part, and in him it is not acting.

“Perhaps, as would be expected by those who know his generosity of heart,
and his scorn of everything like oppression or extortion, he is most
powerful in his indignant denunciations of fraud or injustice, and his
addresses to the feelings in behalf of the poor and lowly, and the
sufferers under wrong.  I remember to have heard of his extraordinary
power on one occasion, when a person who had offered to procure arrears
of a pension for revolutionary services had appropriated to himself a
most unreasonable share of the money.  General Pierce spoke of the
frequency of these instances, and, before the numerous audience, offered
his aid, freely and gratuitously, to redress the wrongs of any widow or
representative of a revolutionary officer or soldier who had been made
the subject of such extortion.

“The reply of the poor man, in the anecdote related by Lord Campbell of
Harry Erskine, would be applicable, as exhibiting a feeling kindred to
that with which General Pierce is regarded: ‘There’s no a puir man in a’
Scotland need to want a friend or fear an enemy, sae lang as Harry
Erskine lives!’”

We next give his aspect as seen from the bench, in the following
carefully prepared and discriminating article, from the chief justice of
New Hampshire:--

“In attempting to estimate the character and qualifications of Mr. Pierce
as a lawyer and an advocate, we undertake a delicate, but, at the same
time, an agreeable task.  The profession of the law, practised by men of
liberal and enlightened minds, and unstained by the sordidness which more
or less affects all human pursuits, invariably confers honor upon and is
honored by its followers.  An integrity above suspicion, an eloquence
alike vigorous and persuasive, and an intuitive sagacity have earned for
Mr. Pierce the reputation that always follows them.

“The last case of paramount importance in which he was engaged as counsel
was that of Morrison v. Philbrick, tried in the month of February, 1852,
at the Court of Common Pleas for the county of Belknap.  There was on
both sides an array of eminent professional talent, Messrs. Pierce, Bell,
and Bellows appearing for the defendant, and Messrs. Atherton and Whipple
for the plaintiff.  The case was one of almost unequalled interest to the
public generally, and to the inhabitants of the country lying around the
lower part of Lake Winnipiscogee.  A company, commonly called the Lake
Company, had become the owners of many of the outlets of the streams
supplying the lake, and by means of their works at such places, and at
Union Bridge, a few miles below, were enabled to keep back the waters of
the lake, and to use them as occasion should require to supply the mills
at Lowell.  The plaintiff alleged that the dam at Union Bridge had caused
the water to rise higher than was done by the dam that existed in the
year 1828, and that he was essentially injured thereby.  The case had
been on trial nearly seven weeks.  Evidence equivalent to the testimony
of one hundred and eighty witnesses had been laid before the jury.  Upon
this immense mass of facts, involving a great number of issues, Mr.
Pierce was to meet his most formidable opponent in the state, Mr.
Atherton.  In that gentleman are united many of the rarest qualifications
of an advocate.  Of inimitable self-possession; with a coolness and
clearness of intellect which no sudden emergencies can disturb; with that
confidence in his resources which nothing but native strength, aided by
the most thorough training, can bestow; with a felicity and fertility of
illustration, the result alike of an exquisite natural taste and a
cultivation of those studies which refine while they strengthen the mind
for forensic contests,--Mr. Atherton’s argument was listened to with an
earnestness and interest which showed the conviction of his audience that
no ordinary man was addressing them.

“No one who witnessed that memorable trial will soon forget the argument
of Mr. Pierce on that occasion.  He was the counsel for the defendant,
and was therefore to precede Mr. Atherton.  He was to analyze and unfold
to the jury this vast body of evidence under the watchful eyes of an
opponent at once enterprising and cautious, and before whom it was
necessary to be both bold and skilful.  He was to place himself in the
position of the jury, to see the evidence as they would be likely to
regard it, to understand the character of their minds and what views
would be the most likely to impress them.  He was not only to be familiar
with his own case, but to anticipate that of his opponent, and answer as
he best might the argument of the counsel.  And most admirably did he
discharge the duties he had assumed on behalf of his client.  Eminently
graceful and attractive in his manner at all times, his demeanor was then
precisely what it should have been, showing a manly confidence in himself
and his case, and a courteous deference to the tribunal he was
addressing.  His erect and manly figure, his easy and unembarrassed air,
bespoke the favorable attention of his audience.  His earnest devotion to
his cause, his deep emotion, evidently suppressed, but for that very
reason all the more interesting, diffused themselves like electricity
through his hearers.  And when, as often happened, in the course of his
argument, his clear and musical accents fell upon the ear in eloquent and
pointed sentences, gratifying the taste while they satisfied the reason,
no man could avoid turning to his neighbor, and expressing by his looks
that pleasure which the very depth of his interest forbade him to express
in words.  And when the long trial was over, every one remembered with
satisfaction that these two distinguished gentlemen had met each other
during a most exciting and exhausting trial of seven weeks, and that no
unkind words, or captious passages, had occurred between them to diminish
their mutual respect, or that in which they were held by their
fellow-citizens.

“In the above remarks, we have indicated a few of Mr. Pierce’s
characteristics as an advocate; but he possesses other endowments, to
which we have not alluded.  In the first place, as he is a perfectly
fearless man, so he is a perfectly fearless advocate; and true courage is
as necessary to the civilian as to the soldier, and smiles and frowns Mr.
Pierce disregards alike in the undaunted discharge of his duty.  He never
fears to uphold his client, however unpopular his cause may seem to be
for the moment.  It is this courage which kindles his eloquence, inspires
his conduct, and gives direction and firmness to his skill.  This it is
which impels him onward, at all risks, to lay bare every ‘mystery of
iniquity’ which he believes is threatening his case.  He does not ask
himself whether his opponent be not a man of wealth and influence, of
whom it might be for his interest to speak with care and circumspection;
but he devotes himself with a ready zeal to his cause, careless of aught
but how he may best discharge his duty.  His argumentative powers are of
the highest order.  He never takes before the court a position which he
believes untenable.  He has a quick and sure perception of his points,
and the power of enforcing them by apt and pertinent illustrations.  He
sees the relative importance and weight of different views, and can
assign to each its proper place, and brings forward the main body of his
reasoning in prominent relief, without distracting the attention by
unimportant particulars.  And above all, he has the good sense, so rarely
shown by many, to stop when he has said all that is necessary for the
elucidation of his subject.  With a proper confidence in his own
perceptions, he states his views so pertinently and in such precise and
logical terms, that they cannot but be felt and appreciated.  He never
mystifies; he never attempts to pervert words from their proper and
legitimate meaning to answer a temporary purpose.

“His demeanor at the bar nay be pronounced faultless.  His courtesy in
the court house, like his courtesy elsewhere, is that which springs from
self-respect and from a kindly heart, disposing its owner to say and do
kindly things.  But he would be a courageous man who, presuming upon the
affability of Mr. Pierce’s manner, would venture a second time to attack
him; for he would long remember the rebuke that followed his first
attack.  There is a ready repartee and a quick and cutting sarcasm in his
manner when he chooses to display it, which it requires a man of
considerable nerve to withstand.  He is peculiarly happy in the
examination of witnesses--that art in which so few excel.  He never
browbeats, he never attempts to terrify.  He is never rude or
discourteous.  But the equivocating witness soon discovers that his
falsehood is hunted out of its recesses with an unsparing determination.
If he is dogged and surly, he is met by a spirit as resolute as his own.
If he is smooth and plausible, the veil is lifted from him by a firm but
graceful hand.  If he is pompous and vain, no ridicule was ever more
perfect than that to which he listens with astonished and mortified ears.

“The eloquence of Mr. Pierce is of a character not to be easily
forgotten.  He understands men, their passions and their feelings.  He
knows the way to their hearts, and can make them vibrate to his touch.
His language always attracts the hearer.  A graceful and manly carriage,
bespeaking him at once the gentleman and the true man; a manner warmed by
the ardent glow of an earnest belief; an enunciation ringing, distinct,
and impressive beyond that of most men; a command of brilliant and
expressive language; and an accurate taste, together with a sagacious and
instinctive insight into the points of his case, are the secrets of his
success.  It is thus that audiences are moved and truth ascertained; and
he will ever be the most successful advocate who can approach the nearest
to this lofty and difficult position.

“Mr. Pierce’s views as a constitutional lawyer are such as have been
advocated by the ablest minds of America.  They are those which, taking
their rise in the heroic age of the country, were transmitted to him by a
noble father, worthy of the times in which he lived, worthy of that
Revolution which he assisted in bringing about.  He believes that the
Constitution was made, not to be subverted, but to be sacredly preserved;
that a republic is perfectly consistent with the conservation of law, of
rational submission to right authority, and of true self-government.
Equally removed from that malignant hostility to order which
characterizes the demagogues who are eager to rise upon the ruins even of
freedom, and from that barren and bigoted narrowness which would oppose
all rational freedom of opinion, he is, in its loftiest and most
ennobling sense, a friend of that Union, without which the honored name
of American citizen would become a by-word among the nations.  And if, as
we fervently pray and confidently expect he will, Mr. Pierce shall
display before the great tribunals of the nation the courage, the
consistency, the sagacity, and the sense of honor, which have already
secured for him so many thousands of devoted friends, and which have
signalized both his private and professional life, his administration
will long be held in grateful remembrance as one of which the sense of
right and the sagacity to perceive it, a clear insight into the true
destinies of the country and a determination to uphold them at whatever
sacrifice, were the predominant characteristics.”

It may appear singular that Franklin Pierce has not taken up his
residence in some metropolis, where his great forensic abilities would so
readily find a more conspicuous theatre, and a far richer remuneration
than heretofore.  He himself, it is understood, has sometimes
contemplated a removal, and, two or three years since, had almost
determined on settling in Baltimore.  But his native state, where he is
known so well, and regarded with so much familiar affection, which he has
served so faithfully, and which rewards him so generously with its
confidence, New Hampshire, with its granite hills, must always be his
home.  He will dwell there, except when public duty for a season shall
summon him away; he will die there, and give his dust to its soil.

It was at his option, in 1846, to accept the highest legal position in
the country, setting aside the bench, and the one which undoubtedly would
most have gratified his professional aspirations.  President Polk, with
whom he had been associated on the most friendly terms in Congress, now
offered him the post of attorney general of the United States.  “In
tendering to you this position in my cabinet,” writes the President, “I
have been governed by the high estimate which I place upon your character
and eminent qualifications to fill it.”  The letter, in which this
proposal is declined, shows so much of the writer’s real self that we
quote a portion of it.

“Although the early years of my manhood were devoted to public life, it
was never really suited to my taste.  I longed, as I am sure you must
often have done, for the quiet and independence that belong only to the
private citizen; and now, at forty, I feel that desire stronger than
ever.

“Coming so unexpectedly as this offer does, it would be difficult, if not
impossible, to arrange the business of an extensive practice, between
this and the first of November, in a manner at all satisfactory to
myself, or to those who have committed their interests to my care, and
who rely on my services.  Besides, you know that Mrs. Pierce’s health,
while at Washington, was very delicate.  It is, I fear, even more so now;
and the responsibilities which the proposed change would necessarily
impose upon her ought, probably, in themselves, to constitute an
insurmountable objection to leaving our quiet home for a public station
at Washington.

“When I resigned my seat in the Senate in 1842, I did it with the fixed
purpose never again to be voluntarily separated from my family for any
considerable length of time, except at the call of my country in time of
war; and yet this consequence, for the reason before stated, and on
account of climate, would be very likely to result from my acceptance.

“These are some of the considerations which have influenced my decision.
You will, I am sure, appreciate my motives.  You will not believe that I
have weighed my personal convenience and case against the public
interest, especially as the office is one which, if not sought, would be
readily accepted by gentlemen who could bring to your aid attainments and
qualifications vastly superior to mine.”

Previous to the offer of the attorney-generalship, the appointment of
United States Senator had been tendered to Pierce by Governor Steele, and
declined.  It is unquestionable that, at this period, he hoped and
expected to spend a life of professional toil in a private station,
undistinguished except by the exercise of his great talents in peaceful
pursuits.  But such was not his destiny.  The contingency to which he
referred in the above letter, as the sole exception to his purpose of
never being separated from his family, was now about to occur.  Nor did
he fail to comport himself as not only that intimation, but the whole
tenor of his character, gave reason to anticipate.

During the years embraced in this chapter,--between 1842 and 1847,--he
had constantly taken an efficient interest in the politics of the state,
but had uniformly declined the honors which New Hampshire was at all
times ready to confer upon him.  A democratic convention nominated him
for governor, but could not obtain his acquiescence.  One of the
occasions on which he most strenuously exerted himself was in holding the
democratic party loyal to its principles, in opposition to the course of
John P. Hale.  This gentleman, then a representative in Congress, had
broken with his party on no less important a point than the annexation of
Texas.  He has never since acted with the Democracy, and has long been a
leader of the free soil party.

In 1844 died Frank Robert, son of Franklin Pierce, aged four years, a
little boy of rare beauty and promise, and whose death was the greatest
affliction that his father has experienced.  His only surviving child is
a son, now eleven years old.




CHAPTER IV.

THE MEXICAN WAR.


When Franklin Pierce declined the honorable offer of the
attorney-generalship of the United States, he intimated that there might
be one contingency in which he would feel it his duty to give up the
cherished purpose of spending the remainder of his life in a private
station.  That exceptional case was brought about, in 1847, by the
Mexican War.  He showed his readiness to redeem the pledge by enrolling
himself as the earliest volunteer of a company raised in Concord, and
went through the regular drill, with his fellow-soldiers, as a private in
the ranks.  On the passage of the bill for the increase of the army, he
received the appointment of colonel of the Ninth Regiment, which was the
quota of New England towards the ten that were to be raised.  And shortly
afterwards,--in March, 1847,--he was commissioned as brigadier-general in
the army; his brigade consisting of regiments from the extreme north, the
extreme west, and the extreme south of the Union.

There is nothing in any other country similar to what we see in our own,
when the blast of the trumpet at once converts men of peaceful pursuits
into warriors.  Every war in which America has been engaged has done
this; the valor that wins our battles is not the trained hardihood of
veterans, but a native and spontaneous fire; and there is surely a
chivalrous beauty in the devotion of the citizen soldier to his country’s
cause, which the man who makes arms his profession, and is but doing his
regular business on the field of battle, cannot pretend to rival.  Taking
the Mexican War as a specimen, this peculiar composition of an American
army, as well in respect to its officers as its private soldiers, seems
to create a spirit of romantic adventure which more than supplies the
place of disciplined courage.

The author saw General Pierce in Boston, on the eve of his departure for
Vera Cruz.  He had been intensely occupied, since his appointment, in
effecting the arrangements necessary on leaving his affairs, as well as
by the preparations, military and personal, demanded by the expedition.
The transports were waiting at Newport to receive the troops.  He was now
in the midst of bustle, with some of the officers of his command about
him, mingled with the friends whom he was to leave behind.  The severest
point of the crisis was over, for he had already bidden his family
farewell.  His spirits appeared to have risen with the occasion.  He was
evidently in his element; nor, to say the truth, dangerous as was the
path before him, could it be regretted that his life was now to have the
opportunity of that species of success which--in his youth, at least--he
had considered the best worth struggling for.  He looked so fit to be a
soldier, that it was impossible to doubt--not merely his good conduct,
which was as certain before the event as afterwards, but--his good
fortune in the field, and his fortunate return.

He sailed from Newport on the 27th of May, in the bark Kepler, having on
board three companies of the Ninth Regiment of Infantry, together with
Colonel Ransom, its commander, and the officers belonging to the
detachment.  The passage was long and tedious, with protracted calms, and
so smooth a sea that a sail-boat might have performed the voyage in
safety.  The Kepler arrived at Vera Cruz in precisely a month after her
departure from the United States, without speaking a single vessel from
the south during her passage, and, of course, receiving no intelligence
as to the position and state of the army which these reenforcements were
to join.

From a journal kept by General Pierce, and intended only for the perusal
of his family and friends, we present some extracts.  They are mere hasty
jottings-down in camp, and at the intervals of weary marches, but will
doubtless bring the reader closer to the man than any narrative which we
could substitute.  [In this reprint it has been thought expedient to omit
the passages from General Pierce’s journal.]

          *     *     *     *     *     *

General Pierce’s journal here terminates.  In its clear and simple
narrative the reader cannot fail to see--although it was written with no
purpose of displaying them--the native qualities of a born soldier,
together with the sagacity of an experienced one.  He had proved himself,
moreover, physically apt for war, by his easy endurance of the fatigues
of the march; every step of which (as was the case with few other
officers) was performed either on horseback or on foot.  Nature, indeed,
has endowed him with a rare elasticity both of mind and body; he springs
up from pressure like a well-tempered sword.  After the severest toil, a
single night’s rest does as much for him, in the way of refreshment, as a
week could do for most other men.

His conduct on this adventurous march received the high encomiums of
military men, and was honored with the commendation of the great soldier
who is now his rival in the presidential contest.  He reached the main
army at Puebla on the 7th of August, with twenty-four hundred men, in
fine order, and without the loss of a single wagon.




CHAPTER V.

HIS SERVICES IN THE VALLEY OF MEXICO.


General Scott, who was at Puebla with the main army awaiting this
reenforcement, began his march towards the city of Mexico on the day
after General Pierce’s arrival.  The battle of Contreras was fought on
the 19th of August.

The enemy’s force consisted of about seven thousand men, posted in a
strongly-intrenched camp, under General Valencia, one of the bravest and
ablest of the Mexican commanders.  The object of the commanding general
appears to have been to cut off the communications of these detached
troops with Santa Anna’s main army, and thus to have them entirely at his
mercy.  For this purpose a portion of the American forces were ordered to
move against Valencia’s left flank, and, by occupying strong positions in
the villages and on the roads towards the city, to prevent reenforcements
from reaching him.  In the mean time, to draw the enemy’s attention from
this movement, a vigorous onset was made upon his front; and as the
operations upon his flank were not immediately and fully carried out
according to the plan, this front demonstration assumed the character of
a fierce and desperate attack, upon which the fortunes of the day much
depended.  General Pierce’s brigade formed a part of the force engaged in
this latter movement, in which four thousand newly-recruited men, unable
to bring their artillery to bear, contended against seven thousand
disciplined soldiers, protected by intrenchments, and showering round
shot and shells against the assailing troops.

The ground in front was of the rudest and roughest character.  The troops
made their way with difficulty over a broken tract called the Pedregal,
bristling with sharp points of rocks, and which is represented as having
been the crater of a now exhausted and extinct volcano.  The enemy had
thrown out skirmishers, who were posted in great force among the crevices
and inequalities of this broken ground, and vigorously resisted the
American advance; while the artillery of the intrenched camp played upon
our troops, and shattered the very rocks over which they were to pass.

General Pierce’s immediate command had never before been under such a
fire of artillery.  The enemy’s range was a little too high, or the havoc
in our ranks must have been dreadful.  In the midst of this fire, General
Pierce, being the only officer mounted in the brigade, leaped his horse
upon an abrupt eminence, and addressed the colonels and captains of the
regiments, as they passed, in a few stirring words,--reminding them of
the honor of their country, of the victory their steady valor would
contribute to achieve.  Pressing forward to the head of the column, he
had nearly reached the practicable ground that lay beyond, when his horse
slipped among the rocks, thrust his foot into a crevice, and fell,
breaking his own leg, and crushing his rider heavily beneath him.

Pierce’s mounted orderly soon came to his assistance.  The general was
stunned, and almost insensible.  When partially recovered, he found
himself suffering from severe bruises, and especially from a sprain of
the left knee, which was undermost when the horse came down.  The orderly
assisted him to reach the shelter of a projecting rock; and as they made
their way thither, a shell fell close beside them and exploded, covering
them with earth.  “That was a lucky miss,” said Pierce calmly.  Leaving
him in such shelter as the rock afforded, the orderly went in search of
aid, and was fortunate to meet with Dr. Ritchie, of Virginia, who was
attached to Pierce’s brigade, and was following in close proximity to the
advancing column.  The doctor administered to him as well as the
circumstances would admit.  Immediately on recovering his full
consciousness, General Pierce had become anxious to rejoin his troops;
and now, in opposition to Dr. Ritchie’s advice and remonstrances, he
determined to proceed to the front.

With pain and difficulty, and leaning on his orderly’s arm, he reached
the battery commanded by Captain McGruder, where he found the horse of
Lieutenant Johnson, who had just before received a mortal wound.  In
compliance with his wishes, he was assisted into the saddle; and, in
answer to a remark that he would be unable to keep his seat, “Then,” said
the general, “you must tie me on.”  Whether his precaution was actually
taken is a point upon which authorities differ; but at all events, with
injuries so severe as would have sent almost any other man to the
hospital, he rode forward into the battle.

The contest was kept up until nightfall, without forcing Valencia’s
intrenchment.  General Pierce remained in the saddle until eleven o’clock
at night.  Finding himself, at nine o’clock, the senior officer in the
field, he, in that capacity, withdrew the troops from their advanced
position, and concentrated them at the point where they were to pass the
night.  At eleven, beneath a torrent of rain, destitute of a tent or
other protection, and without food or refreshment, he lay down on an
ammunition wagon, but was prevented by the pain of his injuries,
especially that of his wounded knee, from finding any repose.  At one
o’clock came orders from General Scott to put the brigade into a new
position, in front of the enemy’s works, preparatory to taking part in
the contemplated operations of the next morning.  During the night, the
troops appointed for that service, under Riley, Shields, Smith, and
Cadwallader, had occupied the villages and roads between Valencia’s
position and the city; so that, with daylight, the commanding general’s
scheme of the battle was ready to be carried out, as it had originally
existed in his mind.

At daylight, accordingly, Valencia’s intrenched camp was assaulted.
General Pierce was soon in the saddle at the head of his brigade, which
retained its position in front, thus serving to attract the enemy’s
attention, and divert him from the true point of attack.  The camp was
stormed in the rear by the American troops, led on by Riley, Cadwallader,
and Dimmick; and in the short space of seventeen minutes it had fallen
into the hands of the assailants, together with a multitude of prisoners.
The remnant of the routed enemy fled towards Churubusco.  As Pierce led
his brigade in pursuit, crossing the battle-field, and passing through
the works that had just been stormed, he found the road and adjacent
fields everywhere strewn with the dead and dying.  The pursuit was
continued until one o’clock, when the foremost of the Americans arrived
in front of the strong Mexican positions at Churubusco and San Antonio,
where Santa Alma’s army had been compelled to make a stand, and where the
great conflict of the day commenced.

General Santa Anna entertained the design of withdrawing his forces
towards the city.  In order to intercept this movement, Pierce’s brigade,
with other troops, was ordered to pursue a route by which the enemy could
be attacked in the rear.  Colonel Noah E. Smith (a patriotic American,
long resident in Mexico, whose local and topographical knowledge proved
eminently serviceable) had offered to point out the road, and was sent to
summon General Pierce to the presence of the commander-in-chief.  When he
met Pierce, near Coyacan, at the head of his brigade, the heavy fire of
the batteries had commenced.  “He was exceedingly thin,” writes Colonel
Smith, “worn down by the fatigue and pain of the day and night before,
and then evidently suffering severely.  Still there was a glow in his
eye, as the cannon boomed, that showed within him a spirit ready for the
conflict.”  He rode up to General Scott, who was at this time sitting on
horseback beneath a tree, near the church of Coyacan, issuing orders to
different individuals of his staff.  Our account of this interview is
chiefly taken from the narrative of Colonel Smith, corroborated by other
testimony.

The commander-in-chief had already heard of the accident that befell
Pierce the day before; and as the latter approached, General Scott could
not but notice the marks of pain and physical exhaustion against which
only the sturdiest constancy of will could have enabled him to bear up.
“Pierce, my dear fellow,” said he,--and that epithet of familiar kindness
and friendship, upon the battle-field, was the highest of military
commendation from such a man,--“you are badly injured; you are not fit to
be in your saddle.”  “Yes, general, I am,” replied Pierce, “in a case
like this.”  “You cannot touch your foot to the stirrup,” said Scott.
“One of them I can,” answered Pierce.  The general looked again at
Pierce’s almost disabled figure, and seemed on the point of taking his
irrevocable resolution.  “You are rash, General Pierce,” said he; “we
shall lose you, and we cannot spare you.  It is my duty to order you back
to St. Augustine.”  “For God’s sake, general,” exclaimed Pierce, “don’t
say that!  This is the last great battle, and I must lead my brigade!”
 The commander-in-chief made no further remonstrance, but gave the order
for Pierce to advance with his brigade.

The way lay through thick standing corn, and over marshy ground
intersected with ditches, which were filled, or partially so, with water.
Over some of the narrower of these Pierce leaped his horse.  When the
brigade had advanced about a mile, however, it found itself impeded by a
ditch ten or twelve feet wide, and six or eight feet deep.  It being
impossible to leap it, General Pierce was lifted from his saddle, and in
some incomprehensible way, hurt as he was, contrived to wade or scramble
across this obstacle, leaving his horse on the hither side.  The troops
were now under fire.  In the excitement of the battle he forgot his
injury, and hurried forward, leading the brigade, a distance of two or
three hundred yards.  But the exhaustion of his frame, and particularly
the anguish of his knee,--made more intolerable by such free use of it,--
was greater than any strength of nerve, or any degree of mental energy,
could struggle against.  He fell, faint and almost insensible, within
full range of the enemy’s fire.  It was proposed to bear him off the
field; but, as some of his soldiers approached to lift him, he became
aware of their purpose, and was partially revived by his determination to
resist it.  “No,” said he, with all the strength he had left, “don’t
carry me off!  Let me lie here!” And there he lay, under the tremendous
fire of Churubusco, until the enemy, in total rout, was driven from the
field.

Immediately after the victory, when the city of Mexico lay at the mercy
of the American commander, and might have been entered that very night,
Santa Anna sent a flag of truce, proposing an armistice, with a view to
negotiation for peace.  It cannot be considered in any other light than
as a very high and signal compliment to his gallantry in the field that
General Pierce was appointed, by the commander-in-chief, one of the
commissioners on our part, together with General Quitman and General
Persifer F. Smith, to arrange the terms of this armistice.  Pierce was
unable to walk, or to mount his horse without assistance, when
intelligence of his appointment reached him.  He had not taken off his
spurs nor slept an hour, for two nights; but he immediately obeyed the
summons, was assisted into the saddle, and rode to Tacubaya, where, at
the house of the British consul-general, the American and Mexican
commissioners were assembled.  The conference began late in the
afternoon, and continued till four o’clock the next morning, when the
articles were signed.  Pierce then proceeded to the quarters of General
Worth, in the village of Tacubaya, where he obtained an hour or two of
repose.

The expectation of General Scott, that further bloodshed might be avoided
by means of the armistice, proved deceptive.  Military operations, after
a temporary interruption, were actively renewed; and on the 8th of
September was fought the bloody battle of Molino del Rey, one of the
fiercest and most destructive of the war.

In this conflict General Worth, with three thousand troops, attacked and
routed fourteen thousand Mexicans, driving them under the protection of
the Castle of Chepultepec.  Perceiving the obstinacy with which the field
was contested, the commander-in-chief dispatched an order to General
Pierce to advance to the support of General Worth’s division.  He moved
forward with rapidity; and although the battle was won just as he reached
the field, he interposed his brigade between Worth and the retreating
enemy, and thus drew upon himself the fire of Chepultepec.  A shell came
streaming from the castle, and, bursting within a few feet of him,
startled his horse, which was near plunging over an adjacent precipice.
Continuing a long time under fire, Pierce’s brigade was engaged in
removing the wounded and the captured ammunition.  While thus occupied,
he led a portion of his command to repel the attacks of the enemy’s
skirmishers.

There remained but one other battle,--that of Chepultepec,--which was
fought on the 13th of September.  On the preceding day (although the
injuries and the over-exertion resulting from previous marches and
battles had greatly enfeebled him), General Pierce had acted with his
brigade.  In obedience to orders, it had occupied the field of Molino del
Rey.  Contrary to expectation, it was found that the enemy’s force had
been withdrawn from this position.  Pierce remained in the field until
noon, when, it being certain that the anticipated attack would not take
place before the following day, he returned to the quarters of General
Worth, which were near at hand.  There he became extremely ill, and was
unable to leave his bed for the thirty-six hours next ensuing.  In the
mean time, the Castle of Chepultepec was stormed by the troops under
Generals Pillow and Quitman.  Pierce’s brigade behaved itself gallantly,
and suffered severely; and that accomplished officer, Colonel Ransom,
leading the Ninth Regiment to the attack, was shot through the head, and
fell, with many other brave men, in that last battle of the war.

The American troops, under Quitman and Worth, had established themselves
within the limits of the city, having possession of the gates of Belen
and of San Cosma, but, up till nightfall, had met with a vigorous
resistance from the Mexicans, led on by Santa Anna in person.  They had
still, apparently, a desperate task before them.  It was anticipated
that, with the next morning’s light, our troops would be ordered to storm
the citadel, and the city of Mexico itself.  When this was told to
Pierce, upon his sick-bed, he rose, and attempted to dress himself; but
Captain Hardcastle, who had brought the intelligence from Worth,
prevailed upon him to remain in bed, and not to exhaust his scanty
strength until the imminence of the occasion should require his presence.
Pierce acquiesced for the time, but again arose, in the course of the
night, and made his way to the trenches, where he reported himself to
General Quitman, with whose division was a part of his brigade.
Quitman’s share in the anticipated assault, it was supposed, owing to the
position which his troops occupied, would be more perilous than that of
Worth.

But the last great battle had been fought.  In the morning, it was
discovered that the citadel had been abandoned, and that Santa Anna had
withdrawn his army from the city.

There never was a more gallant body of officers than those who came from
civil life into the army on occasion of the Mexican War.  All of them,
from the rank of general downward, appear to have been animated by the
spirit of young knights, in times of chivalry, when fighting for their
spurs.  Hitherto known only as peaceful citizens, they felt it incumbent
on them, by daring and desperate valor, to prove their fitness to be
intrusted with the guardianship of their country’s honor.  The old and
trained soldier, already distinguished on former fields, was free to be
discreet as well as brave; but these untried warriors were in a different
position, and therefore rushed on perils with a recklessness that found
its penalty on every battle-field--not one of which was won without a
grievous sacrifice of the best blood of America.  In this band of gallant
men, it is not too much to say, General Pierce was as distinguished for
what we must term his temerity in personal exposure, as for the higher
traits of leadership, wherever there was an opportunity for their
display.

He had manifested, moreover, other and better qualities than these, and
such as it affords his biographer far greater pleasure to record.  His
tenderness of heart, his sympathy, his brotherly or paternal care for his
men, had been displayed in a hundred instances, and had gained him the
enthusiastic affection of all who served under his command.  During the
passage from America, under the tropics, he would go down into the
stifling air of the hold, with a lemon, a cup of tea, and, better and
more efficacious than all, a kind word for the sick.  While encamped
before Vera Cruz, he gave up his own tent to a sick comrade, and went
himself to lodge in the pestilential city.  On the march, and even on the
battle-field, he found occasion to exercise those feelings of humanity
which show most beautifully there.  And, in the hospitals of Mexico, he
went among the diseased and wounded soldiers, cheering them with his
voice and the magic of his kindness, inquiring into their wants, and
relieving them to the utmost of his pecuniary means.  There was not a man
of his brigade but loved him, and would have followed him to death, or
have sacrificed his own life in his general’s defence.

The officers of the old army, whose profession was war, and who well knew
what a soldier was and ought to be, fully recognized his merit.  An
instance of their honorable testimony in his behalf may fitly be recorded
here.  It was after General Pierce had returned to the United States.  At
a dinner in the halls of Montezuma, at which forty or fifty of the brave
men above alluded to were present, a young officer of the New England
Regiment was called on for a toast.  He made an address, in which he
spoke with irrepressible enthusiasm of General Pierce, and begged to
propose his health.  One of the officers of the old line rose, and
observed that none of the recently appointed generals commanded more
unanimous and universal respect; that General Pierce had appreciated the
scientific knowledge of the regular military men, and had acquired their
respect by the independence, firmness, and promptitude with which he
exercised his own judgment, and acted on the intelligence derived from
them.  In concluding this tribute of high, but well-considered praise,
the speaker very cordially acquiesced in the health of General Pierce,
and proposed that it should be drunk standing, with three times three.

General Pierce remained in Mexico until December, when, as the warfare
was over, and peace on the point of being concluded, he set out on his
return.  In nine months, crowded full of incident, he had seen far more
of actual service than many professional soldiers during their whole
lives.  As soon as the treaty of peace was signed, he gave up his
commission, and returned to the practice of the law, again proposing to
spend the remainder of his days in the bosom of his family.  All the
dreams of his youth were now fulfilled; the military ardor, that had
struck an hereditary root in his breast, had enjoyed its scope, and was
satisfied; and he flattered himself that no circumstances could hereafter
occur to draw him from the retirement of domestic peace.  New Hampshire
received him with even more enthusiastic affection than ever.  At his
departure, he had received a splendid sword at the hands of many of his
friends, in token of their confidence; he had shown himself well worthy
to wear and able to use a soldier’s weapon; and his native state now gave
him another, the testimonial of approved valor and warlike conduct.




CHAPTER VI.

THE COMPROMISE AND OTHER MATTERS.


The intervening years, since General Pierce’s return from Mexico, and
until the present time, have been spent in the laborious exercise of the
legal profession,--an employment scarcely varied or interrupted, except
by those episodes of political activity which a man of public influence
finds it impossible to avoid, and in which, if his opinions are matter of
conscience with him, he feels it his duty to interest himself.

In the presidential canvass of 1848 he used his best efforts (and with
success, so far as New Hampshire was concerned) in behalf of the
candidate of his party.  A truer and better speech has never been uttered
on a similar occasion than one which he made (during a hurried half hour,
snatched from the court rooms) in October of the above year, before the
democratic state convention, then in session at Concord.  It is an
invariable characteristic of General Pierce’s popular addresses, that
they evince a genuine respect for the people; he makes his appeal to
their intelligence, their patriotism, and their integrity, and, never
doubtful of their upright purpose, proves his faith in the great mind
and heart of the country both by what he says and by what he refrains
from saying.  He never yet was guilty of an effort to cajole his
fellow-citizens, to operate upon their credulity, or to trick them even
into what was right; and therefore all the victories which he has ever
won in popular assemblies have been triumphs doubly honored, being as
creditable to his audiences as to himself.

When the series of measures known under the collective term of The
Compromise were passed by Congress in 1850, and put to so searching a
test here at the North the reverence of the people for the Constitution
and their attachment to the Union, General Pierce was true to the
principles which he had long ago avowed.  At an early period of his
congressional service he had made known, with the perfect frankness of
his character, those opinions upon the slavery question which he has
never since seen occasion to change in the slightest degree.  There is an
unbroken consistency in his action with regard to this matter.  It is
entirely of a piece, from his first entrance upon public life until the
moment when he came forward, while many were faltering, to throw the
great weight of his character and influence into the scale in favor of
those measures through which it was intended to redeem the pledges of the
Constitution, and to preserve and renew the old love and harmony among
the sisterhood of States.  His approval embraced the whole series of
these acts, as well those which bore hard upon northern views and
sentiments as those in which the South deemed itself to have made more
than reciprocal concessions.

No friend nor enemy that know Franklin Pierce would have expected him to
act otherwise.  With his view of the whole subject, whether looking at it
through the medium of his conscience, his feelings, or his intellect, it
was impossible for him not to take his stand as the unshaken advocate of
Union, and of the mutual steps of compromise which that great object
unquestionably demanded.  The fiercest, the least scrupulous, and the
most consistent of those who battle against slavery recognize the same
fact that he does.  They see that merely human wisdom and human efforts
cannot subvert it, except by tearing to pieces the Constitution, breaking
the pledges which it sanctions, and severing into distracted fragments
that common country which Providence brought into one nation, through a
continued miracle of almost two hundred years, from the first settlement
of the American wilderness until the Revolution.  In the days when, a
young member of Congress, he first raised his voice against agitation,
Pierce saw these perils and their consequences.  He considered, too, that
the evil would be certain, while the good was, at best, a contingency,
and (to the clear, practical foresight with which he looked into the
future) scarcely so much as that, attended as the movement was and must
be during its progress, with the aggravated injury of those whose
condition it aimed to ameliorate, and terminating, in its possible
triumph,--if such possibility there were,--with the ruin of two races
which now dwelt together in greater peace and affection, it is not too
much to say, than had ever elsewhere existed between the taskmaster and
the serf.

Of course, there is another view of all these matters.  The theorist may
take that view in his closet; the philanthropist by profession may strive
to act upon it uncompromisingly, amid the tumult and warfare of his life.
But the statesman of practical sagacity--who loves his country as it is,
and evolves good from things as they exist, and who demands to feel his
firm grasp upon a better reality before he quits the one already gained--
will be likely here, with all the greatest statesmen of America, to stand
in the attitude of a conservative.  Such, at all events, will be the
attitude of Franklin Pierce.  We have sketched some of the influences
amid which he grew up, inheriting his father’s love of country, mindful
of the old patriot’s valor in so many conflicts of the Revolution, and
having close before his eyes the example of brothers and relatives, more
than one of whom have bled for America, both at the extremest north and
farthest south; himself, too, in early manhood, serving the Union in its
legislative halls, and, at a maturer age, leading his fellow-citizens,
his brethren, from the widest-sundered states, to redden the same
battle-fields with their kindred blood, to unite their breath into one
shout of victory, and perhaps to sleep, side by side, with the same sod
over them.  Such a man, with such hereditary recollections, and such a
personal experience, must not narrow himself to adopt the cause of one
section of his native country against another.  He will stand up, as he
has always stood, among the patriots of the whole land.  And if the work
of antislavery agitation, which it is undeniable leaves most men who
earnestly engage in it with only half a country in their affections,--if
this work must be done, let others do it.

Those northern men, therefore, who deem the great causes of human welfare
as represented and involved in this present hostility against southern
institutions, and who conceive that the world stands still except so far
as that goes forward,--these, it may be allowed, can scarcely give their
sympathy or their confidence to the subject of this memoir.  But there is
still another view, and probably as wise a one.  It looks upon slavery as
one of those evils which divine Providence does not leave to be remedied
by human contrivances, but which, in its own good time, by some means
impossible to be anticipated, but of the simplest and easiest operation,
when all its uses shall have been fulfilled, it causes to vanish like a
dream.  There is no instance, in all history, of the human will and
intellect having perfected any great moral reform by methods which it
adapted to that end; but the progress of the world, at every step, leaves
some evil or wrong on the path behind it, which the wisest of mankind, of
their own set purpose, could never have found the way to rectify.
Whatever contributes to the great cause of good, contributes to all its
subdivisions and varieties; and, on this score, the lover of his race,
the enthusiast, the philanthropist of whatever theory, might lend his aid
to put a man, like the one before us, into the leadership of the world’s
affairs.

How firm and conscientious was General Pierce’s support of The Compromise
may be estimated from his conduct in reference to the Reverend John
Atwood.  In the foregoing pages it has come oftener in our way to
illustrate the bland and prepossessing features of General Pierce’s
character, than the sterner ones which must necessarily form the bones,
so to speak, the massive skeleton, of any man who retains an upright
attitude amidst the sinister influences of public life.  The transaction
now alluded to affords a favorable opportunity for indicating some of
these latter traits.

In October, 1850, a democratic convention, held at Concord, nominated Mr.
Atwood as the party’s regular candidate for governor.  The Compromise,
then recent, was inevitably a prominent element in the discussions of the
convention; and a series of resolutions were adopted, bearing reference
to this great subject, fully and unreservedly indorsing the measures
comprehended under it, and declaring the principles on which the
Democracy of the state was about to engage in the gubernatorial contest.
Mr. Atwood accepted the nomination, acceding to the platform thus
tendered him, taking exceptions to none of the individual resolutions,
and, of course, pledging himself to the whole by the very act of assuming
the candidacy, which was predicated upon them.

The reverend candidate, we should conceive, is a well-meaning, and
probably an amiable man.  In ordinary circumstances, he would, doubtless,
have gone through the canvass triumphantly, and have administered the
high office to which he aspired with no discredit to the party that had
placed him at its head.  But the disturbed state of the public mind on
the Compromise question rendered the season a very critical one; and Mr.
Atwood, unfortunately, had that fatal weakness of character, which,
however respectably it may pass in quiet times, is always bound to make
itself pitiably manifest under the pressure of a crisis.  A letter was
addressed to him by a committee, representing the party opposed to The
Compromise, and with whom, it may be supposed, were included those who
held the more thorough-going degrees of antislavery sentiment.  The
purpose of the letter was to draw out an expression of Mr. Atwood’s
opinion on the abolition movement generally, and with an especial
reference to the Fugitive Slave Law, and whether, as chief magistrate of
the state, he would favor any attempt for its repeal.  In an answer of
considerable length the candidate expressed sentiments that brought him
unquestionably within the free soil pale, and favored his correspondents,
moreover, with a pretty decided judgment as to the unconstitutional,
unjust, and oppressive character of the Fugitive Slave Law.

During a space of about two months, this very important document was kept
from the public eye.  Rumors of its existence, however, became gradually
noised abroad, and necessarily attracted the attention of Mr. Atwood’s
democratic friends.  Inquiries being made, he acknowledged the existence
of the letter, but averred that it had never been delivered, that it was
merely a rough draught, and that he had hitherto kept it within his own
control, with a view to more careful consideration.  In accordance with
the advice of friends, he expressed a determination, and apparently in
good faith, to suppress the letter, and thus to sever all connection with
the antislavery party.  This, however, was now beyond his power.  A copy
of the letter had been taken; it was published, with high commendations,
in the antislavery newspapers; and Mr. Atwood was exhibited in the
awkward predicament of directly avowing sentiments on the one hand which
he had implicitly disavowed on the other, of accepting a nomination based
on principles diametrically opposite.

The candidate appears to have apprehended this disclosure, and he hurried
to Concord, and sought counsel of General Pierce, with whom he was on
terms of personal kindness, and between whom and himself, heretofore,
there had never been a shade of political difference.  An interview with
the general and one or two other gentlemen ensued.  Mr. Atwood was
cautioned against saying or writing a word that might be repugnant to his
feelings or his principles; but, voluntarily, and at his own suggestion,
he now wrote for publication a second letter, in which he retracted every
objectionable feature of his former one, and took decided ground in favor
of The Compromise, including all its individual measures.  Had he adhered
to this latter position, he might have come out of the affair, if not
with the credit of consistency, yet, at least, as a successful candidate
in the impending election.  But his evil fate, or, rather, the natural
infirmity of his character, was not so to be thrown off.  The very next
day, unhappily, he fell into the hands of some of his antislavery
friends, to whom he avowed a constant adherence to the principles of his
first letter, describing the second as having been drawn from him by
importunity, in an excited state of his mind, and without a full
realization of its purport.

It would be needlessly cruel to Mr. Atwood to trace with minuteness the
further details of this affair.  It is impossible to withhold from him a
certain sympathy, or to avoid feeling that a very worthy man, as the
world goes, had entangled himself in an inextricable knot of duplicity
and tergiversation, by an ill-advised effort to be two opposite things at
once.  For the sake of true manhood, we gladly turn to consider the
course adopted by General Pierce.

The election for governor was now at a distance of only a few weeks; and
it could not be otherwise than a most hazardous movement for the
democratic party, at so late a period, to discard a candidate with whom
the people had become familiar.  It involved nothing less than the
imminent peril of that political supremacy which the party had so long
enjoyed.  With Mr. Atwood as candidate, success might be considered as
certain.  To a short-sighted and a weak man, it would have appeared the
obvious policy to patch up the difficulty, and, at all events, to
conquer, under whatever leadership, and with whatever allies.  But it was
one of those junctures which test the difference between the man of
principle and the mere politician--the man of moral courage and him who
yields to temporary expediency.  General Pierce could not consent that
his party should gain a nominal triumph, at the expense of what he looked
upon as its real integrity and life.  With this view of the matter, he
had no hesitation in his course; nor could the motives which otherwise
would have been strongest with him--pity for the situation of an
unfortunate individual, a personal friend, a Democrat, as Mr. Atwood
describes himself, of nearly fifty years’ standing--incline him to mercy
where it would have been fatal to his sense of right.  He took decided
ground against Mr. Atwood.  The convention met again, and satisfactory to
all parties; and one of his political opponents (Professor Sanborn, of
Dartmouth College) has ably sketched him, both in that aspect and as a
debater.

“In drawing the portraits of the distinguished members of the
constitutional convention,” writes the professor, “to pass Frank Pierce
unnoticed would be as absurd as to enact one of Shakespeare’s dramas
without its principal hero.  I give my impressions of the man as I saw
him in the convention; for I would not undertake to vouch for the truth
or falsehood of those veracious organs of public sentiment, at the
capital, which have loaded him in turn with indiscriminate praise and
abuse.  As a presiding officer, it would be difficult to find his equal.
In proposing questions to the house, he never hesitates or blunders.  In
deciding points of order, he is both prompt and impartial.  His treatment
of every member of the convention was characterized by uniform courtesy
and kindness.  The deportment of the presiding officer of a deliberative
body usually gives tone to the debates.  If he is harsh, morose, or
abrupt in his manner, the speakers are apt to catch his spirit by the
force of involuntary sympathy.  The same is true, to some extent, of the
principal debaters in such a body.  When a man of strong prejudices and
harsh temper rises to address a public assembly, his indwelling
antipathies speak from every feature of his face and from every motion of
his person.  The audience at once brace themselves against his assaults,
and condemn his opinions before they are heard.  The well-known character
of an orator persuades or dissuades quite as forcibly as the language he
utters.  Some men never rise to address a deliberative assembly without
conciliating good will in advance.  The smile that plays upon the
speaker’s face awakens emotions of complacency in those who hear, even
before he speaks.  So does that weight of character, which is the matured
fruit of long public services and acknowledged worth, soothe, in advance,
the irritated and angry crowd.

“Mr. Pierce possesses unquestionable ability as a public speaker.  Few
men, in our country, better understand the means of swaying a popular
assembly, or employ them with greater success.  His forte lies in moving
the passions of those whom he addresses.  He knows how to call into
vigorous action both the sympathies and antipathies of those who listen
to him.  I do not mean to imply by these remarks that his oratory is
deficient in argument or sound reasoning.  On the contrary, he seizes
with great power upon the strong points of his subject, and presents them
clearly, forcibly, and eloquently.  As a prompt and ready debater, always
prepared for assault or defence, he has few equals.  In these encounters,
he appears to great advantage, from his happy faculty of turning little
incidents, unexpectedly occurring, to his own account.  A word carelessly
dropped, or an unguarded allusion to individuals or parties by an
opponent, is frequently converted into a powerful weapon of assault, by
this skilful advocate.  He has been so much in office that he may be said
to have been educated in public life.  He is most thoroughly versed in
all the tactics of debate.  He is not only remarkably fluent in his
elocution, but remarkably correct.  He seldom miscalls or repeats a word.
His style is not overloaded with ornament, and yet he draws liberally
upon the treasury of rhetoric.  His figures are often beautiful and
striking, never incongruous.  He is always listened to with respectful
attention, if he does not always command conviction.  From his whole
course in the convention, a disinterested spectator could not fail to
form a very favorable opinion, not only of his talent and eloquence, but
of his generosity and magnanimity.”

Among other antiquated relics of the past, and mouldy types of prejudices
that ought now to be forgotten, and of which it was the object of the
present convention to purge the Constitution of New Hampshire, there is a
provision that certain state offices should be held only by Protestants.
Since General Pierce’s nomination for the presidency, the existence of
this religious test has been brought as a charge against him, as if, in
spite of his continued efforts to remove it, he were personally
responsible for its remaining on the statute book.

General Pierce has naturally a strong endowment of religious feeling.  At
no period of his life, as is well known to his friends, have the sacred
relations of the human soul been a matter of indifference with him; and,
of more recent years, whatever circumstances of good or evil fortune may
have befallen him, they have alike served to deepen this powerful
sentiment.  Whether in sorrow or success, he has learned, in his own
behalf, the great lesson, that religious faith is the most valuable and
most sacred of human possessions; but, with this sense, there has come no
narrowness or illiberality, but a wide-embracing sympathy for the modes
of Christian worship, and a reverence for individual belief, as a matter
between the Deity and man’s soul, and with which no other has a right to
interfere.  With the feeling here described, and with his acute
intellectual perception of the abortive character of all intolerant
measures, as defeating their own ends, it strikes one as nothing less
than ludicrous that he should be charged with desiring to retain this
obsolete enactment, standing, as it does, as a merely gratuitous and
otherwise inoperative stigma upon the fair reputation of his native
state.  Even supposing no higher motives to have influenced him, it would
have sufficed to secure his best efforts for the repeal of the religious
test that so many of the Catholics have always been found in the
advance-guard of freedom, marching onward with the progressive party; and
that, whether in peace or war, they have performed for their adopted
country the hard toil and the gallant services which she has a right to
expect from her most faithful citizens.

The truth is that, ever since his entrance upon public life, on all
occasions,--and often making the occasion where he found none,--General
Pierce has done his utmost to obliterate this obnoxious feature from the
Constitution.  He has repeatedly advocated the calling of a convention
mainly for this purpose.  In that of 1850, he both spoke and voted in
favor of the abolition of the test, and, with the aid of Judge Woodbury
and other democratic members, attained his purpose, so far as the
convention possessed any power or responsibility in the matter.  That the
measure was ultimately defeated is due to other causes, either temporary
or of long continuance; and to some of them it is attributable that the
enlightened public sentiment of New Hampshire was not, long since, made
to operate upon this enactment, so anomalous in the fundamental law of a
free state.

In order to the validity of the amendments passed by the convention, it
was necessary that the people should subsequently act upon them, and pass
a vote of two thirds in favor of their adoption.  The amendments proposed
by the convention of 1850 were numerous.  The Constitution had been
modified in many and very important particulars, in respect to which the
popular mind had not previously been made familiar, and on which it had
not anticipated the necessity of passing judgment.  In March, 1851, when
the vote of the people was taken upon these measures, the Atwood
controversy was at its height, and threw all matters of less immediate
interest into the background.  During the interval since the adjournment
of the convention, the whig newspapers had been indefatigable in their
attempts to put its proceedings in an odious light before the people.
There had been no period, for many years, in which sinister influences
rendered it so difficult to draw out an efficient expression of the will
of the Democracy as on this occasion.  It was the result of all these
obstacles that the doings of the constitutional convention were rejected
in the mass.

In the ensuing April, the convention reassembled, in order to receive the
unfavorable verdict of the people upon its proposed amendments.  At the
suggestion of General Pierce, the amendment abolishing the religious test
was again brought forward, and, in spite of the opposition of the leading
whig members, was a second time submitted to the people.  Nor did the
struggle in behalf of this enlightened movement terminate here.

At the democratic caucus, in Concord, preliminary to the town meeting, he
urged upon his political friends the repeal of the test, as a party
measure; and again, at the town meeting itself, while the balloting was
going forward, he advocated it on the higher ground of religious freedom,
and of reverence for what is inviolable in the human soul.  Had the
amendment passed, the credit would have belonged to no man more than to
General Pierce; and that it failed, and that the free Constitution of New
Hampshire is still disgraced by a provision which even monarchical
England has cast off, is a responsibility which must rest elsewhere than
on his head.

In September, 1851, died that eminent statesman and jurist, Levi
Woodbury, then occupying the elevated post of judge of the Supreme Court
of the United States.  The connection between him and General Pierce,
beginning in the early youth of the latter, had been sustained through
all the subsequent years.  They sat together, with but one intervening
chair between, in the national Senate; they were always advocates of the
same great measures, and held, through life, a harmony of opinion and
action, which was never more conspicuous than in the few months that
preceded Judge Woodbury’s death.  At a meeting of the bar, after his
decease, General Pierce uttered some remarks, full of sensibility, in
which he referred to the circumstances that had made this friendship an
inheritance on his part.  Had Judge Woodbury survived, it is not
improbable that his more advanced age, his great public services, and
equally distinguished zeal in behalf of the Union might have placed him
in the position now occupied by the subject of this memoir.  Fortunate
the state which, after losing such a son, can still point to another, not
less worthy to take upon him the charge of the nation’s welfare.

We have now finished our record of Franklin Pierce’s life, and have only
to describe the posture of affairs which, without his own purpose and
against his wish, has placed him before the people of the United States
as a candidate for the presidency.




CHAPTER VII.

HIS NOMINATION FOR THE PRESIDENCY.


On the 12th of June, 1852, the democratic national convention assembled
at Baltimore, in order to select a candidate for the presidency of the
United States.  Many names, eminently distinguished in peace and war, had
been brought before the public, during several months previous; and among
them, though by no means occupying a very prominent place, was the name
of Franklin Pierce.  In January of this year, the Democracy of New
Hampshire had signified its preference of General Pierce as a
presidential candidate in the approaching canvass--a demonstration which
drew from him the following response, addressed to his friend, Mr.
Atherton:--

“I am far from being insensible to the generous confidence so often
manifested towards me by the people of this state; and although the
object indicated in the resolution, having particular reference to
myself, be not one of desire on my part, the expression is not on that
account less gratifying.

“Doubtless the spontaneous and just appreciation of an intelligent people
is the best earthly reward for earnest and cheerful services rendered to
one’s state and country; and while it is a matter of unfeigned regret
that my life has been so barren of usefulness, I shall ever hold this and
similar tributes among my most cherished recollections.

“To these, my sincere and grateful acknowledgments, I desire to add that
the same motives which induced me, several years ago, to retire from
public life, and which since that time controlled my judgment in this
respect, now impel me to say that the use of my name in any event, before
the democratic national convention at Baltimore, to which you are a
delegate, would be utterly repugnant to my taste and wishes.”

The sentiments expressed in the above letter were genuine, and from his
heart.  He had looked long and closely at the effects of high public
station on the character and happiness, and on what is the innermost and
dearest part of a man’s possessions--his independence; and he had
satisfied himself that office, however elevated, should be avoided for
one’s own sake, or accepted only as a good citizen would make any other
sacrifice, at the call and at the need of his country.

As the time for the assembling of the national convention drew near,
there were other sufficient indications of his sincerity in declining a
stake in the great game.  A circular letter was addressed, by Major
Scott, of Virginia, to the distinguished Democrats whose claims had
heretofore been publicly discussed, requesting a statement of their
opinions on several points, and inquiring what would be the course of
each of these gentlemen, in certain contingencies, in case of his
attaining the presidency.  These queries, it may be presumed, were of
such a nature that General Pierce might have answered them, had he seen
fit to do so, to the satisfaction of Major Scott himself, or to that of
the southern democratic party, whom it seemed his purpose to represent.
With not more than one exception, the other statesmen and soldiers, to
whom the circular had been sent, made a response.  General Pierce
preserved an unbroken silence.  It was equivalent to the withdrawal of
all claims which he might be supposed to possess, in reference to the
contemplated office; and he thereby repeated, to the delegates of the
national party, the same avowal of distaste for public life which he had
already made known to the Democracy of his native state.  He had thus
done everything in his power, actively or passively,--everything that he
could have done, without showing such an estimate of his position before
the country as was inconsistent with the modesty of his character,--to
avoid the perilous and burdensome honor of the candidacy.

The convention met, at the date above mentioned, and continued its
sessions during four days.  Thirty-five ballotings were held, with a
continually decreasing prospect that the friends of any one of the
gentlemen hitherto prominent before the people would succeed in obtaining
the two-thirds vote that was requisite for a nomination.  Thus far, not a
vote had been thrown for General Pierce; but, at the thirty-sixth ballot,
the delegation of old Virginia brought forward his name.  In the course
of several more trials, his strength increased, very gradually at first,
but afterwards with a growing impetus, until, at the forty-ninth ballot,
the votes were for Franklin Pierce two hundred and eighty-two, and eleven
for all other candidates.  Thus Franklin Pierce became the nominee of the
convention; and as quickly as the lightning flash could blazon it abroad
his name was on every tongue, from end to end of this vast country.
Within an hour he grew to be illustrious.

It would be a pretension, which we do not mean to put forward, to assert
that, whether considering the length and amount of his public services,
or his prominence before the country, General Pierce stood on equal
ground with several of the distinguished men whose claims, to use the
customary phrase, had been rejected in favor of his own.  But no man, be
his public services or sacrifices what they might, ever did or ever could
possess, in the slightest degree, what we may term a legitimate claim to
be elevated to the rulership of a free people.  The nation would degrade
itself, and violate every principle upon which its institutions are
founded, by offering its majestic obedience to one of its citizens as a
reward for whatever splendor of achievement.  The conqueror may assert a
claim, such as it is, to the sovereignty of the people whom he
subjugates; but, with us Americans, when a statesman comes to the chief
direction of affairs, it is at the summons of the nation, addressed to
the servant whom it deems best fitted to spend his wisdom, his strength,
and his life in its behalf.  On this principle, which is obviously the
correct one, a candidate’s previous services are entitled to
consideration only as they indicate the qualities which may enable him to
render higher services in the position which his countrymen choose that
he shall occupy.  What he has done is of no importance, except as proving
what he can do.  And it is on this score, because they see in his public
course the irrefragable evidences of patriotism, integrity, and courage,
and because they recognize in him the noble gift of natural authority,
and have a prescience of the stately endowment of administrative genius,
that his fellow-citizens are about to summon Franklin Pierce to the
presidency.  To those who know him well, the event comes, not like
accident, but as a consummation which might have been anticipated, from
its innate fitness, and as the final step of a career which, all along,
has tended thitherward.

It is not as a reward that he will take upon him the mighty burden of
this office, of which the toil and awful responsibility whiten the
statesman’s head, and in which, as in more than one instance we have
seen, the warrior encounters a deadlier risk than in the battle-field.
When General Pierce received the news of his nomination, it affected him
with no thrill of joy, but a sadness, which, for many days, was
perceptible in his deportment.  It awoke in his heart the sense of
religious dependence--a sentiment that has been growing continually
stronger, through all the trials and experiences of his life; and there
was nothing feigned in that passage of his beautiful letter, accepting
the nomination, in which he expresses his reliance upon heavenly support.

The committee, appointed by the Baltimore convention, conveyed to him the
intelligence of his nomination in the following terms:--

“A national convention of the democratic republican party, which met at
Baltimore on the first Tuesday in June, unanimously nominated you as a
candidate for the high trust of the President of the United States.  We
have been delegated to acquaint you with the nomination, and earnestly to
request that you will accept it.  Persuaded as we are that this office
should never be pursued by an unchastened ambition, it cannot be refused
by a dutiful patriotism.

“The circumstances under which you will be presented for the canvass of
your countrymen seem to be propitious to the interests which the
Constitution intrusts to our Federal Union, and must be auspicious to
your own name.  You come before the people without the impulse of
personal wishes, and free from selfish expectations.  You are identified
with none of the distractions which have recently disturbed our country,
whilst you are known to be faithful to the Constitution--to all its
guaranties and compromises.  You will be free to exercise your tried
abilities, within the path of duty, in protecting that repose we happily
enjoy, and in giving efficacy and control to those cardinal principles
that have already illustrated the party which has now selected you as its
leader--principles that regard the security and prosperity of the whole
country, and the paramount power of its laws, as indissolubly associated
with the perpetuity of our civil and religious liberties.

“The convention did not pretermit the duty of reiterating those
principles, and you will find them prominently set forth in the
resolutions it adopted.  To these we respectfully invite your attention.

“It is firmly believed that to your talents and patriotism the security
of our holy Union, with its expanded and expanding interests, may be
wisely trusted, and that, amid all the perils which may assail the
Constitution, you will have the heart to love and the arm to defend it.”

We quote likewise General Pierce’s reply:--

“I have the honor to acknowledge your personal kindness in presenting me,
this day, your letter, officially informing me of my nomination, by the
democratic national convention, as a candidate for the presidency of the
United States.  The surprise with which I received the intelligence of my
nomination was not unmingled with painful solicitude; and yet it is
proper for me to say that the manner in which it was conferred was
peculiarly gratifying.

“The delegation from New Hampshire, with all the glow of state pride, and
with all the warmth of personal regard, would not have submitted my name
to the convention, nor would they have cast a vote for me, under
circumstances other than those which occurred.

“I shall always cherish with pride and gratitude the recollection of the
fact that the voice which first pronounced, and pronounced alone, came
from the Mother of States--a pride and gratitude rising above any
consequences that can betide me personally.  May I not regard it as a
fact pointing to the overthrow of sectional jealousies, and looking to
the permanent life and vigor of the Union, cemented by the blood of those
who have passed to their reward?--a Union wonderful in its formation,
boundless in its hopes, amazing in its destiny.

“I accept the nomination, relying upon an abiding devotion to the
interests, honor, and glory of the whole country, but, above and beyond
all, upon a Power superior to all human might--a Power which, from the
first gun of the Revolution, in every crisis through which we have
passed, in every hour of acknowledged peril, when the dark clouds had
shut down over us, has interposed as if to baffle human wisdom, outmarch
human forecast, and bring out of darkness the rainbow of promise.  Weak
myself, faith and hope repose there in security.

“I accept the nomination upon the platform adopted by the convention, not
because this is expected of me as a candidate, but because the principles
it embraces command the approbation of my judgment; and with them, I
believe I can safely say, there has been no word or act of my life in
conflict.”

The news of his nomination went abroad over the Union, and, far and wide,
there came a response, in which was distinguishable a truer appreciation
of some of General Pierce’s leading traits than could have been
anticipated, considering the unobtrusive tenor of his legislative life,
and the lapse of time since he had entirely withdrawn himself from the
nation’s eye.  It was the marvellous and mystic influence of character,
in regard to which the judgment of the people is so seldom found
erroneous, and which conveys the perception of itself through some medium
higher and deeper than the intellect.  Everywhere the country knows that
a man of steadfast will, true heart, and generous qualities has been
brought forward, to receive the suffrages of his fellow-citizens.

He comes before the people of the United States at a remarkable era in
the history of this country and of the world.  The two great parties of
the nation appear--at least to an observer somewhat removed from both--to
have nearly merged into one another; for they preserve the attitude of
political antagonism rather through the effect of their old organizations
than because any great and radical principles are at present in dispute
between them.  The measures advocated by the one party, and resisted by
the other, through a long series of years, have now ceased to be the
pivots on which the election turns.  The prominent statesmen, so long
identified with those measures, will henceforth relinquish their
controlling influence over public affairs.  Both parties, it may likewise
be said, are united in one common purpose,--that of preserving our sacred
Union, as the immovable basis from which the destinies, not of America
alone, but of mankind at large, may be carried upward and consummated.
And thus men stand together, in unwonted quiet and harmony, awaiting the
new movement in advance which all these tokens indicate.

It remains for the citizens of this great country to decide, within the
next few weeks, whether they will retard the steps of human progress by
placing at its head an illustrious soldier, indeed, a patriot, and one
indelibly stamped into the history of the past, but who has already done
his work, and has not in him the spirit of the present or of the coming
time; or whether they will put their trust in a new man, whom a life of
energy and various activity has tested, but not worn out, and advance
with him into the auspicious epoch upon which we are about to enter.


NOTE.

We have done far less than justice to Franklin Pierce’s college standing,
in our statement in Chapter I.  Some circumstances connected with this
matter are too characteristic not to be reported.

During the first two years, Pierce was extremely inattentive to his
college duties, bestowing only such modicum of time upon them as was
requisite to supply the merest superficial acquaintance with the course
of study for the recitation room.  The consequence was that when the
relative standing of the members of the class was first authoritatively
ascertained, in the junior year, he found himself occupying precisely the
lowest position in point of scholarship.  In the first mortification of
wounded pride, he resolved never to attend another recitation, and
accordingly absented himself from college exercises of all kinds for
several days, expecting and desiring that some form of punishment, such
as suspension or expulsion, would be the result.  The faculty of the
college, however, with a wise lenity, took no notice of this behavior;
and at last, having had time to grow cool, and moved by the grief of his
friend Little and another classmate, Pierce determined to resume the
routine of college duties.  “But,” said he to his friends, “if I do so,
you shall see a change!”

Accordingly, from that time forward, he devoted himself to study.  His
mind, having run wild for so long a period, could be reclaimed only by
the severest efforts of an iron resolution; and for three months
afterwards, he rose at four in the morning, toiled all day over his
books, and retired only at midnight, allowing himself but four hours for
sleep.  With habit and exercise, he acquired command over his
intellectual powers, and was no longer under the necessity of application
so intense.  But from the moment when he made his resolve until the close
of his college life, he never incurred a censure, never was absent (and
then unavoidably) but from two college exercises, never went into the
recitation room without a thorough acquaintance with the subject to be
recited, and finally graduated as the third scholar of his class.
Nothing save the low standard of his previous scholarship prevented his
taking a yet higher rank.

The moral of this little story lies in the stern and continued exercise
of self-controlling will, which redeemed him from indolence, completely
changed the aspect of his character, and made this the turning point of
his life.





CHIEFLY ABOUT WAR MATTERS.

By a Peaceable Man.


[This article appeared in the “Atlantic Monthly” for July, 1862, and is
now first reprinted among Hawthorne’s collected writings.  The editor of
the magazine objected to sundry paragraphs in the manuscript, and these
were cancelled with the consent of the author, who himself supplied all
the foot-notes that accompanied the article when it was published.  It
has seemed best to retain them in the present reproduction.  One of the
suppressed passages, in which President Lincoln is described, has since
been printed, and is therefore restored to its proper place in the
following pages.--G. P. L.]


Here is no remoteness of life and thought, no hermetically sealed
seclusion, except possibly, that of the grave, into which the disturbing
influences of this war do not penetrate.  Of course, the general
heart-quake of the country long ago knocked at my cottage-door, and
compelled me, reluctantly, to suspend the contemplation of certain
fantasies, to which, according to my harmless custom, I was endeavoring
to give a sufficiently life-like aspect to admit of their figuring in a
romance.  As I make no pretensions to state-craft or soldiership, and
could promote the common weal neither by valor nor counsel, it seemed, at
first, a pity that I should be debarred from such unsubstantial business
as I had contrived for myself, since nothing more genuine was to be
substituted for it.  But I magnanimously considered that there is a kind
of treason in insulating one’s self from the universal fear and sorrow,
and thinking one’s idle thoughts in the dread time of civil war; and
could a man be so cold and hardhearted, he would better deserve to be
sent to Fort Warren than many who have found their way thither on the
score of violent, but misdirected sympathies.  I remembered the touching
rebuke administered by King Charles to that rural squire the echo of
whose hunting-horn came to the poor monarch’s ear on the morning before a
battle, where the sovereignty and constitution of England were to be set
at a stake.  So I gave myself up to reading newspapers and listening to
the click of the telegraph, like other people; until, after a great many
months of such pastime, it grew so abominably irksome that I determined
to look a little more closely at matters with my own eyes.

Accordingly we set out--a friend and myself--towards Washington, while it
was still the long, dreary January of our Northern year, though March in
name; nor were we unwilling to clip a little margin off the five months’
winter, during which there is nothing genial in New England save the
fireside.  It was a clear, frosty morning, when we started.  The sun
shone brightly on snow-covered hills in the neighborhood of Boston, and
burnished the surface of frozen ponds; and the wintry weather kept along
with us while we trundled through Worcester and Springfield, and all
those old, familiar towns, and through the village-cities of Connecticut.
In New York the streets were afloat with liquid mud and slosh.  Over New
Jersey there was still a thin covering of snow, with the face of Nature
visible through the rents in her white shroud, though with little or no
symptom of reviving life.  But when we reached Philadelphia, the air was
mild and balmy; there was but a patch or two of dingy winter here and
there, and the bare, brown fields about the city were ready to be green.
We had met the Spring half-way, in her slow progress from the South; and
if we kept onward at the same pace, and could get through the Rebel
lines, we should soon come to fresh grass, fruit-blossoms, green peas,
strawberries, and all such delights of early summer.

On our way, we heard many rumors of the war, but saw few signs of it.
The people were staid and decorous, according to their ordinary fashion;
and business seemed about as brisk as usual,--though, I suppose, it was
considerably diverted from its customary channels into warlike ones.  In
the cities, especially in New York, there was a rather prominent display
of military goods at the shop windows,--such as swords with gilded
scabbards and trappings, epaulets, carabines, revolvers, and sometimes a
great iron cannon at the edge of the pavement, as if Mars had dropped
one of his pocket-pistols there, while hurrying to the field.  As
railway-companions, we had now and then a volunteer in his French-gray
great-coat, returning from furlough, or a new-made officer travelling to
join his regiment, in his new-made uniform, which was perhaps all of the
military character that he had about him,--but proud of his eagle-buttons
and likely enough to do them honor before the gilt should be wholly
dimmed.  The country, in short, so far as bustle and movement went, was
more quiet than in ordinary times, because so large a proportion of its
restless elements had been drawn towards the seat of the conflict.  But
the air was full of a vague disturbance.  To me, at least, it seemed so,
emerging from such a solitude as has been hinted at, and the more
impressible by rumors and indefinable presentiments, since I had not
lived, like other men, in an atmosphere of continual talk about the war.
A battle was momentarily expected on the Potomac; for, though our army
was still on the hither side of the river, all of us were looking towards
the mysterious and terrible Manassas, with the idea that somewhere in its
neighborhood lay a ghastly battle-field, yet to be fought, but foredoomed
of old to be bloodier than the one where we had reaped such shame.  Of
all haunted places, methinks such a destined field should be thickest
thronged with ugly phantoms, ominous of mischief through ages beforehand.

Beyond Philadelphia there was a much greater abundance of military
people.  Between Baltimore and Washington a guard seemed to hold every
station along the railroad; and frequently, on the hill-sides, we saw a
collection of weather-beaten tents, the peaks of which, blackened with
smoke, indicated that they had been made comfortable by stove-heat
throughout the winter.  At several commanding positions we saw
fortifications, with the muzzles of cannon protruding from the ramparts,
the slopes of which were made of the yellow earth of that region, and
still unsodded; whereas, till these troublous times, there have been no
forts but what were grass-grown with the lapse of at least a lifetime of
peace.  Our stopping-places were thronged with soldiers, some of whom
came through the cars asking for newspapers that contained accounts of
the battle between the Merrimack and Monitor, which had been fought the
day before.  A railway-train met us, conveying a regiment out of
Washington to some unknown point; and reaching the capital, we filed out
of the station between lines of soldiers, with shouldered muskets,
putting us in mind of similar spectacles at the gates of European cities.
It was not without sorrow that we saw the free circulation of the
nation’s life-blood (at the very heart, moreover) clogged with such
strictures as these, which have caused chronic diseases in almost all
countries save our own.  Will the time ever come again, in America, when
we may live half a score of years without once seeing the likeness of a
soldier, except it be in the festal march of a company on its summer
tour?  Not in this generation, I fear, nor in the next, nor till the
Millennium; and even that blessed epoch, as the prophecies seem to
intimate, will advance to the sound of the trumpet.

One terrible idea occurs in reference to this matter.  Even supposing the
war should end to-morrow, and the army melt into the mass of the
population within the year, what an incalculable preponderance will there
be of military titles and pretensions for at least half a century to
come!  Every country-neighborhood will have its general or two, its three
or four colonels, half a dozen majors, and captains without end,--besides
non-commissioned officers and privates, more than the recruiting offices
ever knew of,--all with their campaign-stories, which will become the
staple of fireside talk forevermore.  Military merit, or rather, since
that is not so readily estimated, military notoriety, will be the measure
of all claims to civil distinction.--One bullet-headed general will
succeed another in the Presidential chair; and veterans will hold the
offices at home and abroad, and sit in Congress and the state
legislatures, and fill all the avenues of public life.  And yet I do not
speak of this deprecatingly, since, very likely, it may substitute
something more real and genuine, instead of the many shams on which men
have heretofore founded their claims to public regard; but it behooves
civilians to consider their wretched prospects in the future, and assume
the military button before it is too late.

We were not in time to see Washington as a camp.  On the very day of our
arrival sixty thousand men had crossed the Potomac on their march towards
Manassas; and almost with their first step into the Virginia mud, the
phantasmagory of a countless host and impregnable ramparts, before which
they had so long remained quiescent, dissolved quite away.  It was as if
General McClellan had thrust his sword into a gigantic enemy, and,
beholding him suddenly collapse, had discovered to himself and the world
that he had merely punctured an enormously swollen bladder.  There are
instances of a similar character in old romances, where great armies are
long kept at bay by the arts of necromancers, who build airy towers and
battlements, and muster warriors of terrible aspect, and thus feign a
defence of seeming impregnability, until some bolder champion of the
besiegers dashes forward to try an encounter with the foremost foeman,
and finds him melt away in the death grapple.  With such heroic
adventures let the march upon Manassas be hereafter reckoned.  The whole
business, though connected with the destinies of a nation, takes
inevitably a tinge of the ludicrous.  The vast preparation of men and
warlike material,--the majestic patience and docility with which the
people waited through those weary and dreary months,--the martial skill,
courage, and caution, with which our movement was ultimately made,--and,
at last, the tremendous shock with which we were brought suddenly up
against nothing at all!  The Southerners show little sense of humor
nowadays, but I think they must have meant to provoke a laugh at our
expense, when they planted those Quaker guns.  At all events, no other
Rebel artillery has played upon us with such overwhelming effect.

The troops being gone, we had the better leisure and opportunity to look
into other matters.  It is natural enough to suppose that the centre and
heart of Washington is the Capitol; and certainly, in its outward aspect,
the world has not many statelier or more beautiful edifices, nor any, I
should suppose, more skilfully adapted to legislative purposes, and to
all accompanying needs.  But, etc., etc.  [We omit several paragraphs
here, in which the author speaks of some prominent Members of Congress
with a freedom that seems to have been not unkindly meant, but might be
liable to misconstruction.  As he admits that he never listened to an
important debate, we can hardly recognize his qualifications to estimate
these gentlemen, in their legislative and oratorical capacities.]

          *     *     *     *     *     *

We found one man, however, at the Capitol, who was satisfactorily
adequate to the business which brought him thither.  In quest of him, we
went through halls, galleries, and corridors, and ascended a noble
staircase, balustraded with a dark and beautifully variegated marble from
Tennessee, the richness of which is quite a sufficient cause for
objecting to the secession of that State.  At last we came to a barrier
of pine boards, built right across the stairs.  Knocking at a rough,
temporary door, we thrust a card beneath; and in a minute or two it was
opened by a person in his shirt-sleeves, a middle-aged figure, neither
tall nor short, of Teutonic build and aspect, with an ample beard of a
ruddy tinge and chestnut hair.  He looked at us, in the first place, with
keen and somewhat guarded eyes, as if it were not his practice to
vouchsafe any great warmth of greeting, except upon sure ground of
observation.  Soon, however, his look grew kindly and genial (not that it
had ever been in the least degree repulsive, but only reserved), and
Leutze allowed us to gaze at the cartoon of his great fresco, and talked
about it unaffectedly, as only a man of true genius can speak of his own
works.  Meanwhile the noble design spoke for itself upon the wall.  A
sketch in color, which we saw afterwards, helped us to form some distant
and flickering notion of what the picture will be, a few months hence,
when these bare outlines, already so rich in thought and suggestiveness,
shall glow with a fire of their own,--a fire which, I truly believe, will
consume every other pictorial decoration of the Capitol, or, at least,
will compel us to banish those stiff and respectable productions to some
less conspicuous gallery.  The work will be emphatically original and
American, embracing characteristics that neither art nor literature have
yet dealt with, and producing new forms of artistic beauty from the
natural features of the Rocky-Mountain region, which Leutze seems to have
studied broadly and minutely.  The garb of the hunters and wanderers of
those deserts, too, under his free and natural management, is shown as
the most picturesque of costumes.  But it would be doing this admirable
painter no kind office to overlay his picture with any more of my
colorless and uncertain words; so I shall merely add that it looked full
of energy, hope, progress, irrepressible movement onward, all represented
in a momentary pause of triumph; and it was most cheering to feel its
good augury at this dismal time, when our country might seem to have
arrived at such a deadly stand-still.

It was an absolute comfort, indeed, to find Leutze so quietly busy at
this great national work, which is destined to glow for centuries on the
walls of the Capitol, if that edifice shall stand, or must share its
fate, if treason shall succeed in subverting it with the Union which it
represents.  It was delightful to see him so calmly elaborating his
design, while other men doubted and feared, or hoped treacherously, and
whispered to one another that the nation would exist only a little
longer, or that, if a remnant still held together, its centre and seat of
government would be far northward and westward of Washington.  But the
artist keeps right on, firm of heart and hand, drawing his outlines with
an unwavering pencil, beautifying and idealizing our rude, material life,
and thus manifesting that we have an indefeasible claim to a more
enduring national existence.  In honest truth, what with the
hope-inspiring influence of the design, and what with Leutze’s
undisturbed evolvement of it, I was exceedingly encouraged, and allowed
these cheerful auguries to weigh against a sinister omen that was pointed
out to me in another part of the Capitol.  The freestone walls of the
central edifice are pervaded with great cracks, and threaten to come
thundering down, under the immense weight of the iron dome,--an
appropriate catastrophe enough if it should occur on the day when we drop
the Southern stars out of our flag.

Everybody seems to be at Washington, and yet there is a singular dearth
of imperatively noticeable people there.  I question whether there are
half a dozen individuals, in all kinds of eminence, at whom a stranger,
wearied with the contact of a hundred moderate celebrities, would turn
round to snatch a second glance.  Secretary Seward, to be sure,--a pale,
large-nosed, elderly man, of moderate stature, with a decided originality
of gait and aspect, and a cigar in his mouth,--etc., etc.
[We are again compelled to interfere with our friend’s license of
personal description and criticism.  Even Cabinet Ministers (to whom the
next few pages of the article were devoted) had their private immunities,
which ought to be conscientiously observed,--unless, indeed, the writer
chanced to have some very piquant motives for violating them.]

          *     *     *     *     *     *

Of course, there was one other personage, in the class of statesmen, whom
I should have been truly mortified to leave Washington without seeing;
since (temporarily, at least, and by force of circumstances) he was the
man of men.  But a private grief had built up a barrier about him,
impeding the customary free intercourse of Americans with their chief
magistrate; so that I might have come away without a glimpse of his very
remarkable physiognomy, save for a semi-official opportunity of which I
was glad to take advantage.  The fact is, we were invited to annex
ourselves, as supernumeraries, to a deputation that was about to wait
upon the President, from a Massachusetts whip-factory, with a present of
a splendid whip.

Our immediate party consisted only of four or five (including Major Ben
Perley Poore, with his note-book and pencil), but we were joined by
several other persons, who seemed to have been lounging about the
precincts of the White House, under the spacious porch, or within the
hall, and who swarmed in with us to take the chances of a presentation.
Nine o’clock had been appointed as the time for receiving the deputation,
and we were punctual to the moment; but not so the President, who sent us
word that he was eating his breakfast, and would come as soon as he
could.  His appetite, we were glad to think, must have been a pretty fair
one; for we waited about half an hour in one of the antechambers, and
then were ushered into a reception-room, in one corner of which sat the
Secretaries of War and of the Treasury, expecting, like ourselves, the
termination of the Presidential breakfast.  During this interval there
were several new additions to our group, one or two of whom were in a
working-garb, so that we formed a very miscellaneous collection of
people, mostly unknown to each other, and without any common sponsor, but
all with an equal right to look our head-servant in the face.

By and by there was a little stir on the staircase and in the
passage-way, and in lounged a tall, loose-jointed figure, of an
exaggerated Yankee port and demeanor, whom (as being about the homeliest
man I ever saw, yet by no means repulsive or disagreeable) it was
impossible not to recognize as Uncle Abe.

Unquestionably, Western man though he be, and Kentuckian by birth,
President Lincoln is the essential representative of all Yankees, and the
veritable specimen, physically, of what the world seems determined to
regard as our characteristic qualities.  It is the strangest and yet the
fittest thing in the jumble of human vicissitudes, that he, out of so
many millions, unlooked for, unselected by any intelligible process that
could be based upon his genuine qualities, unknown to those who chose
him, and unsuspected of what endowments may adapt him for his tremendous
responsibility, should have found the way open for him to fling his lank
personality into the chair of state,--where, I presume, it was his first
impulse to throw his legs on the council-table, and tell the Cabinet
Ministers a story.  There is no describing his lengthy awkwardness, nor
the uncouthness of his movement; and yet it seemed as if I had been in
the habit of seeing him daily, and had shaken hands with him a thousand
times in some village street; so true was he to the aspect of the pattern
American, though with a certain extravagance which, possibly, I
exaggerated still further by the delighted eagerness with which I took it
in.  If put to guess his calling and livelihood, I should have taken him
for a country schoolmaster as soon as anything else.  He was dressed in a
rusty black frock-coat and pantaloons, unbrushed, and worn so faithfully
that the suit had adapted itself to the curves and angularities of his
figure, and had grown to be an outer skin of the man.  He had shabby
slippers on his feet.  His hair was black, still unmixed with gray,
stiff, somewhat bushy, and had apparently been acquainted with neither
brush nor comb that morning, after the disarrangement of the pillow; and
as to a night-cap, Uncle Abe probably knows nothing of such effeminacies.
His complexion is dark and sallow, betokening, I fear, an insalubrious
atmosphere around the White House; he has thick black eyebrows and an
impending brow; his nose is large, and the lines about his mouth are very
strongly defined.

The whole physiognomy is as coarse a one as you would meet anywhere in
the length and breadth of the States; but, withal, it is redeemed,
illuminated, softened, and brightened by a kindly though serious look out
of his eyes, and an expression of homely sagacity, that seems weighted
with rich results of village experience.  A great deal of native sense;
no bookish cultivation, no refinement; honest at heart, and thoroughly
so, and yet, in some sort, sly,--at least, endowed with a sort of tact
and wisdom that are akin to craft, and would impel him, I think, to take
an antagonist in flank, rather than to make a bull-run at him right in
front.  But, on the whole, I like this sallow, queer, sagacious visage,
with the homely human sympathies that warmed it; and, for my small share
in the matter, would as lief have Uncle Abe for a ruler as any man whom
it would have been practicable to put in his place.

Immediately on his entrance the President accosted our member of
Congress, who had us in charge, and, with a comical twist of his face,
made some jocular remark about the length of his breakfast.  He then
greeted us all round, not waiting for an introduction, but shaking and
squeezing everybody’s hand with the utmost cordiality, whether the
individual’s name was announced to him or not.  His manner towards us was
wholly without pretence, but yet had a kind of natural dignity, quite
sufficient to keep the forwardest of us from clapping him on the shoulder
and asking him for a story.  A mutual acquaintance being established, our
leader took the whip out of its case, and began to read the address of
presentation.  The whip was an exceedingly long one, its handle wrought
in ivory (by some artist in the Massachusetts State Prison, I believe),
and ornamented with a medallion of the President, and other equally
beautiful devices; and along its whole length there was a succession of
golden bands and ferrules.  The address was shorter than the whip, but
equally well made, consisting chiefly of an explanatory description of
these artistic designs, and closing with a hint that the gift was a
suggestive and emblematic one, and that the President would recognize the
use to which such an instrument should be put.

This suggestion gave Uncle Abe rather a delicate task in his reply,
because, slight as the matter seemed, it apparently called for some
declaration, or intimation, or faint foreshadowing of policy in reference
to the conduct of the war, and the final treatment of the Rebels.  But
the President’s Yankee aptness and not-to-be-caughtness stood him in good
stead, and he jerked or wiggled himself out of the dilemma with an
uncouth dexterity that was entirely in character; although, without his
gesticulation of eye and month,--and especially the flourish of the whip,
with which he imagined himself touching up a pair of fat horses,--I doubt
whether his words would be worth recording, even if I could remember
them.  The gist of the reply was, that he accepted the whip as an emblem
of peace; not punishment; and, this great affair over, we retired out of
the presence in high good-humor, only regretting that we could not have
seen the President sit down and fold up his legs (which is said to be a
most extraordinary spectacle), or have heard him tell one of those
delectable stories for which he is so celebrated.  A good many of them
are afloat upon the common talk of Washington, and are certainly the
aptest, pithiest, and funniest little things imaginable; though, to be
sure, they smack of the frontier freedom, and would not always bear
repetition in a drawing-room, or on the immaculate page of the Atlantic.


[The above passage relating to President Lincoln was one of those omitted
from the article as originally published, and the following note was
appended to explain the omission, which had been indicated by a line of
points:--

We are compelled to omit two or three pages, in which the author
describes the interview, and gives his idea of the personal appearance
and deportment of the President.  The sketch appears to have been written
in a benign spirit, and perhaps conveys a not inaccurate impression of
its august subject; but it lacks reverence, and it pains us to see a
gentleman of ripe age, and who has spent years under the corrective
influence of foreign institutions, falling into the characteristic and
most ominous fault of Young America.]


Good Heavens! what liberties have I been taking with one of the
potentates of the earth, and the man on whose conduct more important
consequences depend than on that of any other historical personage of the
century!  But with whom is an American citizen entitled to take a
liberty, if not with his own chief magistrate?  However, lest the above
allusions to President Lincoln’s little peculiarities (already well known
to the country and to the world) should be misinterpreted, I deem it
proper to say a word or two in regard to him, of unfeigned respect and
measurable confidence.  He is evidently a man of keen faculties, and,
what is still more to the purpose, of powerful character.  As to his
integrity, the people have that intuition of it which is never deceived.
Before he actually entered upon his great office, and for a considerable
time afterwards, there is no reason to suppose that he adequately
estimated the gigantic task about to be imposed on him, or, at least, had
any distinct idea how it was to be managed; and I presume there may have
been more than one veteran politician who proposed to himself to take the
power out of President Lincoln’s hands into his own, leaving our honest
friend only the public responsibility for the good or ill success of the
career.  The extremely imperfect development of his statesmanly
qualities, at that period, may have justified such designs.  But the
President is teachable by events, and has now spent a year in a very
arduous course of education; he has a flexible mind, capable of much
expansion, and convertible towards far loftier studies and activities
than those of his early life; and if he came to Washington a backwoods
humorist, he has already transformed himself into as good a statesman (to
speak moderately) as his prime-minister.

Among other excursions to camps and places of interest in the
neighborhood of Washington, we went, one day, to Alexandria.  It is a
little port on the Potomac, with one or two shabby wharves and docks,
resembling those of a fishing-village in New England, and the respectable
old brick town rising gently behind.  In peaceful times it no doubt bore
an aspect of decorous quietude and dulness; but it was now thronged with
the Northern soldiery, whose stir and bustle contrasted strikingly with
the many closed warehouses, the absence of citizens from their customary
haunts, and the lack of any symptom of healthy activity, while
army-wagons trundled heavily over the pavements, and sentinels paced the
sidewalks, and mounted dragoons dashed to and fro on military errands.  I
tried to imagine how very disagreeable the presence of a Southern army
would be in a sober town of Massachusetts; and the thought considerably
lessened my wonder at the cold and shy regards that are cast upon our
troops, the gloom, the sullen demeanor, the declared or scarcely hidden
sympathy with rebellion, which are so frequent here.  It is a strange
thing in human life, that the greatest errors both of men and women often
spring from their sweetest and most generous qualities; and so,
undoubtedly, thousands of warm-hearted, sympathetic, and impulsive
persons have joined the Rebels, not from any real zeal for the cause, but
because, between two conflicting loyalties, they chose that which
necessarily lay nearest the heart.  There never existed any other
government against which treason was so easy, and could defend itself by
such plausible arguments, as against that of the United States.  The
anomaly of two allegiances (of which that of the State comes nearest home
to a man’s feelings, and includes the altar and the hearth, while the
General Government claims his devotion only to an airy mode of law, and
has no symbol but a flag) is exceedingly mischievous in this point of
view; for it has converted crowds of honest people into traitors, who
seem to themselves not merely innocent but patriotic, and who die for a
bad cause with as quiet a conscience as if it were the best.  In the vast
extent of our country,--too vast by far to be taken into one small human
heart,--we inevitably limit to our own State, or, at farthest, to our own
section, that sentiment of physical love for the soil which renders an
Englishman, for example, so intensely sensitive to the dignity and
well-being of his little island, that one hostile foot, treading anywhere
upon it, would make a bruise on each individual breast.  If a man loves
his individual State, therefore, and is content to be ruined with her,
let us shoot him if we can, but allow him an honorable burial in the soil
he fights for.

[We do not thoroughly comprehend the author’s drift in the foregoing
paragraph, but are inclined to think its tone reprehensible, and its
tendency impolitic in the present stage of our national difficulties.]

In Alexandria we visited the tavern in which Colonel Ellsworth was
killed, and saw the spot where he fell, and saw the stairs below, whence
Jackson fired the fatal shot, and where he himself was slain a moment
afterwards; so that the assassin and his victim must have met on the
threshold of the spirit-world, and perhaps came to a better understanding
before they had taken many steps on the other side.  Ellsworth was too
generous to bear an immortal grudge for a deed like that, done in hot
blood, and by no skulking enemy.  The memorial-hunters have completely
cut away the original wood-work around the spot, with their
pocket-knives; and the staircase, balustrade, and floor, as well as the
adjacent doors and door-frames, have recently been renewed; the walls,
moreover, are covered with new paper-hangings, the former having been
torn off in tatters; and thus it becomes something like a metaphysical
question whether the place of the murder actually exists.

Driving out of Alexandria, we stopped on the edge of the city to inspect
an old slave-pen, which is one of the lions of the place, but a very poor
one; and a little farther on, we came to a brick church, where Washington
used sometimes to attend service,--a pre-Revolutionary edifice, with ivy
growing over its walls, though not very luxuriantly.  Reaching the open
country, we saw forts and camps on all sides; some of the tents being
placed immediately on the ground, while others were raised over a
basement of logs, laid lengthwise, like those of a log-hut, or driven
vertically into the soil in a circle,--thus forming a solid wall, the
chinks closed up with Virginia mud, and above it the pyramidal shelter of
the tent.  Here were in progress all the occupations, and all the
idleness, of the soldier in the tented field: some were cooking the
company-rations in pots hung over fires in the open air; some played at
ball, or developed their muscular power by gymnastic exercise; some read
newspapers; some smoked cigars or pipes; and many were cleaning their
arms or accoutrements,--the more carefully, perhaps, because their
division was to be reviewed by the Commander-in-Chief that afternoon;
others sat on the ground, while their comrades cut their hair,--it being
a soldierly fashion (and for excellent reasons) to crop it within an inch
of the skull; others, finally, lay asleep in breast-high tents, with
their legs protruding into the open air.

We paid a visit to Fort Ellsworth, and from its ramparts (which have been
heaped up out of the muddy soil within the last few months, and will
require still a year or two to make them verdant) we had a beautiful view
of the Potomac, a truly majestic river, and the surrounding country.  The
fortifications, so numerous in all this region, and now so unsightly with
their bare, precipitous sides, will remain as historic monuments,
grass-grown and picturesque memorials of an epoch of terror and
suffering: they will serve to make our country dearer and more
interesting to us, and afford fit soil for poetry to root itself in: for
this is a plant which thrives best in spots where blood has been spilt
long ago, and grows in abundant clusters in old ditches, such as the moat
around Fort Ellsworth will be a century hence.  It may seem to be paying
dear for what many will reckon but a worthless weed; but the more
historical associations we can link with our localities, the richer will
be the daily life that feeds upon the past, and the more valuable the
things that have been long established: so that our children will be less
prodigal than their fathers in sacrificing good institutions to
passionate impulses and impracticable theories.  This herb of grace, let
us hope, will be found in the old footprints of the war.

Even in an aesthetic point of view, however, the war has done a great
deal of enduring mischief, by causing the devastation of great tracts of
woodland scenery, in which this part of Virginia would appear to be very
rich.  Around all the encampments, and everywhere along the road, we saw
the bare sites of what had evidently been tracts of hard-wood forest,
indicated by the unsightly stumps of well-grown trees, not smoothly
felled by regular axe-men, but hacked, haggled, and unevenly amputated,
as by a sword or other miserable tool, in an unskilful hand.  Fifty years
will not repair this desolation.  An army destroys everything before and
around it, even to the very grass; for the sites of the encampments are
converted into barren esplanades, like those of the squares in French
cities, where not a blade of grass is allowed to grow.  As to the other
symptoms of devastation and obstruction, such as deserted houses,
unfenced fields, and a general aspect of nakedness and ruin, I know not
how much may be due to a normal lack of neatness in the rural life of
Virginia, which puts a squalid face even upon a prosperous state of
things; but undoubtedly the war must have spoilt what was good, and made
the bad a great deal worse.  The carcasses of horses were scattered along
the wayside.

One very pregnant token of a social system thoroughly disturbed was
presented by a party of contrabands, escaping out of the mysterious
depths of Secessia; and its strangeness consisted in the leisurely delay
with which they trudged forward, as dreading no pursuer, and encountering
nobody to turn them back.  They were unlike the specimens of their race
whom we are accustomed to see at the North, and, in my judgment, were far
more agreeable.  So rudely were they attired,--as if their garb had grown
upon them spontaneously,--so picturesquely natural in manners, and
wearing such a crust of primeval simplicity (which is quite polished away
from the Northern black man), that they seemed a kind of creature by
themselves, not altogether human, but perhaps quite as good, and akin to
the fawns and rustic deities of olden times.  I wonder whether I shall
excite anybody’s wrath by saying this.  It is no great matter.  At all
events, I felt most kindly towards these poor fugitives, but knew not
precisely what to wish in their behalf, nor in the least how to help
them.  For the sake of the manhood which is latent in them, I would not
have turned them back; but I should have felt almost as reluctant, on
their own account, to hasten them forward to the stranger’s land; and I
think my prevalent idea was, that, whoever may be benefited by the
results of this war, it will not be the present generation of negroes,
the childhood of whose race is now gone forever, and who must henceforth
fight a hard battle with the world, on very unequal terms.  On behalf of
my own race, I am glad and can only hope that an inscrutable Providence
means good to both parties.

There is an historical circumstance, known to few, that connects the
children of the Puritans with these Africans of Virginia in a very
singular way.  They are our brethren, as being lineal descendants from
the Mayflower, the fated womb of which, in her first voyage, sent forth a
brood of Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock, and, in a subsequent one, spawned
slaves upon the Southern soil,--a monstrous birth, but with which we have
an instinctive sense of kindred, and so are stirred by an irresistible
impulse to attempt their rescue, even at the cost of blood and ruin.  The
character of our sacred ship, I fear, may suffer a little by this
revelation; but we must let her white progeny offset her dark one,--and
two such portents never sprang from an identical source before.

While we drove onward, a young officer on horseback looked earnestly into
the carriage, and recognized some faces that he had seen before; so he
rode along by our side, and we pestered him with queries and
observations, to which he responded more civilly than they deserved.  He
was on General McClellan’s staff; and a gallant cavalier, high-booted,
with a revolver in his belt, and mounted on a noble horse, which trotted
hard and high without disturbing the rider in his accustomed seat.  His
face had a healthy hue of exposure and an expression of careless
hardihood; and, as I looked at him, it seemed to me that the war had
brought good fortune to the youth of this epoch, if to none beside; since
they now make it their daily business to ride a horse and handle a sword,
instead of lounging listlessly through the duties, occupations,
pleasures--all tedious alike--to which the artificial state of society
limits a peaceful generation.  The atmosphere of the camp and the smoke
of the battle-field are morally invigorating; the hardy virtues flourish
in them, the nonsense dies like a wilted weed.  The enervating effects of
centuries of civilization vanish at once, and leave these young men to
enjoy a life of hardship, and the exhilarating sense of danger,--to kill
men blamelessly, or to be killed gloriously,--and to be happy in
following out their native instincts of destruction, precisely in the
spirit of Homer’s heroes, only with some considerable change of mode.
One touch of Nature makes not only the whole world, but all time, akin.
Set men face to face, with weapons in their hands, and they are as ready
to slaughter one another now, after playing at peace and good-will for so
many years, as in the rudest ages, that never heard of peace-societies,
and thought no wine so delicious as what they quaffed from an enemy’s
skull.  Indeed, if the report of a Congressional committee may be
trusted, that old-fashioned kind of goblet has again come into use at the
expense of our Northern head-pieces,--a costly drinking-cup to him that
furnishes it!  Heaven forgive me for seeming to jest upon such a
subject!--only, it is so odd, when we measure our advances from
barbarism, and find ourselves just here!  [We hardly expected this
outbreak in favor of war from the Peaceable Man; but the justness of our
cause makes us all soldiers at heart, however quiet in our outward life.
We have heard of twenty Quakers in a single company of a Pennsylvania
regiment.]

We now approached General McClellan’s head-quarters, which, at that time,
were established at Fairfield Seminary.  The edifice was situated on a
gentle elevation, amid very agreeable scenery, and, at a distance, looked
like a gentleman’s seat.  Preparations were going forward for reviewing a
division of ten or twelve thousand men, the various regiments composing
which had begun to array themselves on an extensive plain, where,
methought, there was a more convenient place for a battle than is usually
found in this broken and difficult country.  Two thousand cavalry made a
portion of the troops to be reviewed.  By and by we saw a pretty numerous
troop of mounted officers, who were congregated on a distant part of the
plain, and whom we finally ascertained to be the Commander-in-Chief’s
staff, with McClellan himself at their head.  Our party managed to
establish itself in a position conveniently close to the General, to
whom, moreover, we had the honor of an introduction; and he bowed, on his
horseback, with a good deal of dignity and martial courtesy, but no airs
nor fuss nor pretension beyond what his character and rank inevitably
gave him.

Now, at that juncture, and in fact, up to the present moment, there was,
and is, a most fierce and bitter outcry, and detraction loud and low,
against General McClellan, accusing him of sloth, imbecility, cowardice,
treasonable purposes, and, in short, utterly denying his ability as a
soldier, and questioning his integrity as a man.  Nor was this to be
wondered at; for when before, in all history, do we find a general in
command of half a million of men, and in presence of an enemy inferior in
numbers and no better disciplined than his own troops, leaving it still
debatable, after the better part of a year, whether he is a soldier or
no?  The question would seem to answer itself in the very asking.
Nevertheless, being most profoundly ignorant of the art of war, like the
majority of the General’s critics, and, on the other hand, having some
considerable impressibility by men’s characters, I was glad of the
opportunity to look him in the face, and to feel whatever influence might
reach me from his sphere.  So I stared at him, as the phrase goes, with
all the eyes I had; and the reader shall have the benefit of what I saw,
--to which he is the more welcome, because, in writing this article, I
feel disposed to be singularly frank, and can scarcely restrain myself
from telling truths the utterance of which I should get slender thanks
for.

The General was dressed in a simple, dark-blue uniform, without epaulets,
booted to the knee, and with a cloth cap upon his head; and, at first
sight, you might have taken him for a corporal of dragoons, of
particularly neat and soldier-like aspect, and in the prime of his age
and strength.  He is only of middling stature, but his build is very
compact and sturdy, with broad shoulders and a look of great physical
vigor, which, in fact, he is said to possess,--he and Beauregard having
been rivals in that particular, and both distinguished above other men.
His complexion is dark and sanguine, with dark hair.  He has a strong,
bold, soldierly face, full of decision; a Roman nose, by no means a thin
prominence, but very thick and firm; and if he follows it (which I should
think likely), it may be pretty confidently trusted to guide him aright.
His profile would make a more effective likeness than the full face,
which, however, is much better in the real man than in any photograph
that I have seen.  His forehead is not remarkably large, but comes
forward at the eyebrows; it is not the brow nor countenance of a
prominently intellectual man (not a natural student, I mean, or abstract
thinker), but of one whose office it is to handle things practically and
to bring about tangible results.  His face looked capable of being very
stern, but wore, in its repose, when I saw it, an aspect pleasant and
dignified; it is not, in its character, an American face, nor an English
one.  The man on whom he fixes his eye is conscious of him.  In his
natural disposition, he seems calm and self-possessed, sustaining his
great responsibilities cheerfully, without shrinking, or weariness, or
spasmodic effort, or damage to his health, but all with quiet, deep-drawn
breaths; just as his broad shoulders would bear up a heavy burden without
aching beneath it.

After we had had sufficient time to peruse the man (so far as it could be
done with one pair of very attentive eyes), the General rode off,
followed by his cavalcade, and was lost to sight among the troops.  They
received him with loud shouts, by the eager uproar of which--now near,
now in the centre, now on the outskirts of the division, and now sweeping
back towards us in a great volume of sound--we could trace his progress
through the ranks.  If he is a coward, or a traitor, or a humbug, or
anything less than a brave, true, and able man, that mass of intelligent
soldiers, whose lives and honor he had in charge, were utterly deceived,
and so was this present writer; for they believed in him, and so did I;
and had I stood in the ranks, should have shouted with the lustiest of
them.  Of course I may be mistaken; my opinion on such a point is worth
nothing, although my impression may be worth a little more; neither do I
consider the General’s antecedents as bearing very decided testimony to
his practical soldiership.  A thorough knowledge of the science of war
seems to be conceded to him; he is allowed to be a good military critic;
but all this is possible without his possessing any positive qualities of
a great general, just as a literary critic may show the profoundest
acquaintance with the principles of epic poetry without being able to
produce a single stanza of an epic poem.  Nevertheless, I shall not give
up my faith in General McClellan’s soldiership until he is defeated, nor
in his courage and integrity even then.

Another of our excursions was to Harper’s Ferry,--the Directors of the
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad having kindly invited us to accompany them on
the first trip over the newly laid track, after its breaking up by the
Rebels.  It began to rain, in the early morning, pretty soon after we
left Washington, and continued to pour a cataract throughout the day; so
that the aspect of the country was dreary, where it would otherwise have
been delightful, as we entered among the hill-scenery that is formed by
the subsiding swells of the Alleghanies.  The latter part of our journey
lay along the shore of the Potomac, in its upper course, where the margin
of that noble river is bordered by gray, over-hanging crags, beneath
which--and sometimes right through them--the railroad takes its way.  In
one place the Rebels had attempted to arrest a train by precipitating an
immense mass of rock down upon the track, by the side of which it still
lay, deeply imbedded in the ground, and looking as if it might have lain
there since the Deluge.  The scenery grew even more picturesque as we
proceeded, the bluffs becoming very bold in their descent upon the river,
which, at Harper’s Ferry, presents as striking a vista among the hills as
a painter could desire to see.  

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