Children of the Market Place Part 25

What are their speculations as to whether this ridiculous old doc.u.ment called the Const.i.tution goes into a territory or not? Give me old Bishop Berkeley with his inquiries concerning the virtues of tar water. It takes imagination of some moment to sense, as he did, that tar contains the purified spirits of the trees, of vegetation which can heal and help man. These were dreams worth while. Now a German chemist named Kekule, comes along and develops a theory called the valence of atoms. And who can tell what will come of that? For that matter, Sir Walter Raleigh did more for the world than Douglas. He found petroleum in the Trinidad pitch lake way back in the sixteenth century. And now a well has just been drilled, not for salt as you saw it in Kentucky as a boy, but for the oil for which they then had no use except to make ointment for people who stumble on the pier trying to catch a boat."

I said to Abigail: "I have never pretended that Douglas was a scientist or an artist or that he had a philosophical mind, but now that you bring these things to my attention I want to ask you why he is not a first-cla.s.s disciple of Darwin, since he has advocated the processes of nature in the solution of the slavery question."

"Nature! Well, are climate and soil any more nature than thought? Can't we use our will and our thought to a.s.sist climate and soil, about anything? But after all I get tired of this emphasis of the one slavery, just as you do. Why not include some other slaveries for condemnation?

There is Emerson for example. He didn't start out with this John Brown idea. He began with a plea for emanc.i.p.ation intellectually from England; and for emanc.i.p.ation from the slavery of orthodoxy."

"Yes," said Aldington, "I wish to add my plea too, and against the slavery of a lot of things: against the slavery of courts and bad laws and bad thoughts and poverty, and the whole business which we can see growing up in America, and making laws to stimulate it and protect it."

CHAPTER LIX

I was now more lonely than I had ever been in my life, more lonely than I was on the farm. Then I had youth and expectation of wonderful things.

I had ebullient spirits which were excited by simple things, the new country, the prospect of growing rich. Now my spirits were on the level of the prairie itself and I could look over the whole of life. I had nothing in particular with which to employ my energies except taking care of the riches that I had acquired. Riches had no meaning to me now.

They brought nothing that moderate means would not buy. What I needed was some one in my life. I had lost Dorothy. My boy was away at school.

Isabel was denied me. If she had only rejected me so that my will had been raised against her. Then I should have had pa.s.sion for my thought and action. But it was with gentleness and understanding that she bade me adieu.

Douglas was left to me, but what could he do for me or I for him? He had been my friend with that loyalty which characterized him from the time that he had taken me from the clutches of the law for killing Lamborn.

We had seen much of each other along the way. Did loneliness ever come over him? He had married again, but was he happy? He was living a life of much social brilliancy with the new Mrs. Douglas in Washington. But was he happy? Or was he drowning disappointment, the tragic sense of life's inadequacy, in abandoned diversions?

Like myself, he had wished for riches and attained them. He had lost his riches. I still possessed mine. But I was no happier for that. He had married a woman who was a slave owner. On my part, I had been made kindred to the slave blood by the marriage of my father. He wished for land, for wealth, and had taken a purse to marry an octoroon. Douglas had wished for land for his country and had paralleled the course of the slavocracy to get it. I had killed a man because of Zoe; then Zoe had disappeared and a part of the accursed land which had come to me through my father had pa.s.sed to the unknown Fortescue, who had appeared and disappeared from my life like a thief. I had married Dorothy because my will drove me to it in overcoming her opposition to the fact of Zoe. I had loved Isabel and lost her. Douglas had loved the North and the Great West. Was he to lose them?

Thus Douglas and I seemed to have arrived at the same place in life. He was broken in fortune and without a party. I was burdened with what more and more seemed to me a tainted fortune. And I was as isolated as he was. I could not help but think of him constantly, of his long years of labor, his great struggles, his heroic fight, his undaunted courage.

Could anything lift him out of his complication to honor and freedom?

He was the most talked of man for the Presidency. If he could only win that now and stand as a master man for nationalism, union, progress, peace, popular sovereignty, all the great liberties for which he had battled. He had already failed twice to be nominated. If now he could not win the prize, what would be his future as against the growing power of the Republican party?

As my heart was set upon Douglas' ambition I set off for Charleston, South Carolina, in April. Anything to alleviate my regret over Isabel.

When I arrived there I sought Douglas and found him deep in consultation with his advisers. He was unmistakably confronted with the severest contest of his life. He was delighted to see me and got me admission to the convention hall. I had tried to come as a delegate; but Illinois had split in a fight over her own son, and there were two delegations, one for and one against Douglas. And I could be on neither.

Douglas' birthday, April the 23d, saw the opening of the fateful deliberations. He was destined to have no peace and no rest. Others might find shelter from the storm. He was compelled after his great labors in the years before to walk through the lightning and have it gather about his head. His doctrines on slavery had alienated the whole South from him. But he had the West, save California and Oregon, which acted with the South. Yet he was their son too. He had strength all through the North, because of the West. That West which he had done so much to create, which he had prophesied would stand as a balance between the North and the South, was for its son and its prophet--save California and Oregon.

But of the whole thirty-three states, seventeen were against him. The West fought the South and fought for Douglas. The South made a common cause of opposition to the North and the West. But the new Giant put through the Douglas principles in the platform.

Then Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Florida, Texas, and Arkansas seceded from the convention. The West had won but it had lost the South.

And now in the balloting Douglas could not be nominated. He needed 202 votes, he could only poll 152-1/2. The heat grew intense. The delegates, trying to accommodate their interests, wandered about the old city talking seriously and not excitedly. There was little drinking. The local clergy offered up prayers for the success of the convention, for peaceful solutions. Balloting and balloting! No choice! The twenty-third of May arrived and the convention, exhausted and half disgusted, adjourned to meet in Baltimore, June 18th. Douglas had not been nominated. His party had split just as the Republicans had antic.i.p.ated when they were congratulating themselves on Douglas' success in the Senatorial contest with Lincoln.

Meantime, the seceders went to another hall, adopted a platform that suited them on the slavery matter, and nominated John C. Breckenridge.

I did not go up to Baltimore to see the end of this melancholy business. I followed the proceedings in the press. Delegates from the state delegations which had seceded appeared there on the scene to gain admission. They were admitted where pledged to Douglas; upon this decision a second secession took place. Then they nominated Douglas; but he was now like a runner who has been tripped along the way, and who stumbles spent and breathless over the goal. He had conjured the West.

It was strong enough to adopt his principles, but it could not prevent the convention from dividing. It could nominate him, but could not hold to him the states he needed in this, his greatest trial. And among his bitterest enemies was that Jefferson Davis whom I had seen in the Mexican War and who was now Senator from Mississippi. My hatred of the South nearly reached self-contempt for the way in which my life had been united to its feeling. All my thinking of the country and the terrible events which followed the monumental folly of not giving Douglas a united nomination dates from these days.

On my way west I read in the press of the verbal clash between this Jefferson Davis and Douglas in the Senate. With an insulting inflection Davis had said: "I have a declining respect for platforms. I would sooner have an honest man on any sort of a rickety platform you could construct than to have a man I did not trust, on the best platform which could be made."

Douglas had retorted with telling effect: "If the platform is not a matter of much consequence, why press that question to the disruption of the party?"

Why? But the South had done it. And Davis had done it.

CHAPTER LX

Who should call upon me the next morning after my arrival in Chicago but Yarnell? I had not seen him now for several years. And he was a delegate to the Republican convention.

"How is this?" I asked him. "I remember yet what you said to me about slavery when we came to America more than twenty-five years ago." "Oh,"

he replied, "that makes no difference. The Republican party is not going to disturb slavery where it is. It only proposes to keep it out from what it isn't. The platform will refer to the Declaration of Independence, and all that. But it will also have a tariff plank. The Democrats have beaten the Morrill tariff bill; and we want a tariff--Pennsylvania wants a tariff for iron. And we will nominate Seward and elect him."

"What if the Southern States secede?"

"That suits us. That will give the Republican party complete control.

With the Southern States out, we will have the Senate and the House as well as the President, and we can dominate everything, and gather in all the offices--postmasters, marshals, Federal judges, everything. The northern Democrats will have nothing to say. Your friend Douglas will have nothing to say. He is already a played-out horse. He won't be able to even whinny in the Senate. And the world and the fullness thereof will be ours."

"How about Seward being too radical?"

"No, he isn't. Look at what it comes to. Kansas will come in as a free state. The work is already done for that. California came in as a free state. Minnesota, Oregon, Wisconsin, have all come in as free states under the Democratic party and with Douglas on top as Senator. There won't be any more slave states no matter who is elected."

"That's what I think."

"I only say this to show that this talk of the radicalism of Seward is nonsense. He spoke of the higher law, to be sure, but Douglas has been talking of nature and nature's G.o.d. What's the difference?"

"No difference except that Douglas' law of nature means something and the higher law means nothing. We can see what the law of nature is; we don't know what the higher law is, unless you can fathom the mind of the fanatic; of Th.o.r.eau, of John Brown, and Garrison. I will tell you something: Lincoln of this state is not so far apart from Douglas. He has rejected the higher law of Seward in a recent letter. He is for the irrepressible conflict, because it is the same thing as the house divided against itself. He must stand by his own doctrine--and the Bible. He is as practical as Douglas."

"That's the point," said Yarnell. "The Abolitionists don't like Lincoln.

He said right here in the debates that he was not in favor of giving the n.i.g.g.e.r a vote or making him a citizen. He isn't for the Declaration of Independence when it comes to things like that. But he is of no moment. He's not known. He's only a local man. He's a country jake, isn't he?"

"Rather so."

"That's what I hear. He's had no experience. Seward, you know, has been Governor of New York, and Senator. He's a famous man. The political machine is back of him, and lots of money in New York City."

Then Yarnell went on to tell me that he himself was connected with the street railways in New York, and that the railways were backing Seward.

Wall Street, however, was a little nervous. It didn't want any man elected President who would drive the South into secession. No use to let iron drive out cotton. Let us have both cotton and iron.

We went out to walk through the city. Yarnell was amazed at the growth of Chicago. We wandered over to the Wigwam where the convention was to be held. It was a huge frame structure, seating ten thousand people. The city was swarming with delegates and visitors. All the hotels were filled; the saloons roared with drinking crowds. How many thousand cigars were lighted every minute! Stubs decorated the floors, the spittoons, the sidewalks. The houses of ill fame were riotous with men let loose upon a holiday.

At the Richmond House there was much champagne, for that was the headquarters of the New York crowd. Yarnell took me here and introduced me about to his friends. He was well known. He had money for the occasion, and was esteemed in that light. It was a different crowd here from that I had seen in St. Louis years before, but its spirit was the same. "If you don't nominate Seward, where will you get your money?"

Yarnell was saying this here and there. Some one at our side says: "This railsplitter Lincoln, who carries the purse for him?" "The tariff carries it," is the answer. "There's more money in the tariff than all that Seward can rake together." "Very well, Seward is for the tariff.

Give us the tariff and Seward, then we will have the tariff money and Seward's money too."

Yarnell and I left the Richmond House on our way to look again at the crowds. Bands of music were playing everywhere. Men were marching. Tom Hyer, the great prize fighter, was leading a club of rough and handy men. They were preceded by a noisy band. They shouted. The staring crowd shouted. Hyer had come for the purpose of lifting a l.u.s.ty voice for Seward at the critical moment. He and his men had good fists too to use in a case of doubt on a question of votes or of a right of entrance to the hall. They pa.s.s, the band dies away; other marchers follow. Some paraders are carrying rails bearing the banner with the words "Honest Old Abe" That reminds me of something. We go over to the office of the _Chicago Times_ to see in the windows some rails which Lincoln split when he was working on the bottoms of the Sangamon River, thirty years before.

"I should think Greeley would be for Lincoln," I said to Yarnell. "I saw the _Tribune_ yesterday and it slants toward Edward Bates of Missouri."

"That old slicker," sneered Yarnell. "Why who can depend on him? He's been for every one and everything, and then against them. He hates Seward. We kept him off the New York delegation. Now he's got on the delegation from Oregon, got some one's proxy, and he's here to make trouble. But it won't do him any good. We will put Seward over on the first ballot."

We came to the _Times_' window and looked at the rails. "Well," I said, "if they nominate Lincoln, we'll have another log-cabin campaign."