The Age of Miracles—A Story of Franklin Pierce—Simon Suggs Billy Sunday—Jefferson Davis and Aaron Burr—Certain Constitutional Shortcomings

I

The years intervening between 1865 and 1919 may be accounted the most momentous in all the cycles of the ages. The bells that something more than half a century ago rang forth to welcome peace in America have been from that day to this jangled out of tune and harsh with the sounding of war’s alarms in every other part of the world. We flatter ourselves with the thought that our tragedy lies behind us. Whether this be true or not, the tragedy of Europe is at hand and ahead. The miracles of modern invention, surpassing those of old, have made for strife, not for peace. Civilization has gone backward, not forward. Rulers, intoxicated by the lust of power and conquest, have lost their reason, and nations, following after, like cattle led to slaughter, seem as the bereft of Heaven “that knew not God.”

We read the story of our yesterdays as it unfolds itself in the current chronicle; the ascent to the bank-house, the descent to the mad-house, and, over the glittering paraphernalia that follows to the tomb, we reflect upon the money-zealot’s progress; the dizzy height, the dazzling array, the craze for more and more and more; then the temptation and fall, millions gone, honor gone, reason gone—the innocent and the gentle, with the guilty, dragged through the mire of the prison, and the court—and we draw back aghast. Yet, if we speak of these things we are called pessimists.

I have always counted myself an optimist. I know that I do not lie awake nights musing on the ingratitude either of my stars or my countrymen. I pity the man who does. Looking backward, I have sincere compassion for Webster and for Clay! What boots it to them, now that they lie beneath the mold, and that the drums and tramplings of nearly seventy years of the world’s strifes and follies and sordid ambitions and mean repinings, and longings, and laughter, and tears, have passed over their graves, what boots it to them, now, that they failed to get all they wanted? There is indeed snug lying in the churchyard; but the flowers smell as sweet and the birds sing as merry, and the stars look down as loving upon the God-hallowed mounds of the lowly and the poor, as upon the man-bedecked monuments of the Kings of men. All of us, the least with the greatest, let us hope and believe shall attain immortal life at last. What was there for Webster, what was there for Clay to quibble about? I read with a kind of wonder, and a sickening sense of the littleness of great things, those passages in the story of their lives where it is told how they stormed and swore, when tidings reached them that they had been balked of their desires.

Yet they might have been so happy; so happy in their daily toil, with its lofty aims and fair surroundings; so happy in the sense of duty done; so happy, above all, in their own Heaven-sent genius, with its noble opportunities and splendid achievements. They should have emulated the satisfaction told of Franklin Pierce. It is related that an enemy was inveighing against him, when an alleged friend spoke up and said: “You should not talk so about the President, I assure you that he is not at all the man you describe him to be. On the contrary, he is a man of the rarest gifts and virtues. He has long been regarded as the greatest orator in New England, and the greatest lawyer in New England, and surely no one of his predecessors ever sent such state papers to Congress.”

“How are you going to prove it,” angrily retorted the first speaker.

“I don’t need to prove it,” coolly replied the second. “He admits it.”

I cannot tell just how I should feel if I were President, though, on the whole, I fancy fairly comfortable, but I am quite certain that I would not exchange places with any of the men who have been President, and I have known quite a number of them.

II

I am myself accused sometimes of being a “pessimist.” Assuredly I am no optimist of the Billy Sunday sort, who fancies the adoption of the prohibition amendment the coming of “de jubilo.” Early in life, while yet a recognized baseball authority, Mr. Sunday discovered “pay dirt” in what Col. Mulberry Sellers called “piousness.” He made it an asset and began to issue celestial notes, countersigned by himself and made redeemable in Heaven. From that day to this he has been following the lead of the renowned Simon Suggs, who, having in true camp meeting style acquired “the grace of God,” turned loose as an exhorter shouting “Step up to the mourner’s bench, my brethering, step up lively, and be saved! I come in on na ’er par, an’ see what I draw’d! Religion’s the only game whar you can’t lose. Him that trusts the Lord holds fo’ aces!”

The Billy Sunday game has made Billy Sunday rich. Having exhausted Hell-fire-and-brimstone, the evangel turns to the Demon Rum. Satan, with hide and horns, has had his day. Prohibition is now the trick card.

The fanatic is never either very discriminating or very particular. As a rule, for him any taking “ism” will suffice. To-day, it happens to be “whisky.” To-morrow it will be tobacco. Finally, having established the spy system and made house-to-house espionage a rule of conventicle, it will become a misdemeanor for a man to kiss his wife.

From fakers who have cards up their sleeves, not to mention snakes in their boots, we hear a great deal about “the people,” pronounced by them as if it were spelled “pee-pul.” It is the unfailing recourse of the professional politician in quest of place. Yet scarcely any reference, or referee, were faultier.

The people en masse constitute what we call the mob. Mobs have rarely been right—never except when capably led. It was the mob of Jerusalem that did the unoffending Jesus of Nazareth to death. It was the mob in Paris that made the Reign of Terror. Mobs have seldom been tempted, even had a chance to go wrong, that they have not gone wrong.

The “people” is a fetish. It was the people, misled, who precipitated the South into the madness of secession and the ruin of a hopelessly unequal war of sections. It was the people backing if not compelling the Kaiser, who committed hari-kari for themselves and their empire in Germany. It is the people leaderless who are making havoc in Russia. Throughout the length and breadth of Christendom, in all lands and ages, the people, when turned loose, have raised every inch of hell to the square foot they were able to raise, often upon the slightest pretext, or no pretext at all.

This is merely to note the mortal fallibility of man, most fallible when herded in groups and prone to do in the aggregate what he would hesitate to do when left to himself and his individual accountability.

Under a wise dispensation of power, despotism, we are told embodies the best of all government. The trouble is that despotism is seldom, if ever, wise. It is its nature to be inconsiderate, being essentially selfish, grasping and tyrannous. As a rule therefore revolution—usually of force—has been required to change or reform it. Perfectibility was not designed for mortal man. That indeed furnishes the strongest argument in favor of the immortality of the soul, life on earth but the ante-chamber of eternal life. It would be a cruel Deity that condemned man to the brief and vexed span of human existence with nothing beyond the grave.

We know not whence we came, or whither we go; but it is a fair guess that we shall in the end get better than we have known.

III

Historic democracy is dead.

This is not to say that a Democratic party organization has ceased to exist. Nor does it mean that there are no more Democrats and that the Democratic party is dead in the sense that the Federalist party is dead or the Whig party is dead, or the Greenback party is dead, or the Populist party is dead. That which has died is the Democratic party of Jefferson and Jackson and Tilden. The principles of government which they laid down and advocated have been for the most part obliterated. What slavery and secession were unable to accomplish has been brought about by nationalizing sumptuary laws and suffrage.

The death-blow to Jeffersonian democracy was delivered by the Democratic Senators and Representatives from the South and West who carried through the prohibition amendment. The coup de grÂce was administered by a President of the United States elected as a Democrat when he approved the Federal suffrage amendment to the Constitution.

The kind of government for which the Jeffersonian democracy successfully battled for more than a century was thus repudiated; centralization was invited; State rights were assassinated in the very citadel of State rights. The charter of local self-government become a scrap of paper, the way is open for the obliteration of the States in all their essential functions and the erection of a Federal Government more powerful than anything of which Alexander Hamilton dared to dream.

When the history of these times comes to be written it may be said of Woodrow Wilson: he rose to world celebrity by circumstance rather than by character. He was favored of the gods. He possessed a bright, forceful mind. His achievements were thrust upon him. Though it sometimes ran away with him, his pen possessed extraordinary facility. Thus he was ever able to put his best foot foremost. Never in the larger sense a leader of men as were Chatham and Fox, as were Washington, Clay and Lincoln; nor of ideas as were Rousseau, Voltaire and Franklin, he had the subtle tenacity of Louis the Eleventh of France, the keen foresight of Richelieu with a talent for the surprising which would have raised him to eminence in journalism. In short he was an opportunist void of conviction and indifferent to consistency.

The pen is mightier than the sword only when it has behind it a heart as well as a brain. He who wields it must be brave, upright and steadfast. We are giving our Chief Executive enormous powers. As a rule his wishes prevail. His name becomes the symbol of party loyalty. Yet it is after all a figure of speech not a personality that appeals to our sense of duty without necessarily engaging our affection.

Historic Republicanism is likewise dead, as dead as historic Democracy, only in both cases the labels surviving.

IV

We are told by Herbert Spencer that the political superstition of the past having been the divine right of kings, the political superstition of the present is the divine right of parliaments and he might have said of peoples. The oil of anointing seems unawares, he thinks, to have dripped from the head of the one upon the heads of the many, and given sacredness to them also, and to their decrees.

That the Proletariat, the Bolsheviki, the People are on the way seems plain enough. How far they will go, and where they will end, is not so clear. With a kind of education—most men taught to read, very few to think—the masses are likely to demand yet more and more for themselves. They will continue strenuously and effectively to resent the startling contrasts of fortune which aptitude and opportunity have created in a social and political structure claiming to rest upon the formula “equality for all, special privilege for none.”

The law of force will yield to the rule of numbers. Socialism, disappointed of its Utopia, may then repeat the familiar lesson and reproduce the man-on-horseback, or the world may drop into another abyss, and, after the ensuing “dark ages,” like those that swallowed Babylon and Tyre, Greece and Rome, emerge with a new civilization and religion.

“Man never is, but always to be blessed.” We know not whence we came, or whither we go. Hope that springs eternal in the human breast tells us nothing. History seems, as Napoleon said, a series of lies agreed upon, yet not without dispute.

V

I read in an ultra-sectional non-partisan diatribe that “Jefferson Davis made Aaron Burr respectable,” a sentence which clearly indicates that the writer knew nothing either of Jefferson Davis or Aaron Burr.

Both have been subjected to unmeasured abuse. They are variously misunderstood. Their chief sin was failure; the one to establish an impossible confederacy laid in human slavery, the other to achieve certain vague schemes of empire in Mexico and the far Southwest, which, if not visionary, were premature.

The final collapse of the Southern Confederacy can be laid at the door of no man. It was doomed the day of its birth. The wonder is that sane leaders could invoke such odds against them and that a sane people could be induced to follow. The single glory of the South is that it was able to stand out so long against such odds.

Jefferson Davis was a high-minded and well-intentioned man. He was chosen to lead the South because he was, in addition, an accomplished soldier. As one who consistently opposed him in his public policies, I can specify no act to the discredit of his character, his one serious mistake being his failure to secure the peace offered by Abraham Lincoln two short months before Appomattox.

Taking account of their personalities and the lives they led, there is little to suggest comparison, except that they were soldiers and Senators, who, each in his day, filled a foremost place in public affairs.

Aaron Burr, though well born and highly educated, was perhaps a rudely-minded man. But he was no traitor. If the lovely woman, Theodosia Prevost, whom he married, had lived, there is reason to believe that the whole course and tenor of his career would have been altered. Her death was an irreparable blow, as it were, a prelude to the series of mischances that followed. The death of their daughter, the lovely Theodosia Alston, completed the tragedy of his checkered life.

Born a gentleman and attaining soldierly distinction and high place, he fell a victim to the lure of a soaring ambition and the devious experience of a man about town.

The object of political proscription for all his intellectual and personal resources, he could not successfully meet and stand against it. There was nothing in the affair with Hamilton actually to damn and ruin him. Neither morally nor politically was Hamilton the better man of the two. Nor was there treason in his Mexican scheme. He meant no more with universal acclaim than Houston did three decades later. To couple his name with that of Benedict Arnold is historic sacrilege.

Jefferson pursued him relentlessly. But even Jefferson could not have destroyed him. When, after an absence of four years abroad, he returned to America, there was still a future for him had he stood up like a man, but, instead, like one confessing defeat, he sank down, whilst the wave of obloquy rolled over him.

His is one of the few pathetic figures in our national history. Mr. Davis has had plenty of defenders. Poor Burr has had scarcely an apologist. His offense, whatever it was, has been overpaid. Even the War of Sections begins to fade into the mist and become dreamlike even to those who bore an actual part in it.

The years are gliding swiftly by. Only a little while, and there shall not be one man living who saw service on either side of that great struggle of systems and ideas. Its passions long ago vanished from manly bosoms. That has come to pass within a single generation in America which in Europe required ages to accomplish.

There is no disputing the verdict of events. Let us relate them truly and interpret them fairly. If the South would have the North do justice to its heroes, the South must do justice to the heroes of the North. Each must render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s even as each would render unto God the things that are God’s. As living men, standing erect in the presence of Heaven and the world, the men of the South have grown gray without being ashamed; and they need not fear that History will fail to vindicate their integrity.

When those are gone that fought the battle, and Posterity comes to strike the balance, it will be shown that the makers of the Constitution left the relation of the States to the Federal Government and of the Federal Government to the States open to a double construction. It will be told how the mistaken notion that slave labor was requisite to the profitable cultivation of sugar, rice and cotton, raised a paramount property interest in the Southern section of the Union, whilst in the Northern section, responding to the trend of modern thought and the outer movements of mankind, there arose a great moral sentiment against slavery. The conflict thus established, gradually but surely sectionalizing party lines, was as inevitable as it was irrepressible. It was fought out to its bitter and logical conclusion at Appomattox. It found us a huddle of petty sovereignties, held together by a rope of sand. It made and it left us a Nation.