HOUR-GLASS SERIES 
 
 FISHER AMES -HENRY CLSY 
 
 ETC. 
 
 " Jumping o'er times, 
 
 Turning th' accomplishment of many years 
 Into an hour-glass. 
 
 Chorus to Henry the Fifth. 
 
 BY 
 
 DANIEL B. LUCAS, LL.D. 
 
 (President Supreme Court of Appeals, \V. Va.) 
 AND 
 
 j. FAIRFAX MCLAUGHLIN, LL.D. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 
 CHARLES L. WEBSTER & CO. 
 1891.
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1891, 
 
 BY 
 DANIEL B. LUCAS, LL.D., 
 
 AND 
 
 j. FAIRFAX MCLAUGHLIN, LL.D. 
 
 [All rights reserved.]
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 " pENUINE HISTORY," says M. Taine, "is 
 VJ brought into existence only when the histo- 
 rian begins to unravel, across the lapse of time, the 
 living man." That is the aim of this little book. 
 To draw truthfully in miniature the real sentient 
 being, the magnetic Clay and O'Connell the ora- 
 tor face to face with their fellow-men; to see 
 Fisher Ames and strain the ear to listen as he 
 utters his most impassioned words ; to get behind 
 the scenes of actual occurrences ; this is the pur- 
 pose and animating motive of the nine short 
 papers that follow. 
 
 What a study it would be if we had an authen- 
 tic portrait either of Washington, Napoleon, or 
 Wellington, as they bore themselves in a great 
 crisis, say at Yorktown, the Bridge of Lodi, or 
 the battle of Waterloo! It is the likeness, after 
 all, that pleases most and instructs best. 
 
 Francis Scott Key, a prisoner, writing the 
 Star Spangled Banner during the roar of English 
 
 44^949
 
 6 PREFACE. 
 
 cannon; Jefferson and Hamilton composing a 
 strife in the closet which a whole Congress found 
 to be unmanageable and big with disunion; 
 Benjamin Robbins Curtis expounding the law 
 and convincing an unwilling Senate of the 
 innocence of Andrew Johnson, the impeached 
 President; John Randolph of Roanoke, the pre- 
 cursor of Abraham Lincoln, emancipating four 
 hundred slaves, and .winning from the great poet 
 of the Abolitionists, John Greenleaf Whittier, 
 this magnificent tribute to his philanthropy : 
 
 " He held his slaves ; yet kept the while 
 
 His reverence for the Human ; 
 In the dark vassals of his will 
 
 He saw but Man and Woman ! 
 No hunter of God's outraged poor 
 
 His Roanoke valley entered; 
 No trader in the souls of men 
 
 Across his threshold ventured. 
 
 And when the old and wearied man 
 
 Lay down for his last sleeping, 
 And at his side, a slave no more, 
 
 His brother-man stood weeping, 
 His latest thought, his latest breath, 
 
 To Freedom's duty giving, 
 With failing tongue and trembling hand 
 
 The dying blest the living : "
 
 PREFACE. 7 
 
 such are the topics, and points of observation, 
 from which these sketches have been indited. 
 
 Now, especially when many Americans are led 
 captive by the fascinating pens of two foreign 
 champions of centralization, when Mr. Bryce 
 depicts Thomas Jefferson as a freethinker and 
 anarchist, and Dr. Von Hoist holds Webster, 
 Clay and Calhoun so lightly that he gravely 
 declares " neither of the three can lay claim to 
 the name of a statesman," is it not time to exam- 
 ine more critically these European doctrinaires 
 as they gallop through the country writing as 
 they ride ; is it not time to revert to our own 
 great originals, the lives and writings and 
 speeches of American statesmen, and let them 
 speak for themselves? The object here sought 
 is to promote this recurrence to fountain sources. 
 
 Should the public encouragement justify its 
 authors in continuing the work, the first number 
 of Hour Glass Scries will not be the last, and the 
 experiment of historical epitome which is here 
 . introduced will be extended to several succeeding 
 numbers. 
 
 THE AUTHORS. 
 
 NEW YORK, AUGUST 15, 1891.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 FISHER AMES 1 1 
 
 JOHN RANDOLPH OF ROANOKE 22 
 
 JEFFERSON'S FIRST ELECTION .... 57 
 
 A STUDY OF HENRY CLAY 65 
 
 How WE GOT TO WASHINGTON . . . . 115 
 
 BENJAMIN ROUBINS CURTIS 143 
 
 DANIEL O'CONNELL 167 
 
 A HISTORIC LANDMARK 201 
 
 ORIGIN OF THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER . . 213
 
 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 FISHER AMES. 
 
 WHAT have we done in eloquence that the 
 people of a century hence will be inter- 
 ested in, and still shall read and admire? Perhaps 
 there are a dozen speeches, possibly only a half 
 dozen. Who so bold to select them from the 
 Congressional debates from Annals, Register, 
 Globe, and Record that mighty array of solid 
 folios and reluctant quartos ? Who, being so bold, 
 can have any assurance that posterity will approve 
 his choice? Modern eloquence begins properly 
 with the English revolution of 1688, but it was 
 not until nearly a century more, when the Amer- 
 ican revolution was about to occur, that parliamen- 
 tary annals showed great oratory. Hampden 
 and Pulteney had appeared at the earlier period, 
 but who reads them now? Chatham, Burke, Fox, 
 and Sheridan appeared when the colonies were 
 about to strike for altar and fireside, and are read 
 yet by a few, not too many. 
 
 Who among our own Conscript Fathers will 
 stand the century test, and will make his or their
 
 12 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 voices still audible, say in 1991? Be sure if 
 any of them have said great things greatly, ar- 
 ticulately, posterity will want to hear them ; or, to 
 drop the figure, they will be remembered. We 
 have always liked a speech delivered in the 
 House of Representatives April 28, 1796, by 
 Fisher Ames, on the British or Jay treaty. It 
 is a little diffuse in places, and once or twice 
 overloaded with rhetoric, but, non constat, it is a 
 great speech, and although almost forgotten out- 
 side of Massachusetts, it is not yet dead ; and Mr. 
 Henry Cabot Lodge "with pious hands has re- 
 cently swept off from our eyes the accumulating 
 cobwebs, and pointed out the orator in the length- 
 ening procession. Juvenal says that is fame 
 when the man is still pointed at with the finger 
 after he has passed the stand. In 1790 Ames 
 was overborne in debate by Madison, and the 
 Virginians yet talk about that victory, which, of 
 course, is forgotten in Massachusetts. In 1796 
 Ames returned the compliment, and vanquished 
 the father of the constitution, and the Virginians 
 don't remember the latter tilt nearly so vividly 
 as the men of Massachusetts. Party spirit raged 
 furiously all along the lines. The treaty which 
 John Jay had negotiated with Great Britain was 
 carried in the Senate only by the casting vote of 
 John Adams the Vice- President. What was the 
 matter with the good old fathers that they fumed 
 so fiercely?
 
 FISHER AMES. 13 
 
 The Fauchet incident had much to do with it. 
 
 The French ambassador, a shrewd diplomat, 
 had divined the opposition to the British treaty 
 of Jefferson, Madison, and Randolph, and of the 
 whole Franco-American party, and had sent a 
 secret dispatch to the French government in 
 which he depicted the real situation of American 
 affairs. The two great parties were not, as now, 
 Democrats and Republicans, but Franco-Ameri- 
 cans and Anglo-Americans, or a British party and 
 a French party, and the spirit of 'partisanship was 
 carried to an excess not surpassed in subsequent 
 similar conflicts. 
 
 An English cruiser overhauled the vessel by 
 which the Fauchet dispatch had been sent out to 
 France, and carried the paper to London. The 
 important communication was forwarded from 
 England to the British Minister resident in the 
 United States, and that functionary forthwith 
 placed it in the hands of Oliver Wolcott, Secretary 
 of the Treasury under Washington. Mr. Wolcott, 
 the ally of Alexander Hamilton, was in politics 
 a decided Anglo-American. Edmund Randolph, 
 Secretary of State, and the ally of Thomas Jeffer- 
 son, was equally as strong a Franco- American. 
 A cabal was formed in the Cabinet by Wolcott, 
 the object of which was the destruction of Ran- 
 dolph. The French Minister's dispatch, Mr. 
 Wolcott insisted, contained revelations of Cabi- 
 net secrets ; and General Washington, then on a
 
 14 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 visit to Mount Vernon, was privately notified that 
 Randolph had betrayed him. The cabal gentle- 
 men, proh pudor! induced Randolph to write to 
 Washington urging his immediate return to the 
 seat of government on important business. Of 
 course the real business was not disclosed to Ran- 
 dolph, and the devious course adopted by the 
 Secretary of the Treasury, who was bent on the 
 destruction of the Secretary of State, was un- 
 worthy of one holding such a position. The de- 
 tective character of this proceeding was shown 
 by the employment of the unconscious victim of 
 the cabal to promote the plans of his opponents. 
 When cunning and duplicity take the place of 
 plain dealing and high tone among gentlemen, 
 the ends of justice are apt to be sacrificed. Wash- 
 ington forthwith returned to Philadelphia, then 
 the seat of government, revolving in his mind 
 during the journey from Mount Vernon the sin- 
 ister story of Cabinet secrets alleged to have been 
 betrayed by his prime minister, and the alarming 
 situation which such treason might precipitate. 
 Thus prepared beforehand, the President was 
 astute and quick to see in Fauchet's intercepted 
 dispatch some evidence of Randolph's guilt. 
 Now that the full particulars of that transaction 
 are known, and Randolph's indignant denial, and 
 Fauchet's equally emphatic refutation of the 
 story, have become a part of the public history of 
 the country, it is marvellous that Washington
 
 FISHKR AMES. 15 
 
 could have been imposed upon, and his serene 
 judgment biased by the trumpery intrigues of a 
 cabal to get rid of a powerful rival. 
 
 A Cabinet meeting was called, and the first in- 
 timation the Secretary of State received that he 
 was to be attacked was when the members were 
 all seated, and the President handed him the in- 
 tercepted dispatch to read. The ministers of 
 State, converted for the occasion into a detective 
 corps, watched every motion and expression of 
 the countenance of Mr. Randolph as he read the 
 Fauchet letter, thus sprung on him with an un- 
 friendly suddenness by those who had kept the 
 secret from him until this moment, when he had as 
 much right as they to know the contents of the let- 
 ter as soon as it was received. Indeed, the English 
 Minister should have handed it to the Secretary 
 of State in the first instance, to whom all foreign 
 affairs properly belonged, but his notorious hos- 
 tility to Randolph caused him to keep the Secre- 
 tary in ignorance, and convey the dispatch to the 
 Secretary of the Treasury, who had no right 
 whatever to receive such a communication. This 
 was one of the rare occasions, if not the only one, 
 in General Washington's life, when he allowed 
 himself to be swayed from that inflexible impar- 
 tiality which characterized his dealings with oth- 
 ers. His deviation from the strict line of non- 
 partisanship on this occasion is greatly extenu- 
 ated by the provocations he had received to an
 
 l6 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 opposite course. Popular feeling had been kin- 
 dled to the highest pitch against the administra- 
 tion, and the President himself was furiously de- 
 nounced. In Philadelphia, New York, and Bos- 
 ton the rage of the citizens against the British 
 treaty was nearly universal. America's just claims 
 against England, the people clamored, were about 
 to be abandoned. They had not forgotten the 
 county jails, the prison ships, and other living 
 sepulchres in which so many of themselves and 
 their now dead countrymen had been entombed 
 by the British during the revolutionary war. 
 Roused to fury by this treaty, in which so much 
 that they held dear was given up, and remember- 
 ing their old French allies as their best friends, 
 when America most needed friends, the people 
 of the United States very generally sympathized 
 with France in the war then raging between that 
 country and England. 
 
 The British treaty was burned in effigy by a great 
 multitude of the people of Philadelphia in front 
 of the British Minister's house. Similar burn- 
 ings in Boston, New York, Baltimore, Richmond, 
 and elsewhere took place, and the popularity of 
 Washington himself was gravely imperilled. He 
 had not, as is now known, declared in favor of 
 the treaty, but was greatly dissatisfied with some 
 of its provisions, and disappointed at some of its 
 omissions. But in presence of popular clamor 
 Washington never quailed, and thus the British
 
 FISHER AMES. 17 
 
 party, led by Hamilton and Wolcott, turned the 
 scales over the disgraceful Fauchet incident, and 
 Washington took sides. 
 
 Edmund Randolph indignantly resigned the 
 office of Secretary of State, and published his 
 "Vindication," which has exculpated him in the 
 judgment of posterity from the charges made 
 against him by the Hamilton faction. Although 
 there were Democratic Societies before, the birth 
 of the Democratic Republican party as a great 
 national organization dates from this day, as 
 the result of the violent administration rupture 
 brought about by this disgraceful transaction, and 
 four years later the new party swept the Feder- 
 alists from power and elected Thomas Jefferson 
 President of the United States. 
 
 In the midst of the excitement over the inter- 
 
 /""""^ ' 
 cepted Fauchet dispatch, and jU'hen the popular 
 
 commotion against the British treaty was at its 
 height, Fisher Ames, who has been called the 
 New England Cicero, came forward in the House 
 of Representatives as champion of the treaty. 
 The debate took place during the consideration 
 of that item in the budget intended to provide for 
 the expenses of the treaty, and its fate was 
 wrapped up in the passage of that appropriation. 
 If the item was defeated, the treaty fell with it. 
 Such were the conditions when Ames addressed 
 the House. Never was there a higher-strung 
 man in Congress than the Massachusetts orator.
 
 1 8 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 Delicate in health, impassioned in feelings, and 
 nervous in temperament, he threw his whole soul 
 into this cause, in the success of which he felt 
 the liberties of the country to be involved. He 
 was a polished scholar, master of a rich though 
 sometimes too studied rhetoric, and had a ge- 
 nius for highly wrought dramatic eloquence. 
 His best speeches, while occasionally diffuse in 
 style, show a philosophic arrangement and direc- 
 . jjrm . 
 
 He-had need of all his powers now. The im- 
 petuous Giles, the profound Gallatin, the great 
 parliamentary debater Madison, who had defeated 
 him in the celebrated battle over assumption of 
 the debts of the States in 1 790, were all arrayed on 
 the other side; and Washington, having taken 
 sides with the friends of the treaty, looked to 
 Fisher Ames as the Hector to defend his Troy 
 against this formidable opposition. Peace or war 
 seemed to tremble in the balance, and the Presi- 
 dent staked the whole strength of the administra- 
 tion upon this single issue. And gallantly did 
 Fisher Ames meet the test. So great was the 
 sensation produced in the House by his speech, 
 that the opposition refused to allow the vote to 
 be taken at its close, and that members might 
 become disenchanted from the orator's spell an 
 adjournment was carried when Ames sat down. 
 But the supplies were voted notwithstanding 
 these tactics; and the appeal of Fisher Ames,
 
 FISHER AMES. 19 
 
 both in itself and its effects, has became one of 
 the great landmarks of American eloquence. 
 
 No analysis of the speech can be attempted here. - 
 It was like all masterpieces of eloquence pitched 
 in a high key bold, philosophical, and full of 
 faith in the supremacy of truth. Every appeal 
 was to the higher aims and objects of government ; 
 every assumption clear cut and bold to aggressive- 
 ness. The argument was trenchant, and only 
 subtle in its weaker points, where sophistry of 
 speech covered doubtful or defective ground. 
 Where the case was strong in itself there was no 
 attempt to inflame by exaggeration, but a power- 
 ful statement, a flash of fervor, a highly wrought 
 image, or a sententious syllogism was employed 
 with sledge-hammer force. An example or two 
 must suffice.^' lit answer to the complaint of 
 the opposition that they might be forced to swal- 
 low the treaty by a sort of moral coercion, Mr. 
 Ames called such a coercion "the authority of 
 principles, the despotism of duty. It is," he said, 
 " for tyrants to complain that principles are re- 
 straints, and that they have no liberty so long as 
 their despotism has limits." In answer to the 
 popular clamor raised against the treaty by mis- 
 representations of its provisions, and appeals to 
 feelings thus misguided, the orator said : " Objec- 
 tions that proceed upon error in fact or calculation 
 may be traced and exposed ; but such as are 
 drawn from the imagination or addressed to it
 
 ^ : ' * ^ 
 
 20 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 elude definition, and return to domineer over 
 the mind after having been banished from it by 
 truth." His defence of public faith rang out like 
 a clarion. "It is," he said, "an extended self- 
 love, mingling with all the enjoyments of life, and 
 twisting itself with the minutest filaments of the 
 heart. ... It is the philosophy of politics, the 
 religion of governments." fThe horrors of an 
 Indian war, liable to take place unless the treaty 
 was concluded, ac^hus depicted. He is address- 
 ing thosewhHived in log houses beyond the 
 from your false security : your 
 
 cruel dangers, vour more rrnel appreTipmsimi 
 joon to be renewed ; the wounds, yet unheatecLjire 
 to be torn open ayain : in the daytime your path 
 through the woods will bg flmhiisyH ; the dark- 
 ness of midnight will glitter with the blaze of 
 vour dwellings. You are a father. the blood of 
 your sons shall fatten your corn-field. You are 
 a mother, the war-whoop shall wake the"sWp 
 of the cradle. . . . By rejecting the_psts, we 
 light the savage fires, we bind the victirns. This 
 day we undertake to render account to the widows 
 and orphans whom our decision will make. 
 The vnipp of himv^ity issues from the"shadc <>:" 
 the wilderness ; it exclaims, that while one hand is 
 held up to reject this treaty, the other grasps a 
 tomahawk, ... I can fancy that I listen to the 
 yells of savage vengeance and the shrieks of tor- 
 ture; already they seem to sigh in the western
 
 FISHER AMES. 21 
 
 wind J already they mingle with every echo from 
 the mountains." 
 
 With a touch of prophecy Mr. Ames predicts 
 the marvellous growth of America, if the treaty 
 is carried and the gigantic war in Europe is kept 
 beyond our borders. "The progress of wealth 
 and imprrovement is wonderful, and some will 
 think too rapid. . . . Profit is every hour becoming - 
 capital. The vast crop of our neutrality is all seed 
 wheat, and is sown again to swell, almost beyond 
 calculation, the future harvest of prosperity. In 
 this progress what seems to be fiction is found 
 to fall short of experience." He alluded in closing 
 to his ill health, and said, " I have perhaps as little 
 personal interest in the event as any one here. 
 There is, I believe, no member who will not 
 think his chance to be a witness of the conse- 
 quences greater than mine. If, however, the vote 
 should pass to reject, and a spirit should rise, 
 as it will, with the public disorders, to make ' con- - 
 fusion worse confounded,' even I, slender and 
 almost broken as my hold upon life is, may out- 
 live the government and constitution of my 
 country." 
 
 No wonder they would not take a vote when 
 the resistless orator sat down ! , But that speech 
 carried the treaty v - and immortafizecl Fiimer" c 
 Ames. 
 
 J. F. McL.
 
 JOHN RANDOLPH OF ROANOKE. 
 
 BY DANIEL B. LUCAS, LL.D.* 
 
 LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: I have thought 
 that at this seat of learning, in this atmo- 
 sphere, and on this day, I could not do better than co 
 hazard some reflections upon the public character 
 of one of Virginia's greatest orators, ripest schol- 
 ars, and profoundest statesmen ; one whom this 
 section delighted to honor, and who, in turn, both 
 trod and loved this very soil, now rendered classic 
 by its convention of learning and religion, and 
 dedicated to human freedom by its adoption of 
 the names of two martyrs of English liberty 
 John Hampden and Algernon Sidney. 
 
 But John Randolph, of whose public career I 
 shall speak briefly to-day, confers as much honor 
 upon this section by his proximate nativity, as 
 do those two great patronyms, (if I may so call 
 them,) by lending the luster of their immortal 
 names. No man excelled him in strength of 
 devotion to the cause of liberty, or in fidelity to 
 the constitution of his country. 
 
 To understand the controversy of 1799 into 
 
 * An address delivered before the Literary Societies of Hampden- 
 Sidney College, Virginia, June 13, 1883.
 
 JOHN RANDOLPH OF ROANOKE. 23 
 
 which Randolph threw himself with such im- 
 petuosity at the outset of his political career, it 
 would be necessary to know something of the 
 constitutional history of the mother country, and 
 to appreciate the travail of the centuries, out of 
 which sprang, with ineffable splendor of beauty 
 and perfection, the genius of English liberty. 
 
 Commencing with our own revolution, we find 
 that it was fought to perpetuate two ideas, for 
 the firm establishment of which the English peo- 
 ple had been for two centuries contending. The 
 first was that no tax should be levied upon the 
 people without their consent expressed through 
 their representatives, the House of Commons. 
 The colonies maintained that with them the right 
 of the Commons resided in their respective local 
 legislatures, and no tax could be imposed with- 
 out the consent of their own Commons. In the 
 Cromwell Charter of Virginia of 1651, this pro- 
 vision was expressly reserved and stipulated.* 
 
 The second idea was embodied in the Declara- 
 tion of Independence, and was the same which 
 underlay the English Declaration of Rights, al- 
 though not in direct terms contained in that im- 
 mortal charter of liberty. This was the right of 
 the people to alter, abolish, or reorganize their 
 existing form of government, whenever the 
 
 * See New School History of the United States, by McDonald (page 66 ) 
 for the language of this Charter. The language of William Penn's 
 Charter of 1682 was otherwise.
 
 24 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 national exigency should demand or justify revo- 
 lution or reform.* 
 
 To maintain these two ideas the Revolution 
 was fought. England had put in practice to- 
 wards the colonies the doctrines of Charles I. 
 and the Restoration. The latter resisted and in- 
 scribed upon their standards the principles of 
 1641 , and of the glorious revolution of 1688. The 
 result was American Independence. 
 
 The colonies had united during the war for 
 mutual protection and safety. They formed, un- 
 der the Articles of Confederation, what they 
 styled in that constitution "a league." This was 
 a temporary structure, arising from the exigen- 
 cies of the times, and evidently somewhat exper- 
 imental in design. When the permanent build- 
 ing came to be constructed there was discovered 
 that divergence of opinion which afterwards led 
 to, or rather eventuated in, the formation of two 
 great parties, which at the beginning of this cen- 
 tury, led on respectively by Jefferson and Adams, 
 not only divided, but well-nigh convulsed, the 
 infant Confederacy. 
 
 One formula had governed England from the 
 days of Alfred the Great King, Lords, and Com- 
 mons. There had been indeed, in England, re- 
 publicans, such as the immortal Sidney ; but they 
 were few, and never from the days of the Restora- 
 tion could be said to have had concert, much 
 
 * II. Hallam's Const. Hist. Eng., p. 312.
 
 JOHN RANDOLPH OF ROANOKE. 2$ 
 
 less organization. The two great parties there 
 were Whigs and Tories. Between these the 
 main distinction was that the Whigs looked to 
 the people as the ultimate source of power, * while 
 the Tories taught that the hierarchy and the 
 hereditary sucession were of divine origin, and 
 could not be changed or disestablished even by 
 act of Parliament. I repeat, that for pure repub- 
 licanism there was no English precedent. It was 
 not strange therefore, that when a permanent 
 form of government was about to be organized 
 in America, many minds of masterly activity and 
 power should doubt the feasibility of a purely 
 republican system. Washington himself, as dis- 
 closed in his correspondence, recognized two facts : 
 first, that the temper of the people, particularly 
 in the South, was determined upon a Republic 
 pure and simple ; and secondly, that republican- 
 ism was experimental, had yet to be tried, might 
 fail, and failing, some more absolute form would 
 have to be substituted upon its ruins. -j Alex- 
 ander Hamilton, great as he undoubtedly was, 
 foresaw nothing at first of America as she actu- 
 ally became. A reproduction of King, Lords, 
 and Commons ; a President and a Senate for life ; 
 a popular House of Commons these corner- 
 stones of the English commonwealth satisfied 
 Hamilton as the foundations of our own system. 
 
 * III. Macaulay, Hist. Eng., p. 9. 
 t I. Curtis, Hist. Const. U. S., p. 370.
 
 26 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 He was, at the date of the constitution, only 
 thirty years of age. John Adams was much 
 older. Together he and Jefferson had fought 
 the intellectual battle of the Revolution. Nei- 
 ther was a member of the inter-state Constitu- 
 tional Convention, yet both were there in spirit ; 
 Jefferson as the apostle of pure republicanism, 
 Adams as the advocate of King, Lords and Com- 
 mons translated into the language of America; 
 that is to say, a President for a term, an heredi- 
 tary Senate, and a popular House. I deny that 
 there is any derogation from the patriotism 
 of these conservative statesmen, in the admis- 
 sion that originally Hamilton, and subsequently 
 Adams, were strongly opposed to pure republi- 
 canism. We must view their opinions in the light 
 of English history, and not in the glamour of 
 subsequent American glory and success. 
 
 John Randolph was by nature, as well as by 
 inheritance, a pure Republican. " I was not 
 born," said he, "to endure a master." I doubt 
 whether he himself ever knew certainly he 
 never confessed how much he was indebted to 
 Thomas Jefferson for his political opinions. It 
 is certain, however, in the great political contest 
 of 1799, when the line between the Federalists 
 and Republicans was distinctly drawn, it is quite 
 certain that Randolph, at the age of twenty-six, 
 though in appearance a mere boy, espoused the 
 Republican cause, and encountered Patrick Henry
 
 JOHN RANDOLPH OF ROANOKE. 2/ 
 
 upon the hustings of Virginia at Charlotte Court 
 House. I am quite convinced that he overthrew 
 Henry. I once had in my hand, and retained for 
 twenty-four hours, his own account of this en- 
 counter in a letter to St. George Tucker. God 
 forgive me for not having copied and preserved 
 it from the vortex of fire, blood, and flame into 
 which it afterwards drifted and was consumed.* 
 According to my recollection, he described the 
 extreme reluctance which he felt in rising to 
 oppose so great a man, but as no one else would 
 assume the burden, he was constrained by the 
 imperative call of patriotic duty. He then pro- 
 ceeded to give a modest and brief account of the 
 positions assumed respectively by Henry and 
 himself ; spoke of Henry's accustomed fervor and 
 eloquence, and very modestly, yet with sufficient 
 self-satisfaction, of his own part in the discussion. 
 But beyond this general outline, I am ashamed 
 to say how absolutely blank is my recollection. 
 The subject of discussion between them was the 
 passage and enforcement of the Alien and Sedi- 
 tion law by the administration of John Adams. 
 This policy so alarmed the pure Republicans of 
 that day that the Assembly of Virginia', under 
 the lead of Mr. Madison, had adopted the cele- 
 brated Virginia Resolutions of 1798-99, and 
 sent to each of the other States copies of their 
 strong protest against the manifest usurpation 
 
 * Richmond, April 3, 1865.
 
 28 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 of the Federal Government. These resolutions 
 called forth responses from the other States, some 
 in accord with their spirit, but a majority in opposi- 
 tion, and propounding a different view of the re- 
 spective powers and rights of the two systems 
 (or parts of one system), Federal and State. 
 
 The truth is that those clauses of the law 
 which were so obnoxious to Virginia and the pure 
 Republicans of that day were copied almost ver- 
 batim from the English act of the same period. 
 This fact is not quite so familiar as the ground 
 gone over up to this point. 
 
 Those Republicans who, in the Constitutional 
 Convention, had witnessed the devotion of the 
 leaders now called Federal to the English 
 model of government, could but view with grave 
 alarm the attempt to distinguish the President of 
 the United States with a flower of prerogative 
 which even in England had excited the sternest 
 opposition of every true lover of liberty. 
 
 In December, 1792, Lord Grenville, as For- 
 eign Secretary, had introduced into the House of 
 Lords an Alien Bill, one section of which provided 
 that the Secretary of State might order any sus- 
 pected foreigner instantly to quit the kingdom.* 
 A bill emanating from the same source, called 
 the "Traitorous Correspondence Bill," contained 
 a section from which our own Sedition clause was 
 evidently drafted. 
 
 * Yonge's Const. Hist, of Eng., p. 145.
 
 JOHN RANDOLPH OF ROANOKE. 29 
 
 These measures to increase the royal preroga- 
 tive, and to attack the liberty of the press and of 
 speech, were met, resisted, and denounced by Fox, 
 Lansdowne, Grey, and Sheridan, as " utterly irrec- 
 oncilable with the principles of the constitu- 
 tion" of England. 
 
 What wonder then, that the Republicans of 
 America saw with the gravest apprehension that 
 those who in the Convention had been so enam- 
 oured of the English constitution as to desire a 
 similarly aristocratic form in America, were now 
 still pursuing the phantom of English legislation 
 in an attempt to clothe the President with more 
 than kingly prerogatives, and to destroy those 
 birthrights of the American citizen liberty of 
 speech, and a free press. 
 
 Randolph, we may rest assured, rose to the 
 height of the grand argument at that March 
 term in Charlotte Court House. Henry, who had 
 espoused the cause of Pitt and Grenville in Eng- 
 land, was met by a young champion who com- 
 bined the dauntless fervor of Fox with the elo- 
 quence and wit of Sheridan. 
 
 His reply to Henry can only be reproduced 
 from the faint tradition of near fifty years. 
 If this can be relied on, he directed those gifts 
 of satire and invective, which no man of his day 
 possessed in so eminent a degree, upon the Presi- 
 dent, whom he denounced as "a weak-minded 
 man, vain, jealous, and vindictive;" "influenced
 
 30 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 by evil passions and prejudices, and goaded on by 
 wicked counsel." Under the Sedition act, this 
 language was clearly indictable. Matthew Lyon, 
 a member of Congress from Vermont, had only 
 one month before been released from prison, where 
 he had been thrown for publishing language 
 against the President much more temperate. 
 Randolph was bitter in his denunciation of the 
 " Aristocrats " of that day a term which he used 
 only in its political or technical sense, as char- 
 acterizing those who desired the aristocratic rather 
 than the democratic, or purely republican, form of 
 government. 
 
 His was a mind that clearly comprehended the 
 distinction between private magnificence and 
 public extravagance. Absolute liberty in the mat- 
 ter of dress and expenditure in the private citizen 
 as opposed to sumptuary laws, is not only consist- 
 ent with republicanism, but is apparently de- 
 manded by that form of government. But in 
 our public servant, we demand that the representa- 
 tive feature shall shine conspicuously forth; we 
 demand that our legislator, our congressman, our 
 President, shall walk in republican simplicity; 
 adorned only with the simple glory of unher- 
 alded and unheraldic manhood. Away with pur- 
 suivant and herald with robes of ermine and of 
 gold, with kettledrums, and trumpets and gon- 
 falons, and armorial bearings ; with portcullis 
 and rouge dragon, and grotesque coats embroid-
 
 JOHN RANDOLPH OF ROANOKE. 31 
 
 ered with lilies, and set upon with lions ; away 
 with all this semi-barbaric mountebankery of 
 royal insignia in the installation or administra- 
 tion of our republican President ! 
 
 This was the political religion of John Ran- 
 dolph. 
 
 I hold in my hand an unpublished letter writ- 
 ten to St. George Tucker in 1805, in which he 
 denounces the political "Aristocrats:" "I have 
 nothing new to tell you, but I cannot help compas- 
 sionating your case, surrounded as you must be 
 with a pack of yelping, open-mouthed Aristocrats." 
 
 Upon another occasion he said : " I do not be- 
 lieve that a free republican government is com- 
 patible with the apery of European fashions and 
 manners is compatible with the apery of Euro- 
 pean luxury and habits." In the same speech 
 he denounces the elder Adams as " the apostle 
 of monarchy." " It is no secret," he continues; 
 " I was in New York when he first took his seat 
 as Vice- President. I recollect for I was a school 
 boy at the time, attending the lobby of Congress 
 when I ought to have been at school I remember 
 the manner in which my brother was spurned by 
 the coachman of the Vice-President for coming too 
 near the arms emblazoned on the scutcheon of 
 the vice-regal carriage."* 
 
 Again in 1814, in writing of John Adams, Ran- 
 dolph said : " Intoxicated not more by the ful- 
 
 * H. Garland's Life, 247-8.
 
 32 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 some adulation with which he was plied, than by 
 the fumes of his own vanity, this poor old gen- 
 tleman saw a visionary coronet suspended over 
 his brow, and an undrawn sceptre, 'the handle to- 
 wards his hand,' which, attempting- to clutch, he 
 lost his balance, and disappeared never to rise 
 again." 
 
 These denunciations by Randolph of European 
 apery and vice-regal pretensions (not more con- 
 spicuous in his day than in our own times) illus- 
 trate his profound hatred of aristocratic and 
 monarchical tendencies, and a love no less sin- 
 cere and intense for the republican simplicity of 
 democratic institutions. 
 
 These quotations illustrate another phase of his 
 character far less admirable, though equally well 
 established. No man, not even the Dean of St. 
 Patrick's, or Sir Philip Francis (Junius), had 
 thrown into his public utterances such unreserved 
 bitterness of ridicule, denunciation, and sarcasm. 
 That he was capable of doing justice to the per- 
 sonal attributes of those who differed with him 
 in politics is proved by the fact of his veneration 
 of Marshall and his vindication of Hamilton, 
 whom he described as " the best and ablest man of 
 his party too honest for the country or the 
 times in which he lived." That his dislike for 
 the Adamses was not based upon sectional 
 grounds is also clear, because he was still more 
 unjust to James Madison.
 
 JOHN RANDOLPH OF ROAXOKE. 33 
 
 No! Gifted with an inquisitorial faculty of 
 penetration into the conduct and motives of those 
 whom he deemed political heretics, Randolph 
 supplied rack, thumbscrew, cords, whip, and fagot 
 by his satirical eloquence 
 
 " That sarcastic levity of tongue, 
 The stinging of a heart the world hath stung, 
 That darts in seeming playfulness around, 
 And makes those feel who will not own the wound." 
 
 In the case of the Adamses, the wound was 
 felt, and resentment has been cherished unto 
 the jihird and fourth generations. I have here 
 a small volume entitled, "John Randolph, by 
 Henry Adams. " It is one of a series called " Amer- 
 ican Statesmen," and emanates from the thin air of 
 Boston. The series is edited by Mr. J. T. Morse, 
 Jr. By what law of selection he has been gov- 
 erned in allotting to particular authors the prepa- 
 ration of respective biographies it is impossible to 
 divine. It is quite clear, however, that he has 
 not followed any rule of qualification or conge- 
 niality hitherto recognized by men or angels. For 
 example, a foreigner, Dr. Von Holtz,who,in an em- 
 phatically European and un-American treatise on 
 the Federal Constitution, had already denounced - 
 Calhoun as a kind of Lucifer, is appointed his biog- 
 rapher ; Henry Clay, the father of Protection (as 
 it is called), is assigned to Carl Schurz, who, as I 
 understand, is an ardent advocate of Free Trade ; 
 3
 
 34 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 while John Randolph is turned over to the tender 
 mercies of a descendant of the first Vice-Presi- 
 dent, and the grandson of John Quincy Adams ! 
 
 It should be esteemed a source of profound grati- 
 tude, that this unique law of antipodal antipathy, 
 which Mr. Morse has hit upon, has not hitherto 
 prevailed . in biographical literature ; otherwise, 
 we might have had a biography of Martin Luther 
 by Leo the Tenth ; a life of St. Thomas Aquinas, 
 "the angel of the schools," by Thomas Payne; 
 while Pontius Pilate, or more likely the devil 
 himself, would have been selected to chronicle 
 the divine career of Jesus Christ. 
 
 The task allotted Mr. Henry Adams has been 
 performed as might have been expected. Ran- 
 dolph's denunciation of his ancestors is made the 
 key-note to the whole performance. It is not 
 easy to decide in what category this performance 
 should be classed. It cannot be called history, be- 
 cause in the whole book of three hundred and six 
 pages, without pretending to any original material 
 whatever, the author does not furnish a single 
 reference. Satire, the nature of the series would 
 appear to negative ; while biography does not seem 
 to be the appropriate head, because nothing is at- 
 tempted in detail of consecutive narrative. Upon 
 the whole, I incline to think that the term parti- 
 san romance would most nearly describe this num- 
 ber of a very interesting series. 
 
 .As I have said, in the whole book of three
 
 JOHN RANDOLPH OF ROANOKE. 35 
 
 hundred and six pages, not one single reference 
 is given, although many new and startling opin- 
 ions, incidents, and surmises are stated or half- 
 stated in the text. On picking up a volume of 
 Hallam, and counting the references, I find his 
 average about five to the page, or, in 306 pages, 
 1530 references or tests of accuracy. Macaulay, 
 averaged in the same way, would have given, 
 in 306 pages, about 612 references ; and Sumner in 
 his life of Jackson (one of the same series) would 
 afford, in 306 pages, 1518 references. Mr. Adams 
 does not give us one, either in the text or in anno- 
 tation. 
 
 I cannot pause, however, to notice, except in- 
 cidentally, the errors of fact, of inference, and of- 
 conclusion, which go to make up this "biogra- 
 phy." I must hasten forward in my own effort 
 to point out the prominent features in the con- 
 victions of John Randolph on public affairs. 
 
 His views of the character of the Federal 
 Union were in the main those of Jefferson and 
 Madison, as embodied in the celebrated resolu- 
 tions of i 798-99. 
 
 He believed in State Rights,* although he was 
 not by any means the father of that school, as 
 intimated by Mr. Adams. From the date of his 
 reply to Henry in 1799, up to the day of his 
 
 * So written and spelled by Calhoun, Clay, Jefferson, Webster, 
 Stephens, and the rest, and not ''States' Rights," as erroneously writ 
 ten by Henry Adams.
 
 36 HOUR CLASS SERIES. 
 
 death or his last public utterances, we find no 
 change nor shadow of turning in his views upon 
 this subject. 
 
 "Our constitution," said he," is an affair of com- 
 promise between the States, and this is the mas- 
 ter key which unlocks all its difficulties. If any 
 of the parties to the compact are dissatisfied 
 with their share of influence, it is an affair of 
 amicable discussion in the mode pointed out by 
 the constitution itself, but no cause for dissolving 
 the Confederacy." 
 
 Again he says : "This government is the 
 breath of the nostrils of the States. Gentlemen 
 may say what they please of the preamble to the 
 .constitution, but this constitution is not the 
 work of the then existing Confederacy, but the 
 offspring of the States, and however high we 
 may carry our heads, and strut and fret our hour, 
 'dressed in a little brief authority,' it is in the 
 power of the States to extinguish this govern- 
 ment at a blow. They have only to refuse to 
 send members to the other branch of the legis- 
 lature (the Senate), or to appoint electors of 
 President and Vice-President, and the thing is 
 done." It is this sentiment among others which 
 Mr. Adams declares to have been " wicked and 
 mischievous beyond all precedent," forgetting 
 (if he ever knew) that the same sentiment is ex- 
 pressed in the Federalist, under the sanction of 
 Madison and Hamilton. Nay, more, Mr. Adams
 
 JOHN RANDOLPH OF ROANOKE. 37 
 
 himself admits, with a frankness which is re- 
 freshing-, after his abuse of Randolph for similar 
 opinions, " That the doctrine of States' Rights 
 was, in itself, a sound and true doctrine," "as 
 dear to Massachusetts as to Virginia." Whether 
 Mr. Adams is entirely correct in thus attribut- 
 ing to Massachusetts and Virginia equal fealty 
 to the cause of the States may be doubted ; it is 
 quite certain that Randolph's view as to the origin 
 of the constitution differed widely from the earlier 
 views of Daniel Webster. To illustrate this, let 
 us carry ourselves back about a half century in 
 the current of events, and open the doors of the 
 hall of the House of Representatives. It was a 
 cold, raw day in February, yet an eager crowd of 
 spectators, overflowing the spacious galleries and 
 lobbies, were kept warm by the excitement of a 
 contest for the Presidency. There were three can- 
 didates in the field John Quincy Adams, William 
 H. Crawford and Andrew Jackson. Neither had 
 received a majority of votes in the Electoral 
 Colleges, although a plurality had fallen to Gen- 
 eral Jackson, ever the idol of the genius-loving 
 multitude. Hence the election, according to the 
 constitutional provision, devolved upon the House 
 of Representatives, and they had assembled to 
 perform this duty. Though from centre to cir- 
 cumference the popular sea had lashed itself to 
 fury, yet the love of law abided, and set and 
 firmly held the great tidal currents of party strife 
 
 443949
 
 3<S HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 in the channels of peace and order. Those were 
 the halcyon days of the Republic, when pity had 
 not fled to brutish beasts, nor men had lost their 
 reason. 
 
 The long and exciting contest is on the eve 
 of decision. Every member is marshalled in 
 his place to cast, and tellers are appointed to 
 count the vote. A breathless throng of both 
 sexes looks down from the crowded galleries on 
 the conflict between these gladiatorial giants of 
 the political arena. The vote is taken, and 
 counted, and nothing remains but to announce 
 the result. Presiding at the table, on the right 
 of the Speaker, sits a square-built representative, 
 whose dark features are cut in bold, masculine re- 
 lief; his lustrous eyes, the windows of his soul, 
 are deep-set in their sockets, and, surmounting 
 and crowning all, projects his solid, massive 
 forehead. Magnificent temple of thought ! When 
 shall we behold its like again ~ Daniel Webster, 
 for it is he, rises first, and in a deep, sonorous 
 voice announces the vote at his table : " For An- 
 drew Jackson, seven votes ; for John Quincy 
 Adams, thirteen votes, and for William H. Craw- 
 ford, four votes."* 
 
 Scarcely has he taken his seat, when the teller 
 on the left arises, a tall, spare, feeble form, with 
 short body and long, attenuated legs; features 
 feminine but not effeminate, from which nearly 
 
 * See Cobb's Life of William H. Crawford.
 
 JOHN RANDOLPH OF ROANOKK. 39 
 
 sixty corroding summers have not effaced the 
 traces of rare beauty ; a chin as smooth as Rosa- 
 lind's in hose and doublet; a mouth cut in spir- 
 itual perfection, yet at the corners pressing upward 
 slightly against the thin nostrils, as its poetry 
 melts away into a half-developed cynical smile, 
 and yet with a strange, sweet magnetism in the 
 darkly brilliant hazel eyes: these were the fea- 
 tures of John Randolph, of Roanoke. In a voice 
 thin, shrill, piping, yet clear as the ivory tube 
 which Cains Gracchus was wont to instruct his 
 prompter to sound behind him, John Randolph 
 announces the vote at his table; but mark the 
 difference in the mode of announcement ! Web- 
 ster has said so many votes for Adams, such a 
 number for Jackson, and so many for Crawford. 
 Not so John Randolph; he announces "Thir- 
 teen States for John Quincy Adams, seven States 
 for Andrew Jackson, and four States for William 
 H. Crawford!" 
 
 Here, then, from the mouths of these two great 
 representatives, flashed out the old issue. Is it 
 the mass of the Nation choosing a Ruler, or many 
 sovereignties choosing a common Executive ? 
 Ever vital, vexed question, behold again thy 
 champion! Strike, Puritan! Up, Cavalier! On, 
 Federal New England ! State Rights Virginia to 
 the rescue ! Both representatives dearly love the 
 Union, but for different reasons one because he 
 sees in it the mother of Massachusetts, the other
 
 4O HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 because it is the daughter of Virginia. The rays 
 from the central sun flow into the heart of Web- 
 ster in a steady stream of white light ; but into 
 that of Randolph, as distinct, yet beautifully and 
 harmoniously blending as the colors of the rain- 
 bow! 
 
 Although I had proposed to confine myself to 
 Randolph '$ public convictions, and not to discuss 
 those which more especially relate to his private 
 character, yet as his latest biographer has styled 
 his relations to the subject of Christianity, " re- 
 ligious spasms," I cannot resist the temptation 
 to inquire somewhat into his views upon this im- 
 portant subject. 
 
 All Christian emotion is to the infidel a 
 "spasm"; a "female instinct";* an Jiystcria fcm- 
 inarum ct infantium to the Jews a stumbling- 
 block, and to the Greeks foolishness. Neverthe- 
 less, I may venture to say that however far from 
 Christian charity was Randolph's practice, that 
 part of his faith which we call conviction was or- 
 thodox, simple, and childlike. I have met with 
 nothing in prose that so nearly approaches the 
 soliloquy of Hamlet as the reasoning of Ran- 
 dolph upon the immortality of the soul, and the 
 reality of a future life. The passage to which I 
 refer is to be found in a private letter to Dr. 
 Brockenborough, and is as follows: 
 
 " There is or there is not another and a better 
 
 * Life of Randolph, by Konry Adams, p. 8.
 
 JOHN RANDOLPH OF ROANOKE. 4! 
 
 world ! If there is, as we all believe, what is it 
 but madness to be absorbed in the cares of a clay- 
 built hovel, held at will, unmindful of the rich 
 inheritance of an imperishable palace of which 
 we are immortal heirs? We acknowledge these 
 things with our lips, but not with our hearts; 
 we lack faith. For my part, could I be brought 
 to believe that this life must be the end of my 
 being, I should be disposed to get rid of it as an 
 incumbrance. If what is to come be anything 
 like what is passed, it would be wise to abandon 
 the hulk to the underwriters, the worms. I am 
 more and more convinced that, with a few ex- 
 ceptions, this world of ours is a vast mad-house. 
 The only men I ever knew well, ever approached 
 closely, whom I did not discover to be unhappy, 
 are sincere believers of the gospel, and conform 
 their lives, as far as the nature of man can per- 
 mit, to its precepts." 
 
 Thus far my friends, I have endeavored to 
 show that as a public man Randolph had clear, 
 strong, and consistent convictions on the subject 
 of American institutions : that he was a pure re- 
 publican ; that he derived the powers of the Fed- 
 eral Government from the States acting as sepa- 
 rate political communities, and not from the 
 people of the whole as an aggregate mass ; that 
 he favored a strict construction of the constitu- 
 tion; in a word, was identified with the party 
 then known as, and styled by himself, Web-
 
 42 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 ster, Calhoun, and others, the STATE RIGHTS 
 PARTY. 
 
 In regard to African slavery, which has played 
 so important a part in our political history, Ran- 
 dolph was an Emancipationist, as distinguished 
 from an Abolitionist. This distinction was a very 
 broad one; as broad as that between Algernon 
 Sidney and Jack Cade ; or between Charlemagne 
 and Peter the Hermit in fact, it was the differ- 
 ence between Reason and Fanaticism. On this 
 subject Randolph and Clay concurred, both were 
 Emancipationists, and both denounced the Abo- 
 litionists ; as did also Webster, and all the best, 
 wisest, and purest men of that day. "These 
 men," exclaimed Randolph, in all the bitterness 
 of anguish, " have put back the day of Emancipa- 
 tion one hundred years!" 
 
 Randolph was right in his denunciation of 
 the Abolitionists. They were a pestilent class 
 of agitators, who, for the most part, with little 
 or no stake in the community, mounted their 
 hobby-horses, Hatred and Fanaticism, and rode 
 them, like Ruin and Daikness (the steeds of Lu- 
 cifer in Bailey's "Festus"), over the fairest por- 
 tion of our republic. An exhaustless empire of 
 land has enabled the nation to survive this sub- 
 stitution of the methods, of Abolition for those of 
 Emancipation ; but the eternal truth remains the 
 same, that the one was legitimate and the other 
 internecine ; and to justify the Abolitionists be-
 
 JOHN RANDOLPH OF ROANOKE. 43 
 
 cause Emancipation followed their efforts, would 
 be to justify the crime of the Crucifixion because 
 Redemption followed the Cross ! 
 
 The fact remains unshaken and eternally un- 
 shakable, that the difference between Emanci- 
 pation and Abolition was the difference between 
 Attic and Punic faith; between subserving the 
 constitution and trampling- it under foot. No lapse 
 of time, no pertinacity of misrepresentation can 
 obscure the transparency of these historical and 
 logical facts. The flowers of truth, thank God, 
 are perennial, while the tares of falsehood are 
 only annuals: the one, like the,weeds of the field, 
 perish with the cutting, while the others are like 
 the sweet clover and green grasses of our lawns 
 and meadows, the oftener they are reaped, the 
 sturdier they grow. 
 
 John Randolph was among the most strenuous 
 and practical opponents of the slave-trade. Mr. 
 Jefferson had abolished this traffic in Virginia as 
 early as 1778, eleven years before Wilberforce 
 had introduced his bill for such abolition into 
 Parliament, and nineteen years before it was 
 finally carried through that body. 
 
 Mr. Adams is singularly unfortunate in his re- 
 marks upon the connection of John Randolph 
 with this measure. He calls attention to his posi- 
 tion in regard to a bill passed at the session of 
 1803. "One biographer," says he, "has said 
 that at this session (1803), he spoke and voted
 
 44 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 for a bill to prevent the importation of slaves ; 
 but this was not the case." The author must 
 have overlooked the fact that, under the consti- 
 tution, the Congress was prohibited from inter- 
 fering with the importation of slaves prior to 
 1808, otherwise he would not gravely have un- 
 dertaken to vindicate Randolph from having ad- 
 vocated a bill so plainly unconstitutional. The 
 insertion in the constitution of this restriction 
 as to time, (1808,) was opposed in the conven- 
 tion by Virginia, which wished to abolish the 
 traffic forthwith, but was insisted upon by New 
 England. And in 1807, when the limitation was 
 about to expire, the popular convention which as- 
 sembled in Philadelphia to memorialize Con- 
 gress upon the subject, did not hesitate to declare 
 that the traffic was carried on chiefly by Xew 
 England. Some of the representatives in Con- 
 gress from that section opposed the bill in its 
 original form, because it contained a clause for- 
 feiting or confiscating the cargoes of slavers cap- 
 tured while violating the law. Upon the other 
 hand, the Senate framed a bill which contained 
 a clause restricting the transfer of slaves from 
 otic State to another, and this restriction was vio- 
 lently opposed by Randolph, as an infringement 
 of the rights of the States.* He declared he 
 would rather lose the whole bill than suffer such 
 a feature to be incorporated. He likewise op- 
 
 * Annals of Cong., 1806-7, p. 264.
 
 JOHN RANDOLPH OF ROANOKE. 45 
 
 posed the death penalty for a violation of the 
 proposed law upon grounds of humanity and con- 
 stitutional power.* 
 
 The outcome was a bill, founded upon confer- 
 ence and concession, which passed the House with 
 only five dissenting voices. Of these, two were 
 from Virginia, two from New England, and one 
 from South Carolina. It is true, the name of 
 Randolph is not found recorded for the bill on its 
 final passage ; neither does the record show him 
 "present and not voting." The negative proof, 
 therefore, is that he was absent, and his absence 
 was either from sickness, or accident, as he was 
 a fearless man, universally accredited with never 
 having intentionally evaded or " dodged" a vote 
 in his whole public career. Mr. Benton says, 
 that the sentiment for Abolition was practically 
 unanimous, the five recorded dissentients being 
 adverse only to some of the details of the bill as 
 passed. f Subsequently in London (1823) Ran- 
 dolph publicly expressed his abhorrence of the 
 slave trade, and received the thanks of Wilber- 
 force. "It was delightful," said he, "to know 
 that Virginia, the land of his sires, the place of 
 his nativity, had for half a century affixed a pub- 
 lic- brand and indelible stigma upon this traffic, 
 and had put in the claim of the wretched objects 
 of it to the common rights and attributes of hu- 
 manity."^; 
 
 * Ibid., 243-264. t Ab. Dob. Cong., vol. 3, p. 519. 
 
 t Opposed to the trade in the District of Columbia , see Clay.
 
 4<3 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 He was, also, an early and persistent advocate 
 of the abolition of the slave-trade in the District 
 of Columbia, at a time when that measure was 
 bitterly opposed by John Quincy Adams and 
 other Northern statesmen. 
 
 Randolph was not only a theoretical, but also 
 a practical Emancipationist. So far as I am in- 
 formed or believe, no man that ever lived has 
 liberated, by personal donation or will, so many 
 slaves / mean slaves of his own quite a different 
 thing from liberating those of other people. It 
 is somewhat remarkable that in the so-called 
 biography by Mr. Adams no mention is made of 
 this fact, although slavery is made the key-word 
 to all of Randolph's career. 
 
 It should be remembered that the tongue of 
 impartial history speaks no provincial nor tempo- 
 rary dialect. To write down the courtier's nar- 
 rative of to-day is often the task and duty of 
 to-morrow. Thus we have in English history 
 Clarendon, North and Hume, followed up by the 
 avenging pens of Hallam and Macaulay. Mr. 
 Henry Adams, a true courtier, schooled in the 
 language of the civil war and reconstruction, 
 rings the changes on such "court phrases " as 
 "the slave power" and "plantation manners." 
 He arraigns Randolph as the organizer of the 
 first, and the illustrator of the second. But he 
 forgets that his principles in regard to slavery 
 were, in the main, those of Mr. Jefferson, th''
 
 JOHN RANDOLPH OF ROANOKE. 47 
 
 first emancipationist ; while his manners were of 
 the same plantation cast as those of George Wash- 
 ington, Richard Henry Lee, and Charles Cotes- 
 worth Pinkney. In fact, without the "planters and 
 freemen "* of New England, Pennsylvania, Mary- 
 land, Virginia, and other "plantations" it is doubt- 
 ful (or perhaps not doubtful) whether there would 
 have been any America worth speaking of as the 
 theatre of either manners or morals. 
 
 I come now to speak in conclusion of Ran- 
 dolph's convictions upon the subject of public 
 probity and purity in office. 
 
 His reported speeches against the jobs and 
 schemes inaugurated against the treasury in his 
 day gleam with " those occasional flashes of in- 
 spired prophecy," with which even Mr. Adams 
 accredits him. 
 
 He poured out his invective in meteoric showers 
 of denunciation, and with rhadamanthine impar- 
 tiality as to friend and foe, against all who were 
 engaged in the Yazoo speculation ; a speculation 
 which, although it sinks into insignificance when 
 compared with the gigantic schemes of public 
 plunder which have " damned to everlasting fame" 
 more recent administrations of our national gov- 
 ernment, yet, when viewed impartially, must be 
 condemned as one of the earliest evidences of 
 that corruption of public morals which is said to 
 
 * See W. Penn's Charter of 1682.
 
 48 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 be the bane of republics. Was there no pro- 
 phetic vision in Randolph's patriotism, when, in 
 the House of Representatives, he introduced an 
 amendment to the constitution prohibiting- all 
 public contractors from holding seats on the floor of 
 Congress ? Had no live coal from the altar touched 
 his lips, when, on the same theatre, he exclaimed : 
 " Shall political power be made tJie engine of private 
 interest?" Did no apocalypse of future degener- 
 acy, when corruption should have reached si- 
 dereal proportions, spread out before him, when he 
 inveighed against the mail-contractors of his day 
 in such unparalleled bitterness as the following : 
 " A few evenings since a profitable contract for 
 carrying the mail was offered to a friend of mine, 
 who is a member of this House. You must know, 
 sir, the person so often alluded to maintains a 
 jackal ; fed not, as you would suppose, upon the 
 offal of contract, but with the fairest pieces in 
 the shambles; and at night, when honest men 
 are abed, does this obscure animal prowl through 
 the streets of this vast and desolate city, seeking 
 whom he may tamper with. Well, sir, when 
 this worthy plenipotentiary had made his propo- 
 sal in due form, the independent man to whom 
 it was addressed saw at once its drift. 'Tell 
 your principal,' said he, 'that I will take his con- 
 tract, but I shall vote against the Yazoo claim 
 notwithstanding.' Next day he was told that 
 there had been some misunderstanding of the
 
 JOHN RANDOLPH OF ROANOKE. 49 
 
 business, that he could not have the contract, as 
 it was previously bespoken by another." 
 
 And with this heroic picture of John Randolph 
 dauntlessly denouncing "public robbery, be the 
 robbers who they may," I might close that which 
 I had proposed, and which I have accomplished 
 in an imperfect manner, as unsatisfactory to my- 
 self as it has proved, I fear, uninstructive to you. 
 But I cannot conscientiously dismiss the subject, 
 without directing your attention to a distinct 
 charge against his public honesty preferred by 
 his latest biographer (or slanderer?), Mr. Henry 
 Adams. "In September, 1829," says he, "he 
 was offered and accepted a special mission to 
 Russia; he sailed in June, 1830, remained ten 
 days at his post, then passed near a year in Eng- 
 land; and returning home in October, 1831, drew 
 $21,407 from the government, with which he 
 paid off his old British debt. This act of Roman 
 virtue, worthy of the satire of Juvenal, still 
 stands as the most flagrant bit of diplomatic job- 
 bery in the annals of the United States govern- 
 ment."* 
 
 So far as I know or believe, it has never been 
 denied that Randolph did not seek this or any 
 other position, and that the honor was, as he 
 declared' in accepting it, as "unexpected as it 
 was unsought for." Thomas Ritchie, the editor 
 of the Richmond Enquirer, vouched at the time 
 
 * L,ife, by Adam*, p. 236.
 
 5O HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 for the authenticity of the statement that Ran- 
 dolph had previously declined the missions to 
 France and England, both of which were offered 
 him.* The frail condition of his health was also 
 known to the appointing power, and the mission 
 to Russia selected because he thought that coun- 
 try most conducive to his restoration. What 
 eccentricities may have marked his private de- 
 portment at St. Petersburg, it is not important 
 to inquire. The charges against his public be- 
 havior, as minister plenipotentiary, were such 
 as might have been expected from the "vice- 
 regal" dynasty which he had overthrown; and, 
 in the main, hinged upon his personal appear- 
 ance at court in a suit of plain black, instead 
 of in that apery of European court dress, which, 
 as a pure Republican, he so justly despised, f 
 "My dress," says he, "on presentation to their 
 imperial majesties was" a full suit of the finest 
 black cloth that London could afford," the 
 same plain black that Franklin wore when he 
 walked up to the Court of St. James with the 
 treaty of American Independence in his hand; 
 the same plain black that the great Marcy after- 
 wards enjoined upon all of our diplomatic agents 
 abroad. But the specific charge is that he left 
 his post and went to London. His own explana- 
 tion of this seems conclusive in his favor, until 
 
 * Niles's Reg., No. 40, p. 305. 
 
 + See the letter of John R. Clay, charg6 d'affaires, etc., of January 17, 
 1831, in Niles's Reg., No. 40, p. 302.
 
 JOHN RANDOLPH OF ROANOKE. 5 I 
 
 contradicted by some historical evidence. The 
 day before his departure from Hampton Roads 
 there was an important change in the Russian 
 ministry, about the same time a revolution in 
 France, one in Belgium, and a rebellion in Po- 
 land. These events postponed consideration of 
 the special subject of his mission. The public 
 documents of the day disclose that his govern- 
 ment gave him a "roving commission," with lib- 
 erty to go to London when he could do so with- 
 out detriment to the object of his mission, which 
 was special, and did not require his presence in 
 St. Petersburg (where we already had a resident 
 charge d'affaires), until it was to be taken up for 
 consideration. Accordingly, he was carried on 
 board a steamer, and landed in London, 2Qth 
 September, 1830, "able to walk a few steps." 
 Before leaving, he had fully laid before the Rus- 
 sian government the object of his mission. From 
 London he corresponded regularly with Count 
 Nesselrode, and held himself ready to return to 
 St. Petersburg at a moment's notice. On the 
 22d of January, 1831, he writes: "I am daily 
 and hourly in the hope of hearing from Russia." 
 On the i Qth of February, and frequently there- 
 after, he wrote to the same effect. Having re- 
 ceived no such summons, in July, 1831, he re- 
 signed his mission, and in the early autumn 
 returned to the United States, prostrated in body 
 and, as many believed, shaken in intellect.
 
 52 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 The only remaining part of his conduct which 
 contributed to constitute the " flagrant bit of 
 diplomatic jobbery" charged by Mr. Adams, is 
 that he ''drew 21,407 from the government, 
 with which he paid off his old British debt." 
 
 It is not quite clear from this sentence, whether 
 the gravamen of the charge consists in his draw 
 ing his salary, or in his paying his old British 
 debt with it. If in the latter, the statement it- 
 self is untrue, as is proved by his will, executed 
 just on the eve of his departure to America from 
 London, and before his salary \vas paid him. In 
 the third item he says : " I have upwards of two 
 thousand pounds sterling in the hands of Baring 
 Bros. & Co., of London, and upwards of one 
 thousand pounds like money in the hands of 
 Gowan & Marx ; this money I leave to my exec- 
 utor, William Leigh, as a fund for carrying into 
 execution my will respecting my slaves" (viz., to 
 emancipate them). 
 
 What possible apology can be made for an 
 author, writing in the atmosphere of Boston, 
 who falls into such astonishing and unpardonable 
 blunders as these? It would be interesting to 
 know just how Mr. Adams is enabled to fix the 
 amount of Randolph's outfit and salary at $21,- 
 407. The amount appropriated by Congress 
 seems to have been $18,000. The partisan press 
 of that day, from which Mr. Adams evidently 
 derives his inspiration, states the amount vari-
 
 JOHN RANDOLPH OF ROANOKE. 53 
 
 onsly, all the way from $19,000 up to $40,000.* 
 I think it highly probable that the amount (al- 
 though the question is not in itself of any im- 
 portance) is mere conjecture, derived from the 
 columns of the New York Journal of Commerce, 
 Commercial, or some such contemporaneous par- 
 tisan journal. I venture, moreover, to affirm 
 that Mr. Adams will not deny either of the fol- 
 ovving propositions: 
 
 First, that Randolph had no part in fixing the 
 amount appropriated for his outfit or salary ; sec- 
 ondly, that his salary of $9000 per annum was 
 passed by Congress by a vote in the House of 
 1 1 5 ayes to 3 nays, and was paid without importu- 
 nity on his part, or remonstrance or reluctance 
 on the part of the government. If these two 
 propositions are conceded, as they must be, the 
 conclusion inevitably follows that Randolph, 
 having accepted a mission spontaneously ten- 
 dered, under conditions which he did not violate 
 nor transcend, only drew such outfit and com- 
 pensation as were by law attached. 
 
 And this is all there is of this imaginary " dip- 
 lomatic jobbery." The truth is, Mr. Adams has 
 suffered himself to be betrayed into accepting as 
 history the unfounded and vituperative assaults 
 upon the administration of Andrew Jackson, 
 which were made by the contemporaneous parti- 
 san press. As a part of this systematic abuse, 
 
 * Niles's Reg., No. 40, p. 8, H., p. 308.
 
 54 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 there were incorporated many groundless charges 
 against, and merciless ridicule of, John Randolph. 
 In many things Randolph was vulnerable enough. 
 But in the one essential of public honesty, he 
 was impregnable; and the folly of his ene- 
 mies has been to attack him where he was 
 least assailable. The result has been that, as in 
 the ancient process of embalming, resin, creo- 
 sote, and other bitterest drugs were freely used, 
 so these bitter invectives and slanders have but 
 embalmed and preserved in the hearts of the 
 people the imperishable memories of these two 
 lovers of liberty Andrew Jackson and John 
 Randolph. 
 
 Upon the other hand, we are bound to admit 
 that there is something of retributive justice in 
 the post mortem abuse and indignity which have 
 been heaped upon the character of Randolph, 
 when we reflect that his own sharp tongue spared 
 neither the living nor the dead. The sacrile- 
 gious inquisition dc lunatico in Virginia was as dis- 
 graceful as Adams's book is discreditable. Even 
 the dead are entitled to be tried by their peers. 
 
 And thus vanishes into air thin air the only 
 charge of public corruption, official malfeasance, 
 or misfeasance, which even an Adams has been 
 able to exhume or manufacture against John 
 Randolph who, if he possessed the atrox animus 
 of Cato, possessed also his unconquerable soul, 
 and his more than Roman public virtue.
 
 JOHN RANDOLPH OK KOANOKK. 55 
 
 And now, my friends, I bring to a conclusion 
 these remarks upon the convictions of John Ran- 
 dolph of Roanoke. The more closely his history 
 is studied, the more firm, I am persuaded, will 
 be found the foundations of my conclusions as to 
 his principles viz., that he was a pure Republi- 
 can, of the State Rights school; a strict construer 
 of the constitution ; an uncompromising advocate 
 of Free Trade as opposed to the fallacies of those 
 " sturdy beggars" who besieged the government 
 for subsidies and bounties under the thin pretext 
 of building up American manufactures ; sparing 
 neither friend nor foe in his denunciation of every 
 species of public robbery so that those who 
 were incapable of understanding this height of 
 Roman virtue have denounced him as a political 
 Don Quixote, for the same reason that Cicero 
 pronounced Cato "better fitted to live in the 
 republic of Plato than to survive amid the dregs 
 of Romulus." 
 
 Of Randolph's private character I have not 
 proposed to speak. It is to be hoped that some 
 impartial historian, neither an idolater nor an 
 iconoclast, will yet take up the hitherto unoccu- 
 pied high ground between indictment and eulogy, 
 and give ,the world a clear, consistent, and candid 
 view of Randolph's character, public and private ; 
 unravelling with delicate hand the mysterious 
 thread of physical torture which wound itself about 
 his life; in naught extenuating his bitter and
 
 56 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 abusive tongue ; his engagement to Maria Ward ; 
 his imperious and overbearing temper ; his quar- 
 rels with and alienations from his relations ; the 
 occasional irrationality which marked his declin- 
 ing years, and its undoubted cause opium and 
 brandy. And yet, setting down naught in malice 
 of detraction from the true merit and genuine 
 greatness of his public character : a lover of God, 
 and of the truth ; a lover of the people and a be- 
 liever in their integrity ; a lover of liberty and of 
 the constitution; a friend of humanity and the 
 liberator of four hundred slaves; in learning, 
 varied and accomplished; in criticism, accurate 
 and suggestive; in conception, a poet; in ora- 
 tory, original, fascinating, and undoubtedly for 
 thirty years the most picturesque figure in our 
 parliamentary history; as prophet, almost in- 
 spired; as politician, in the highest and finest 
 sense an impracticable, who would not use the 
 word " caucus " without an apology; a man of 
 convictions which burnt him through and through 
 with their intensity, and in that sense heroic ; a 
 man of transcendent genius, and in that sense 
 great. Such, as it seems to me, is the rough 
 block which the true artist of the future will be 
 called upon to fret, and carve, and chisel into 
 form of likeness true to life of John Randolph of 
 Roanoke.
 
 JEFFERSON'S FIRST ELECTION. 
 
 A THOUSAND and one fables have been 
 f\ written relative to the Presidential election 
 of 1 80 1. We fear the narrative published in a 
 New York paper by Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge, 
 February 8, 1891, forms no ex :eption to the many 
 fancy sketches that have preceded it. 
 
 The great apostle of Democracy is represented 
 in the likeness rather of an old woman than of a 
 man who had written the Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence. "Jefferson," according to the author 
 of the Force bill, "was in a state of great nerv- 
 ousness, not a little alarmed, and by no means 
 idle." That is just the way that the authors of 
 the Alien and Sedition laws used to talk about the 
 founder of the Democratic party. 
 
 Two statements of Mr. Lodge every student of 
 American history will recognize at once as un- 
 founded. One of them Mr. -Jefferson put his 
 foot on as utterly untrue, and stamped out of 
 respectable circulation eighty odd years ago. 
 Mr. Lodge revives it in this fashion : " Jefferson, 
 however, who was now thoroughly frightened, 
 made advances and offered assurances which 
 years afterward became public through the
 
 $3 HOUR CLASS SKRIES. 
 
 sworn testimony of Mr. Bayard, who in 1801 
 controlled the vote of the State of Delaware in 
 the House." This unqualified reiteration of a 
 refuted charge, refuted in the most unequivocal 
 manner, both by Mr. Jefferson and General 
 Smith, the latter the person mentioned by Mr. 
 Bayard in the testimony referred to by Mr. 
 Lodge, is quite sufficient to stamp Mr. Lodge's 
 method of historical statement. He gives one 
 side, excludes the other, and pronounces judg- 
 ment. 
 
 Here are the facts: Mr. Bayard said, in 1804, 
 in his deposition in the Burr-Cheetham libel suit : 
 " I applied to Mr. John Nicholas, a member of 
 the House from Virginia, who was a particular 
 friend of Mr. Jefferson. I stated to Mr. Nicholas 
 that if certain points of the future administration 
 could be understood and arranged with Mr. Jef- 
 ferson, I was authorized to say that three States 
 would withdraw from all opposition to his elec- 
 tion." Mr. Nicholas not giving any assurances, 
 Mr. Bayard next "unfolded" himself to General 
 Smith of Maryland, "in the same manner," says 
 he, "that I had done to Mr. Nicholas/' It will 
 be observed that Mr. Lodge represents these ap- 
 plications of Bayard, first to Nicholas and next to 
 Smith, as "advances" made by the "now thor- 
 oughly frightened" Jefferson. "The next day," 
 continues Bayard, "upon our meeting, General 
 Smith, informed me that he had seen Mr.^Jeffcr-
 
 JEFFERSON'S FIRST ELECTION. 59 
 
 son, and stated to him the points mentioned, and 
 was authorized* by him to say that they corre- 
 sponded with his views and intentions, and that 
 we might confide in him accordingly." 
 
 Now, having cited Mr. Bayard as a witness, 
 would it not have been more candid on Mr. 
 Lodge's part to cite also the two other principals, 
 Mr. Jefferson and General Smith, more especially 
 as both of them utterly denied what Bayard 
 affirmed? Call ye that writing history? Here 
 is what General Smith, in a letter to the sons of 
 Mr. Bayard in 1830, had to say: "I lodged with 
 Mr. Jefferson, and that night I had a conversa- 
 tion with him without his having had the remo- 
 test idea of my object. ... I certainly never did 
 tell your father that I had any authority from 
 Mr. Jefferson to communicate anything to him or 
 to any other person." Jefferson is equally em- 
 phatic in contradiction. Said he in the "Ana," 
 April 15, 1806: "Bayard pretends to have ad- 
 dressed to me during the pending of the Presi- 
 dential election in February, 1801, through Gen- 
 eral Samuel Smith, certain conditions on which 
 my election, might be obtained, and that General 
 Smith, after conversing with me, gave answers 
 from me. 'This is absolutely false. No propo- 
 sitioi. of any kind was ever made to me on that 
 occasion by General Smith, nor any answer 
 authorized by me. And this fact General Smith 
 affirms at this moment."
 
 60 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 And yet the intrepid Mr. Lodge coolly writes 
 down Jefferson and Smith as liars, and informs 
 the public that "Jefferson, now thoroughly 
 frightened, made advances and offered assur- 
 ances which years afterwards became public 
 property through the sworn testimony of Mr. 
 Bayard." If there were any need, we could pro- 
 duce a cloud of witnesses, Madison, Monroe, 
 Gallatin, Gouverneur Morris, etc., to whom Jef- 
 erson unbosomed himself during that memorable 
 contest, declaring to all that he would make no 
 terms, make no promises, and that he "would 
 not receive the government on capitulation." 
 
 The other myth which Mr. Lodge contributes 
 to the shelves of modern history is as follows: 
 "On the 1 7th of February, on the thirty-sixth 
 ballot, Morris of Vermont was absent, and two 
 Maryland Federalists put in blank ballots, which 
 gave the votes of these States to Jefferson, in 
 addition to Delaware, and which elected him." 
 This assertion is objectionable in three ways: 
 first, it is disingenuous by not giving the whole 
 truth ; second, it ignores the fact that many con- 
 stitutional lawyers then and afterwards contended 
 that blank votes were nevertheless votes, and had 
 to be counted in ascertaining the result ; and third, 
 it is untrue in fact as to the vote of Delaware. 
 
 Now it is our turn to quote Mr. Bayard, and 
 as he is Mr. Lodge's own witness he will, as a 
 good lawyer, be bound by him. Does Mr. Lodge
 
 JEFFERSON'S FIRST ELECTION. 61 
 
 know that on that very iyth of February, 1801, 
 immediately after the votes were cast that made 
 Jefferson President, James A. Bayard wrote to a 
 friend in Wilmington, Delaware, and depicted 
 the whole New England delegation of Federalists 
 in Congress as revolutionists, bent on destroying 
 the government? Does Mr. Lodge know that 
 Bayard himself declared that he supported Burr 
 as long as there was a ghost of a chance for his 
 election? That finally he refused to vote at all, 
 other than a blank vote, notwithstanding Mr. 
 Lodge, with amusing gravity, says that the votes 
 of Vermont and Maryland were given for Jeffer- 
 son, " in addition to Delaware" ! Mr. Lodge, 
 ninety years after, says Bayard did vote for Jef- 
 ferson ; Mr. Bayard, a few moments after the vot- 
 ing was over, said he did not. Hear him : 
 
 "WASHINGTON, Feb. 17, 1801. 
 
 "DEAR SIR: Mr. Jefferson is our President. 
 Our opposition was continued till it was demon- 
 strated that Burr could not be brought in, and even 
 if he could, he meant to come in as a Democrat. 
 
 " In such case, to evidence his sincerity, he 
 must have swept every officer in the United 
 States. I have 'direct information that Mr. Jef- 
 ferson will not pursue that plan. The New 
 England gentlemen came out and declared they 
 meant to go without a Constitution, and take the 
 risk of a civil war. . . . Mr. J. did not get a
 
 62 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 Federal vote. Vermont gave a vote by means of 
 Morris withdrawing. The same thing happened 
 with Maryland. The votes of South Carolina 
 and Delaware were blank. 
 
 " Your obedient servant, 
 
 "J. A. B." 
 
 This pretty effectually disposes of Mr. Lodge's 
 statement that Jefferson got the vote of Delaware. 
 
 In conclusion Mr. Lodge does not even hint at 
 the real causes which produced the grand result. 
 Alexander Hamilton cordially hated Aaron Burr, 
 calling him Catiline, and urged his New England 
 friends to defeat him by voting for Jefferson. 
 Not one of them took his advice, as we are in- 
 formed by Mr. Bayard. Now the election of Jef- 
 ferson was brought about by the vote of Colonel 
 Matthew Lyon of Vermont, the pioneer Democrat 
 of New England. " Colonel Matthew Lyon," says 
 F. S. Drake in his "Dictionary of American Bi- 
 ography,'" p. 571, "gave the vote that made 
 Jefferson President." Charles Lanman, private 
 secretary of Daniel Webster, says at /. 368 of his 
 " Dictionary of Congress " : " The fact of his (Lyon) 
 giving the vote that made Jefferson President is 
 well known." 
 
 The one inflexible Democrat in New England 
 during John Adams's administration was Matthew 
 Lyon. He stood like a rock in defence of the 
 liberties of the people against the monarchists
 
 JEFFERSON'S FIRST ELECTION. 63 
 
 and aristocrats that then dominated the govern- 
 ment. He was an object of terror to Adams, 
 Pickering, Wolcott, Griswold, Sedgwick, and the 
 other New England Federalists. They clearly 
 foresaw that at the Presidential election of 1 800 
 the decision might have to be made by the House 
 of Representatives, and in the then state of 
 parties Colonel Lyon might hold the balance of 
 power, and cast the vote of Vermont. Chiefly to 
 reach him the abominable Alien and Sedition laws 
 were passed. He was arrested and indicted on 
 a pretext, and convicted without regard to the 
 forms of law. Fined and thrown into a filthy 
 cell, Matthew Lyon became more potent there 
 than John Adams was in the presidential office. 
 The Federalists could imprison the patriot, but 
 they could not imprison the idea behind the pa- 
 triot. So from his cell he walked forth at the 
 bidding of the gallant people of Vermont, elected 
 to Congress while bars and bolts held him in a 
 dungeon, a martyr to liberty, called like another 
 John Hampden to discharge a lofty mission. 
 Lyon cast half the vote of Vermont for Jefferson 
 at every stage of the balloting, until on the 
 thirty-sixth or last, ballot his vote became the 
 vote of his State, and gave Jefferson the neces- 
 sary number to decide the contest in his favor. 
 
 Was not Mr. Lodge a trifle disingenuous in ig- 
 noring this celebrated New England Democrat, 
 and attributing the result to Federalists, not one
 
 64 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 of whom voted for Jefferson, and but one cf whom, 
 Hamilton, who had no vote, was patriotic enough 
 to prefer country to party? Why did the Mary- 
 land Federalists waver, and Mr. Bayard break 
 from party traces in the last Federal caucus? 
 The explanation is in a nutshell. Mr. Madison 
 had declared the government would be dissolved 
 if no president was elected within the appointed 
 time, and then another convention of the States 
 would decide the fate of Maryland and Delaware 
 less favorably than before. Maryland would lose 
 the Federal capital, just secured after a desperate 
 struggle, and the little borough of Delaware would 
 be shorn of her consequence in the Senate, even 
 if she might not be annexed outright as a county 
 of Pennsylvania. Charles Carroll of Carrollton 
 and other Maryland Federalists took the hint. 
 James A. Bayard of Delaware took the hint. 
 And salutary, selfish .fear made Maryland and 
 Delaware lukewarm in the cause of Burr. 
 
 All honor to Lyon ! A Democrat from convic- 
 tion ; a fighter against consolidation at all times, a 
 thorn in the sides of the Federalists, and especially 
 of John Adams in the meridian of his arrogant 
 power, he stood now like Horatius at the bridge, 
 with the vote of a State in his charge on that 
 memorable I7th of February, 1801, and to that 
 vote spontaneously given on the thirty-sixth 
 ballot, Thomas Jefferson owed his election as 
 President J. F. McL.
 
 A STUDY OF HENRY CLAY. 
 
 BY DANIEL B. LUCAS, LL.D. 
 
 Is dictus, illis popularibns olim, 
 
 Qui tune vivebant homines, atque ovum agitabant, 
 
 Flos delibatus populi, snadieque medulla. 
 
 THE statesmen who have illustrated and 
 adorned American history may be readily 
 and appropriately divided into four overlapping 
 classes: Those of the period of the revolution, 
 extending to 1812; those of the post-revolution- 
 ary period, from 1812 to 1840; those of the 
 golden era, from 1 840 to 1 86 1 ; those who flour- 
 ished during and after the civil war (Jiorrendain 
 dilnvieni), embracing the period of reconstruc- 
 tion, and since from 1861 to the present time. 
 
 During the forty years of his public life, from 
 i8_io to iScjo, there can be no doubt that Henry 
 y was the most illustrious figure in American 
 )olitical history, Andrew Jackson alone excepted. 
 
 Amidst the mass of material which confronts 
 him, and the diversity of view which confuses 
 from the eulogies of Greeley or Colton, to the 
 semi-Teutonic narratives of Schurz or Von Holtz, 
 the student of Clay's career must devote himself, 
 5
 
 66 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 not to reconciling the opinions of others, but to 
 a careful study of the statesman's manifestations 
 of himself, through his speeches, letters, conver- 
 ms, votes, measures, actions. 
 
 What did Henry Clay himself propose to the 
 public, to his countrymen, as solutions of the prob- 
 lems of statecraft which agitated the men of his 
 age, and, in that era, affected the national destiny? 
 
 Fortunately, the young man who pursues this 
 study will find that Clay possessed, in an emi- 
 nent degree, the faculty of generalization. No 
 man of his /time (J ackson alone excepted) has 
 left such bold, condensed, and ingenuous declara- 
 tions as to his public policies. When change in 
 his views was so marked as to be obvious to him- 
 self, he said frankly : " I have changed my opin- 
 ion!" When change was/imperceptibly wrought 
 by the mutations of time and fortune, we can 
 still see reflected in his speeches the genuine and 
 honest image of his attitude toward public affairs, 
 at every epoch of his career. 
 
 Born in Virginia the first year of the. revolu- 
 tion, he had the singularly good fortune to attract 
 the attention and enjoy the professional tutelage 
 of Chancellor Wythe, one of the purest men and 
 ablest jurists of the old commonwealth. 
 
 The period from 17/8 to 1800 was distin- 
 guished by three important events, all of great 
 historic significance: the French Revolution, the 
 Protestant Revolt of Ireland, and the Civic Revo-
 
 A STUDY OF HENRY CLAY. 67 
 
 lution wrought by Thomas Jefferson in the cha.r- 
 acter and trend of American institutions. It was 
 undoubtedly an era when master minds, such as 
 Rousseau, Locke, and Raynal, had prepared the 
 way to inaugurate, upon a new and extended 
 theatre, the experiment of free government, and 
 popular sovereignty. As did Randolph, Calhoun, 
 and so many others of the post-revolutionary 
 era, so also didfClay fall easily into the 
 
 circle of the Jefferson inn 
 
 The harshest invective in which he ptvp.r in- 
 dulged on the floor of Congress was in rebuking- 
 Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts for a bitterly^ 
 partisan attack on Mr. Jefferson. Quincy was a 
 Federalist, and the Federalists of that day were 
 more opposed and perhaps with better reason 
 to the war of 1812, than were the Whigs of 1847 
 to the war with Mexico. Said Quincy: 'The 
 disgrace of our armies is celestial glory, compared 
 to the disgrace reflected on our country by this 
 invasion [of Canada] ; yet it is 'called a war for 
 glory! Glory? Yes, such glory as that of a 
 tiger, when he tears the bowels from the lamb, 
 filling the wilderness with savage roars. The 
 glory of Genghis Khan, without his greatness; 
 the glory of Bonaparte. Far from me and mine, 
 and far from my country such glory!'? 
 
 He concluded his denunciation of the war with 
 a fierce arraignment of Mr. Jefferson, then in 
 retirement at Monticello.
 
 68 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 Clay was but thirty-six years of age, and had 
 served in the legislature of his adopted State, 
 \ Kentucky, and had also represented her for two 
 / short unexpired terms in the Senate of the United 
 / States, having been Senator in 1806, and again 
 \ in 1 809. He was now serving his first term in 
 the House of Representatives (1813). Clay's 
 rebuke of Quincy was overwhelming. He charged 
 him with participating in a plot (now a matter of 
 history), to dismember the Union, and quoted his 
 own words, "peaceably if we can, forcibly if we 
 must," uttered about the time of the mission of 
 Henry, the English emissary, to Boston. In con- 
 clusion, he used the harshest language to be found 
 in his congressional career, when he denounced 
 Quincy as " one whom no sense of decency or 
 propriety could restrain from soiling the carpet 
 on which he treads!" 
 
 But more to our present purpose was his de- 
 fence of Mr. Jefferson : 
 
 " An honorable gentleman from Massachusetts 
 [Mr. Quincy] of whom, I am sorry to say, it be- 
 comes necessary for me in the course of my re- 
 marks to take some notice, has alluded to him 
 [Jefferson] in a remarkable manner. Neither 
 his retirement from public office, his eminent 
 services, nor his advanced age, can exempt 
 this patriot from the coarse assaults of party 
 malevolence. No; sir; in 1801 he snatched 
 from the rude hand of usurpation the vio-
 
 A STUDY OF HENRY CLAY. 69 
 
 lated constitution of his country, and that is his 
 crime." 
 
 This defence of Mr. Jefferson, in 1813, was 
 along- the line of Clay's early and, up to that 
 point, consistent career. He commenced political 
 life in his adopted State, by throwing himself, 
 \vith all the fervor of his nature, into the contest 
 
 between Jefferson and Adams, and in opposition 
 
 I to the Alien andSgdition laws. The celebrated 
 
 Kentucky Resolutions, introduced into the legis- 
 lature by Mr. Breckenridge, but in fact written 
 bjf Mr. Jefferson, received Clay's cordial support. 
 Unlike those of the Virginia legislature, written 
 by Mr. Madison, and promulgated about the same 
 time, these Resolutions admitted of but one construc- 
 tion. They were, in 1856, endorsed in terms by 
 the national Democratic platform, upon which 
 James Buchanan was elected President of the 
 United States, and received the support of Edwin 
 M. Stanton, Benjamin F. Butler, and other states- 
 men, who subsequently distinguished themselves 
 by strenuous repudiation of, and opposition to, all 
 they contained. 
 
 As late as 1824, during the Monroe administra- 
 tion, Clay, about to enter the presidential canvass, 
 declared his adhesion to the Republican party 
 and its principles. In speaking to Webster's 
 resolution for the recognition of the independence 
 of Greece, Clay said: "I would appeal to my 
 Republican friends, those faithful sentinels of
 
 70 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 civil liberty with whom I have ever acted shall 
 we reject a proposition, consonant to our princi- 
 ples, favoring the good and great cause, on ac- 
 count of the political character of its mover? 
 Shall we not rather look to the intrinsic merits 
 of the measure, and seek every fit occasion to 
 strengthen and perpetuate liberal principles and 
 noble sentiments? If it were possible for Repub- 
 licans to cease to be the champions of human free- 
 dom, and if Federalists became its only sup- 
 porters, I would cease to be a Republican ; I would 
 become a Federalist. The preservation of the 
 public confidence can only be secured or merited, 
 by a faithful adherence to the principles by 
 which it has been acquired." 
 
 So, also, during the same year (1824), in a 
 speech on Internal Improvements, he again de- 
 clared his unequivocal adherence to " Tlic old \ 798 
 Republican principles now become Federal also by 
 which the constitution is to be interpreted that 
 this is a limited government, that it has no 
 powers but the granted powers; and that the 
 granted powers are those which are expressly 
 enumerated, or such as being implied are neces- 
 sary and proper to effectuate the enumerated 
 powers." 
 
 As early, however, as 1818, he had expressed 
 his dissent from the opinion of Judge Roane and 
 the Court of Appeals of Virginia, that the State 
 courts " have a right to determine on the consti-
 
 A STUDY OF HENRY CLAY. 71 
 
 tutionality of any law or treaty of the United 
 States, and to expound them according to their 
 own views, even if they should vary from the 
 decision of the Supreme Court of the United 
 States. " From these extreme views, he distinctly 
 dissented. "The States," said he, "have their 
 appointed orbit; so has the Union; and each 
 should be confined within its fair, legitimate, and 
 constitutional sphere. " 
 
 In regard to constitutional construction, there^ 
 fore, it would seem that Clay started out as a dis- / 
 ciple of the Jeffersonian school, endorsing the / 
 famous Resolutions of 1 798-99, of Virginia and \ 
 Kentucky; that he then shifted to a safe and 
 
 'middle course, as far from the nullification of 
 
 / Calhoun as from the consolidation of Webster ; V 
 finally, after his alliance with Adams, in 1825, he ] 
 
 \ became as much of a latitudinarian as the most 
 
 'xardent Federalist could desire. 
 
 ~In the end, he conceded to the full that power 
 of State-coercion, which Buchanan and the State- 
 rights Democracy denied ; but which Jackson and 
 Lincoln insisted upon. Between the doctrine of 
 Nullification and the right of Secession, there was 
 an obvious and broa,d distinction. But Clay 
 enied both. A State could not remain in the 
 nion and nullify a law of Congress ; neither 
 could she withdraw without the consent of the 
 remainder, or of the national government. 
 
 In his great compromise speech of 1850, he
 
 72 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 said : " But I must take the occasion to say that, 
 in my opinion, there is no right on the part of 
 one or more of the States to secede from the 
 Union. War and the dissolution of the Union 
 are identical and inseparable. There can be no 
 dissolution of the Union, except by consent or 
 by war." 
 
 If this denial of the right of secession was a 
 departure on Clay's part from his early endorse- 
 ment of the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions, 
 it was, at least, a departure distinctly avowed as 
 early as 1832. 
 
 In his speech before the Senate in 1832, which 
 occupied three days, in defence of the American 
 system, he had already declared: "With respect 
 to this Union, Mr. President, the truth cannot 
 be too generally proclaimed, nor too strongly 
 inculcated, that it is necessary to the u'Jiole and 
 to all the parts necessary to those parts, indeed, 
 in different degrees, but vitally necessary to each 
 and that threats to disturb or dissolve it, coming 
 from any of the parts, would be quite as indis- 
 creet and improper as would be threats from the 
 residue to exclude those parts from the pale of 
 its benefits." 
 
 Having been defeated in his aspirations for the 
 Presidency in 1824, and the choice of the House 
 of Representatives having fallen upon John 
 Quincy Adams, Clay accepted from the latter the 
 appointment of Secretary of State.
 
 A STUDY OF HENRY CLAY. 73 
 
 Much has been said and written about the 
 charge of " bargain and corruption," based upon the 
 fact that in the contest before the House of Repre- 
 sentatives, Clay's influence was thrown for Adams 
 and against the other two candidates, Andrew 
 Jackson and William H. Crawford. It will be 
 observed that the election of President by the 
 Electoral Colleges is an affair partly Federal and 
 partly National. When no candidate can com- 
 mand a majority in the colleges, and the election 
 is thrown into the House of Representatives, it 
 becomes entirely Federal. The language of the 
 Constitution is : " But in choosing the President, 
 the vote shall be taken by States, the represen- 
 tation from each State having one vote." 
 
 The vote of Kentucky was given for Adams, 
 although in her Electoral College she had voted 
 for Clay himself. As Clay was now taken into 
 the Cabinet, and as to him was assigned its most 
 important department, this fact gave occasion 
 for scandal, and the charge of a corrupt bargain. 
 
 In regard to this charge, an investigation was 
 demanded by Clay, and refused by his accusers. 
 The charge was denied by himself and Adams ; 
 and in its support no evidence was ever adduced 
 save such suspicion, based upon the pessimistic 
 view of human nature, as history herself, despite 
 her better nature, is prone to indulge : such as that 
 Alexander was in some way connected with the 
 death of Philip of Macedon ; that Julius Caesar
 
 74 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 was privy to the designs of Catiline; or Mary 
 Queen of Scots accessory to the murder of her 
 husband. As the result of an examination of 
 the evidences, as arrayed by Linn Boyd and other 
 contemporaneous accusers, not omitting Jackson 
 himself, I must say that they are totally unworthy 
 of serious consideration. I am, moreover, driven 
 to the conclusion that this baseless charge never 
 did seriously affect Clay's subsequent public 
 career. He never sought any honor thereafter, 
 from his own State, which was not accorded with 
 an alacrity approaching to devotion. In his 
 national contest with Van Buren, the rancorous 
 mendacity which assailed the latter gained more 
 votes for Clay than the repetition of this stale 
 old slander could have cost him, if indeed, it cost 
 him any. And when eight years later he ran 
 against James K. Polk, the popular mind was so 
 tumultuously agitated over the disposition of the 
 public lands, and, above all, over the re-annex- 
 ation of Texas, it is inconceivable that the echoes 
 of this ancient slander, now twenty years old, 
 although feebly revived from the Hermitage 
 itself, could seriously have affected Clay's polit- 
 ical fortunes. 
 
 But the alliance between Clay and Adams, 
 though free from any just charge of corruption, 
 was to mark a new era in the political history 
 of the natipn. " La politique ~est dans le sang!" 
 says Lamartine ; politics are in the blood ! The
 
 A STUDY OF HENRY CLAY. 75 
 
 elder Adams had dreamed of a strong govern- 
 ment, composed of the Three Estates, or some- 
 thing analogous to this trinity of the British con- 
 stitution. He had sought by construction to con- 
 vert the government, as actually framed, into the 
 realization of his rejected dream. 
 
 He had failed. His son, John Quincy Adams, 
 faithful to the family traditions of patriotism, 
 had opposed the New England party in 1812, and 
 had thus drifted into the Republican ranks, and 
 become an ardent sympathizer with " the second 
 war of Independence." He was now, by the 
 grace of God and dictum of Henry Clay, President. 
 The old dream of a magnificent and imperial 
 government came back to haunt the Adams fancy. 
 Looking out from his retirement, the sage of 
 Monticello saw through the new scheme of Feder- 
 alism, and characterized it in a few words (1826) : 
 " The Federalists of our time look to a single and 
 splendid government founded on banking institu- 
 tions and moneyed incorporations, riding and 
 ruling over the plundered ploughman and beg- 
 gared yeomanry!" 
 
 The details of this new Federal scheme of 
 
 splendid government developed themselves into 
 
 \those measures with which the name of Henry 
 
 Clay is as inseparably connected as is the name 
 
 \of Noah with the Flood. A high protective 
 
 /tariff; a national bank; internal improvements 
 
 [ by the General Government ; a distribution land-
 
 76 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 bill all parts of the same system of parental 
 government. 
 
 Under the influence of this new combination, 
 the mind of Clay drifted away out from the Re- 
 publican landmarks. Even in his vocabulary, he 
 unconsciously reset the jewel of a Republican sen- 
 timent into the cluster of a Federal coronet. Jef- 
 ferson's ideal was, "A wise and FRUGAL govern- 
 ment." Clay remodeled this sentiment into, " A 
 wise and PARENTAL system of government." In- 
 ternal improvements were to be fostered by 
 this "parental system": "We believe," said he, 
 " that the government incontestably possesses the 
 constitutional power to execute such internal 
 improvements as are called for by the good of 
 the whole. And we appeal to your parental 
 regard" 
 
 "The American system of protection," as it 
 
 was called, was to be another object of this 
 
 parental administration: "I propose," said he, 
 
 " to give protection to our manufactured articles, 
 
 adequate protection for a length of time, which 
 
 compared with the length of human life is very 
 
 long, but which is short in proportion to the legit- 
 
 . imate discretion, of every zvise and parental system 
 
 \of government. " 
 
 A national bank was another child of this 
 
 ^Federal paternalism; while the distribution of 
 
 /the proceeds of the public lands convened the 
 
 subordinate States, like dutiful pensioners, around
 
 A STUDY OF HENRY CLAY. 77 
 
 the board of a common parent the national 
 
 \government. 
 
 Neither did the splendid and comprehensive 
 parentalism of the Clay and Adams alliance con- 
 fine its imperial ambition to the limits of the 
 United States. South and Central America were 
 to be illuminated by at least a reflex glamour of 
 
 N , the great American Republic. In June, 1826, 
 the celebrated " Panama Mission" was organized 
 by the Administration for the purpose of accept- 
 ing an invitation from Peru, Chili, Colombia, 
 Mexico, and the States of Central America, to 
 meet in a Congress at Panama, to form a treaty 
 of friendship and perpetual alliance. On the 
 26th of June (1826), Mr. Adams appointed two 
 commissioners, one of whom could not, for private 
 reasons, attend, and the other died on his way 
 there. These appointments were made by execu- 
 tive authority simply, and the Senate was called 
 on to confirm them, which it did, after heated 
 debate, and by a close vote, and a small majority. 
 The House in a similar manner voted an ap- 
 
 _propriation. The opposition in the Senate was 
 led by Van Buren and John Randolph ; the first 
 in that calm, courteous, and philosophical style 
 which distinguished him, and which Seward after- 
 wards so successfully imitated ; and the other, in 
 the impetuous strain of invective peculiar to 
 himself, embracing his memorable allusion to 
 " the coalition between Blifil and Black George
 
 ?8 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 the Puritan and the Blackleg!" which culminated 
 in his duel with Clay. 
 
 The objections urged against this mission were 
 obvious, and should have been insurmountable. 
 Spain had not yet acknowledged the independence 
 of these South and Central American States, 
 although that fact, much dwelt upon, was per- 
 haps immaterial. But the United States could 
 illy afford to exchange the plain precepts of in- 
 ternational safety and honor pointed out in the 
 admonitions of Washington, for Mr. Clay's mag- 
 nificent dream of -a bi-continental American sys- 
 tem, which was to " constitute the rallying point 
 of human freedom against all the despotism of 
 the old world;" or "the transcendent benefits 
 to the human race," which warmed the con- 
 ceptions of President Adams. 
 
 At that comparatively early day, those plain 
 principles of common sense, republican simplic- 
 ity, and practical judgment, so necessary to the 
 security of the nation, and the preservation of a 
 great confederacy, though subordinated for the 
 moment to the splendid allurements of Clay's 
 imperial dream, soon regained their ascendency, 
 and condemned this vision of a " grand Amphic- 
 tyonic council of American republics." The 
 people saw in the rainbow coloring of the Presi- 
 dent's message on this subject a relapse into the 
 fatal blunders of the first Adams, when, in filling 
 the Berlin mission, he widely departed from the
 
 A STUDY OF HENRY CLAY 79 
 
 admonition of Washington, and informed Con- 
 gress, and through them the American people 
 "that however we might consider ourselves, 
 others would consider us a weight in the balance 
 of power in Europe!" "The younger Adams," 
 (now President), says an astute historian, "had 
 been appointed upon the Berlin mission to carry 
 out these heretical suggestions of his father." 
 
 Upon no public question had Clay's gradual 
 defection from the strict-construction school 
 become apparent to himself except upon a 
 United States bank. 
 
 In 1 8 1 1 , he opposed the re-charter of the 
 bank, which w T as "Hamilton's plan of a finan- 
 cial agency." Clay opposed there-charter not as 
 a question of expediency, but upon the broad 
 ground of its unconstitutionality. Said he, " This 
 vagrant power to erect a bank, after having wan- 
 dered throughout the whole constitution in quest 
 of some congenial spot to fasten upon, has been 
 at length located by the gentleman from Georgia 
 on that provision which authorizes Congress to 
 lay and collect taxes, etc. In 1791, the power is 
 referred to one part of the instrument ; in 1 8 1 1 , 
 to another. Sometiines it is alleged to be de- 
 ducible from the power to regulate commerce. 
 Hard pressed here, it disappears, and shows itself 
 under the grant to coin money. The sagacious 
 Secretary of the Treasury in 1791 (Hamilton) 
 pursued the wisest course he has v taken shelter
 
 80 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 behind general, high-sounding, and imposing 
 terms." 
 
 " What is the nature of this government ? It 
 is emphatically federal, vested with an aggregate 
 of specified powers for general purposes, con- 
 ceded by existing sovereignties, who have them- 
 selves retained what is not so conceded. It is 
 said there are cases where it must act on implied 
 powers. This is not controverted, but the impli- 
 cation must be necessary, and obivously flow from 
 the enumerated power with which it is allied. 
 The power to charter companies is not specified 
 in the grant, and I contend is of a nature not 
 transferable by mere implications." 
 
 All this, and much more to the same purpose, 
 was urged by him, and so logical and obviously 
 true was it, that when the Clay of 1832 undertook 
 to refute the Clay of 1 8 1 1 , he made a lamentable 
 failure. Neither did he pretend to reconcile 
 his position as a Republican in 1811, with his 
 action as a Federal Whig in 1832. On the 
 contrary, with that bold and ingenuous courage 
 which ever distinguished him, he said frankly: 
 " Although I had been instrumental in putting 
 down the old Bank of the United States, / had 
 changed my mind!" 
 
 Still earlier (1832), in speaking of Jackson's 
 veto, he said : " By reasons assigned in it [his 
 speech on the Bank in 1816] for the change in 
 my opinion, I am ready to abide in the judgment
 
 A STUDY OF HENRY CLAY. 8 I 
 
 of the present generation, and of posterity. In 
 1816, being Speaker of the House of Representa- 
 tives, it was perfectly in my power to have said 
 nothing and done nothing, and thus have con- 
 cealed the change of opinion which my mind had 
 undergone. But I did not choose to remain silent, 
 and escape responsibility. I chose publicly to 
 avow my actual conversion. The war and the 
 fatal experience of its disastrous events had 
 changed me." 
 
 Madison and Calhoun, it may be added, had 
 also changed their minds in 1816, but it is doubt- 
 ful if any statesman of the period ever so frankly 
 avowed the change as did Clay. But, in truth, 
 imperceptibly to himself, Clay's whole perspec- 
 tive of the construction of the constitution had 
 undergone a change. To use the language of 
 one of his biographers, " His constitutional prin- 
 ciples had become prodigiously elastic, according 
 to the requirements of the occasion." It would 
 be to do Clay gross injustice, however, to imagine 
 that he ever fell into that fatal abysm of latitu- 
 dinarianism which absorbed all the specific grants 
 of the constitution into one clause, that of pro- 
 viding " for the general welfare." 
 
 In 1824, in commenting upon Monroe's consti- 
 tutional objections to internal improvements by 
 the Federal Government, Clay said : " He [Mon- 
 roe] combats with great success and much ability 
 any deduction of power from the clause relating 
 6
 
 82 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 to the general welfare. He shows that the effect 
 of it would be to overturn or render useless and 
 nugatory the careful enumeration of our powers ; 
 and that it would convert a cautiously limited 
 government into one without limitation." 
 
 It is, perhaps, equally unnecessary to say, that 
 the mind of Clay (although he at times uses 
 language almost capable of such construction) 
 never did precipitate him into the egregious 
 blunder of maintaining that our written compact 
 of specific grants is capable, like the unwritten con- 
 stitution of England, of contraction and expansion 
 to meet the emergencies of shifting political situa- 
 tions. The power of change is the power of amend- 
 ment, and the mode of contracting or expanding 
 is not by construction, but by the legislatures or 
 conventions of three-fourths of the States. Said 
 Clay : " It is urged by the gentleman from Massa- 
 chusetts [Mr. Lloyd] , that as this nation advances 
 in commerce, wealth, and population, new ener- 
 gies will be unfolded, new wants and exigencies 
 will arise, and hence he infers that powers must 
 be implied from the constitution. But, sir, the 
 question is, shall we stretch the instrument to 
 embrace cases not fairly within its scope, or shall 
 we resort to that remedy by amendment which 
 the constitution prescribes?" 
 
 In a speech to his constituents, June 9, 1842, 
 he said : " I never but once changed my opinion 
 on any great principle of construction of the
 
 A STUDY OF HENRY CLAY. . 83 
 
 national constitution. In early life on deliberate 
 consideration, I adopted the principles of inter- 
 preting the Federal constitution which had been 
 so ably enforced by Mr. Madison in his memo- 
 rable report to the Virginia legislature, and to 
 them, as I understood them, I have constantly 
 adhered." As Mr. Madison did himself event- 
 ually reject the logical conclusion to which his 
 report and resolutions inevitably led, it is not 
 strange that Clay should follow the same course. 
 
 One of his last utterances was : " The constitu- 
 tion of the United States creates a limited govern- 
 ment, comprising comparatively few powers, and 
 leaving the residuary mass of political power in 
 the possession of the several States." 
 
 Neither did Clay, at any time, fail to recognize 
 the dual character of our system of government, 
 as being at once a nation and a confederacy. 
 Indeed the statesmen of the three periods preced- 
 ing the flood from Jefferson to Lincoln, from 
 Hamilton to Seward, inclusive each and all, 
 almost without exception, when they meant the 
 nation, said so, and when they meant confederacy 
 said confederacy. 
 
 It was reserved for the leaders of the Recon- 
 struction era to recoil from the use of the word 
 confederacy, against which the civil war had 
 created a not unnatural prejudice. Nevertheless, 
 words are sometimes things, and the banishment 
 of a word oft-times means the ostracism of an
 
 84 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 idea. Let us beware of the politician (I will not 
 say statesman) who is afraid or ashamed to use 
 the constitutional phraseology of the fathers, or 
 of the Supreme Court of the United States ! 
 
 Close upon the heels of the Panama mission, 
 came an international scheme of far greater im- 
 portance, and one in all respects worthy the con- 
 ception of exalted statesmanship. This was the 
 proposition to purchase Texas from the State of 
 Mexico. In March, 1827, the administration in- 
 structed the envoy to Mexico, Joel R. Poinsett, to 
 propose to the Mexican government the purchase 
 of Texas for a sum of money. 
 
 As early as 1820, Clay had opposed the sur- 
 render of our pretensions to Texas as a part of 
 Louisiana, in exchange for Florida. He saw and 
 appreciated the great, almost indispensable value 
 of Texas to the Union. Now, seven years later, 
 he recurred to his favorite theme of acquiring 
 this magnificent domain, five times as extensive 
 as the whole area of France, and adding it to the 
 United States. 
 
 Mexico, unfortunately perhaps for herself, and 
 certainly for Clay's fame, refused to sell Texas, 
 and she remained for twenty years longer a 
 stranger to that galaxy to which she appropriately 
 belonged, and from which only the grossest and 
 most suicidal prejudice could have wished to ex- 
 clude her. Had Clay and Adams succeeded in 
 their laudable efforts to purchase Texas, it is more
 
 A STUDY OF HENRY CLAY. 85 
 
 than probable that the latter would have been 
 re-elected President, and the hydrophobic Adams 
 of the subsequent constitutional contests would 
 never have existed ; Adams would no doubt have 
 kept stride with the patriotic steps of his great 
 premier, in the effort to preserve the Union, by 
 resisting the violence of those extremists, upon 
 either side, whose principles, should they prevail, 
 must, in the long run of the centuries, render the 
 preservation of the Union, as it was founded, 
 impossible. 
 
 Nothing in history is more remarkable than the 
 eventual conversion of John Quincy Adams into 
 a crusader against slavery and the South. It was 
 a genuine metempsychosis. Never was there a 
 clearer or more forcible example of the effect of 
 a mental epidemic, analogous in all respects to 
 physical disease, acting upon an intensely in- 
 tellectual nature, with its sensibilities lacerated 
 by defeat, and its temper stung by disappointed 
 ambition. Adams had strongly approved of the 
 acquisition of Louisiana slave territory, every 
 inch of it, when acquired. He and Clay had co- 
 operated, with more or less discord, in the con- 
 summation of the treaty of Ghent. Upon one 
 point, however, they were thoroughly in accord, 
 but Adams the more persistent. That point was : 
 That fugitive slaves captured by, or escaping to, the 
 British forces, should be returned to their masters. 
 The commission upon the part of the United
 
 86 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 States was composed of Clay, Adams, Gallatin, 
 Bayard, and Russell. Another point of conten- 
 tion was that England claimed an equal right of 
 the navigation of the Mississippi, from its source 
 to the Gulf of Mexico. Clay declared he " would 
 affix his signature to no treaty which should make 
 to Great Britain the contemplated concession." 
 Bayard finally yielded ; while Adams held out in 
 favor of the concession. But upon the point that 
 England should restore or return all fugitive 
 slaves, captured or escaped, during the war, 
 Adams was inexorable. Subsequently, when ap- 
 pointed minister to England, he discovered a dis- 
 position on the part of the English to evade this 
 provision of the treaty. The discovery aroused 
 all the bulldog pertinacity of the Adams character, 
 and he insisted, with vehement energy and war- 
 like protest, that these fugitive slaves should be 
 returned, as private property, to their masters. 
 When inducted into the presidential chair, in 
 none of his state-papers (prepared as they were 
 with that elaborate care, and rare scholarship, 
 which distinguished him) did he utter a word 
 against slavery, although his administration ex- 
 tended into the very heart of the Wilberforce 
 agitation upon that subject. He resisted, with 
 that honest vehemence which characterized him, 
 the concession of the right of search, on the 
 coast of Africa, to repress the slave trade. He 
 stood out to the bitter end, in Monroe's Cabinet,
 
 A STUDY OF HENRY CLAY. 8/ 
 
 against the cession to Spain of the territory west 
 of the Sabine, now constituting the constellation 
 of Texas. 
 
 It is very true that much of the history here 
 referred to is not elaborated, or may not be even 
 mentioned, in a book which has proved an inex- 
 haustible fountain of authority for our surface- 
 skimming biographers, and to which, in a manner 
 calculated to deceive, they refer, as " the Diary 
 of John Quincy Adams." In point of fact, no 
 such work has ever been published. The book 
 thus disingenuously referred to, is a mutilation, 
 published under conditions which would have 
 made its energetic and laborious, but absolutely 
 fearless, author blush for his descendants. The 
 book as published is, " Memoirs of John Quincy 
 Adams, comprising PORTIONS of his Diary, edited 
 by [his son] Charles Francis Adams." 
 
 Webster defines a portion to be " a part of any- 
 thing, separated from the rest." 
 
 The rule of evidence in law is inflexible, that a 
 portion of a record, the whole being demanded 
 and not produced, must be rejected. 
 
 Its post-mortem mutilation and suppression do 
 undoubtedly render th;s famous " Diary" of de- 
 preciated value, as judged from that impartial 
 and judicial eminence whence History should 
 draw her conclusions. 
 
 When a controversy arose between Adams and 
 Monroe, and Adams's Diary was quoted to Jack-
 
 88 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 son, he flew into a rage, and asked, " Did Monroe 
 keep a Diary?" But what would Jackson have said, 
 had he been informed that this same "Diary," 
 in which John Quincy Adams, with scrupulous 
 and infinitesimal detail, had photographed of 
 passing events his own views (often erroneous, 
 always narrow and contracted), was to be expur- 
 gated, revised, and separated from the context, 
 and in this emasculated form was to be quoted 
 and relied on as the most authentic source of 
 American history! was to be paraded as the 
 chief and almost inspired oracle whereby the 
 verdicts of history hitherto rendered and recorded 
 were to be set aside and annulled ! 
 
 Up to the time of his political metempsychosis, 
 Adams was pronounced against emancipation in 
 the District of Columbia. We have seen with 
 what alacrity he entered into the scheme to buy 
 Texas; and yet when, a few years later, she 
 offered herself without money and without price, 
 he went into paroxysms of philanthropic hysteria 
 at the thought of accepting her. He had pushed 
 the surrender of fugitive slaves, in conformity to 
 the treaty of Ghent, to the verge of war with 
 England; subsequently he staked the Union it- 
 self upon a refusal to surrender them in obedi- 
 ence to the constitution. He stood almost soli- 
 tary and alone among American statesmen in 
 resisting the concession of the Right of Search 
 to England, and other powers, in the suppression
 
 A STUDY OF HENRY CLAY. 89 
 
 of the African slave trade. It was under his 
 diplomatic auspices, that Florida, with all of her 
 inestimable benefits to the Union, yet every inch 
 slave territory, was acquired from Spain, in 
 1820-21. 
 
 Such was the strangely inconsistent record and 
 career of the indomitable, learned, and lucid 
 Adams, with whom Clay allied himself, in a 
 dream of national aggrandizement and glory, 
 from 1825 to 1829. 
 
 It happened, however, that the magnificent 
 conception of a parental government which 
 should cover the Union with a network of rail- 
 roads and canals, constructed at national cost, 
 binding the West to the East with indissoluble 
 bonds of material improvement, which should 
 insure to every business man a fortune from the 
 prosecution of manufactures; and should, by a 
 national bank, regulate exchanges and supply 
 currencies, was confronted by a man greater in 
 some respects than either Adams or Clay An- 
 drew Jackson. 
 
 In' a contemporaneous letter, John Tyler 
 sharply drew the lines of contrast between 
 Adams and Jackson. 'Tyler wrote: "The presi- 
 dent [Adams], you may rest assured, is as con- 
 firmed a Federalist now, as at any preceding day 
 of his life. . . . To his opponent, General Jack- 
 son, I have entertained the strongest objections; 
 there are even now many, many others whom I
 
 90 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 would prefer, but every day that passes inspires 
 me with the strong hope that his administration 
 will be characterized by simplicity I mean Re- 
 publican simplicity. . . . I hear our principles 
 again commended, and the Jeffersonian policy 
 extolled." 
 
 Jackson successfully resisted the tide of splen- 
 did and parental imperialism which had swept 
 over the country, and by his strong will, un- 
 bounded popularity, and the smiles of fortune 
 that never failed him, succeeded in inaugurat- 
 ing a genuine renaissance of Jeffersonian de- 
 mocracy. 
 
 Clay's hostility to Jackson carried him into 
 what, at this day, seems to have been a ground- 
 less apprehension of danger to our institutions 
 from the elevation to the presidency of a military 
 chieftain. 
 
 If Jackson had been a soldier by profession, 
 who had never filled civil stations, the objection 
 against him by Clay would have had more force. 
 But, in fact, his military life was only an episode 
 in his career, resulting from accidental environ- 
 ment of national danger. He was by profession 
 a lawyer. Before his military career commenced, 
 he had been attorney-general of the Territory of 
 Tennessee, a member of the convention which 
 framed her constitution as a State, a judge of 
 her Supreme Court, a member of the House of 
 Representatives (1796), and a Senator of the
 
 A STUDY OF HENRY CLAY. 91 
 
 United States. Afterwards, and before he be- 
 came President, he was appointed Governor of 
 Florida, and still later he declined the mission to 
 Mexico, tendered him by President Monroe. 
 
 His career, therefore, had been by no means 
 an exclusively military one, as were those of 
 Taylor and Grant, before attaining the presi- 
 dency. Neither did he, as did Grant, aspire to a 
 third term. 
 
 Clay's denunciations, therefore, and his strik- 
 ingly eloquent warnings seem to have flowed 
 from a spirit of political rivalry rather than from 
 any real danger which Jackson's elevation por- 
 tended to our institutions. " Remember, " cried 
 he, " that Greece had her Alexander, Rome her 
 Caesar, England her Cromwell, France her Bona- 
 parte, and that if we would escape the rock on 
 which they split, we must avoid their errors." 
 Again : " He has displayed great skill and bravery 
 as a military commander, and his own renown 
 will endure as long as the means exist of pre- 
 serving the recollection of human transactions. 
 But to be qualified to discharge the duties of 
 President of the United States, the incumbent 
 must have more than mere military attainments 
 he must be a statesman.'" 
 
 But Jackson proved to be much more of a 
 statesman than Clay was willing to concede. 
 At the national election in 1828, he defeated 
 Adams by an overwhelming majority of the
 
 92 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 popular vote, and of the electors Adams had 
 but 83 to 178 for Jackson. 
 
 To their magnificent schemes of internal im- 
 provement, Jackson, who declared himself "an 
 ardent supporter of the principles of Jefferson 
 and Madison," opposed the Maysville Road veto; 
 to their " American system" of protection for 
 the sake of protection, he opposed a tariff for 
 revenue only; to the Bank of the United States, 
 he opposed the fiat of no farther charter exten- 
 sion and the removal of the public deposits; to 
 the scheme of distribution of the surplus revenue 
 among the States, he replied that all surplus 
 money, not required by the demands of a frugal 
 administration of the government, should be left 
 in the pockets of the people who earned it. 
 
 Up to this point, I have studied Clay in the 
 light of his own utterances, as an expounder of 
 the Federal constitution. 
 
 I come now to consider him as leader, as ora- 
 tor, and as patriot. 
 
 As leader, he was superb and unrivalled. 
 The only quality he lacked, so far as his own 
 advancement was concerned, was luck or good 
 fortune. 
 
 "Undoubtedly," says Cicero, "in the career of 
 some supreme men, to their magnificence, glory, 
 and capacity for the conduct of great affairs, luck 
 also has been divinely superadded." 
 
 If the fact of survival over and against compet-
 
 A STUDY OF HENRY CLAY. 93 
 
 itors be taken as the test of fitness, then of course, 
 the fittest survive; but if, as we must admit, 
 those who, tried by all other standards, approved 
 by human reason, are the most worthy to sur- 
 vive, do frequently succumb to unfathomable 
 influences of overpowering destiny then, we 
 are bound to conclude that the supposed "sur- 
 vival of the fittest" as applied to men, is only a 
 half-truth, which needs to be supplemented by 
 some more profound induction from human ex- 
 perience, or a loftier view of an overruling 
 Providence. 
 
 / In his aspirations to the Presidency of the 
 \United States, Clay was unlucky. When the 
 ^chances were against his party, he was accorded 
 the nomination by acclamation ; when victory 
 /was in certain reach, some inferior rival was put 
 forward to represent the party which Clay had 
 \ireated. I cannot conceal from myself the con- 
 viction that certainly from our human standpoint, 
 Clay did deserve to preside over a Union which 
 he tJiricc saved. Neither was there at any time 
 in our history a man more competent (and I may 
 add more willing) to assert his own transcend- 
 ent claims. 
 
 There was not a quality of the great leader 
 3 which he did not possess. Magnetic in the 
 highest degree ; imperious as Caesar, eloquent as 
 Pericles; in resolution indomitable, in endur- 
 ance, mental and physical, as if a man of iron.
 
 94 Hol'R GLASS SERIES. 
 
 Never was there a popular leader so beloved and 
 worshipped by his adherents. His travels to and 
 from the Capital were ovations ; and when Con- 
 gress was in session, his daily receptions at his 
 quarters in the National Hotel were symposiums 
 worthy of a prince. 
 
 He was a lover of crowds, an inexhaustible, 
 overflowing man, who was never happy without 
 an audience. In his private room, in public 
 parlors, on the deck of the steamboat, at dinner, 
 and after dinner everywhere the spontaneous 
 and irrepressible genius of the man seemed to 
 overflow in exhaustless volumes of speech, full of 
 magnetism, and wonderfully adapted to his 
 audience. In the parlors of the National Hotel 
 at Washington, where he boarded, he held daily 
 receptions, and levees, where, as Wentworth tells 
 us, his admirers would congregate to listen to 
 his eloquent conversation. At the same time 
 the existing memorials of his untiring energy and 
 industry, as preserved in his correspondence and 
 speeches, prove that his private haranguing, his 
 dissipation and card playing, were only the epi- 
 sodes in a life full of intense devotion to solid 
 work. If a single instance of success worthy of 
 ambition has crowned any public man, without 
 such work, I fail to recall him. 
 
 A certain modern orator is credited with hav- 
 ing said that he aspired to the Presidency, be- 
 cause to be President was to be immortal. This
 
 A STUDY OF HENRY CLAY. 95 
 
 orator should have remembered that immortality 
 is the flower of genius, not of place. For exam- 
 ple, very few, perhaps none, can name the archons 
 (presidents) of Athens during the three hundred 
 and fifty years that she remained a free republic. 
 On the other hand, should I ask who were the 
 great orators that flourished during that period, 
 every schoolboy would recall the names of De- 
 mosthenes, Pericles, Themistocles, Alcibiades, 
 Isocrates, ^Eschines, Phalerius, and the rest. 
 Again : during the five hundred years that Rome 
 flourished as a republic, who can recall her 
 consuls (presidents) ? But when I ask the 
 names of the orators whose mellifluent tongues 
 delighted and controlled the imperial city during 
 the summer of her freedom, no one shall find 
 difficulty in responding to the names of Cicero, 
 Hortensius, the Scipios, the Gracchi, Mark An- 
 tony, Julius Caesar, Cato, Marcellus, Piso, and the 
 rest. Henry Clay failed, it is true, in his aspira- 
 tions to be President of the United States ; but 
 ?God made him president among the great orators 
 /of his time the prince of persuaders, and the 
 choicest flower of the State. 
 
 *" I come finally to discuss Clay as patriot and 
 pacificator. 
 
 " If any one desires to know" he wrote, " the 
 leading and paramount object of my public life, 
 the preservation of this Union will furnish him 
 the key."
 
 g6 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 Not only was this intense devotion to the 
 Union the key to his career, but his views as to 
 the means by which alone it could be preserved 
 were crystallized into a political philosophy true 
 not only as to our own Union, but true as to the 
 preservation of republican institutions univer- 
 sally, at all times and in all places. Mr. Schurz 
 sums up this philosophy in its immediate appli- 
 cation to our own country in a few words: 
 " That, as the binding together of the States in 
 the Union and the formation of a constitutional 
 government, had been accomplished by the com- 
 promising of diverse interests, this Union and 
 this constitutional government had to be main- 
 tained in the same way; and that every good 
 citizen should consider it his duty, whenever 
 circumstances required it, to sacrifice something 
 not only of his material advantages, but even of 
 his sentiments and convictions, for the peace 
 and welfare of the common Republic." 
 
 If this central idea were erroneous, then was 
 Clay's life a failure, and its lessons and struggles 
 were in vain. 
 
 The maxim of absolute or imperial govern- 
 ment is " no compromises" ; that of republics is 
 " mutual concessions." 
 
 In a recent interview, Prince Bismarck is cred- 
 ited with the following : 
 
 " The first requisite in a government is energy 
 not to be a time-server, not to sacrifice the future
 
 A STUDY OF HENRY CLAY. 97 
 
 to the convenience of the present. A govern- 
 ment should be steadfast in its firmness ; indeed, 
 the fierceness of a ruling power is a guarantee of 
 peace both abroad and at home. The govern- 
 ment, always ready to yield to the majority, and 
 which keeps up its authority by concessions to 
 each party, which paves the way for new conces- 
 sions, is in a sore strait." 
 
 Let us contrast this with the language of the 
 founders of our own Republic, when they 
 launched the ship of state under its constitu- 
 tional chart : " The constitution which we now 
 present," said they, "is the result of a spirit of 
 amity, and of that mutual deference and conces- 
 sion which the peculiarity of our political situa- 
 tion rendered indispensable." 
 
 The very same diversity of interests and senti- 
 ments which existed when this wise sentence was 
 penned, Clay found confronting him in 1820, 
 1832, and 1850. He invoked for their reconcili- 
 ation the spirit and genius of the constitution 
 " mutual deference and concession" in a word, 
 "compromise." 
 
 On the other hand, Calhoun and his followers 
 would yield nothing, and in his last great speech 
 in the Senate (June 4, 1850), he plainly, pro- 
 phetically, almost despairingly, gave in his ad- 
 herence to the doctrine of irreconcilability be- 
 tween the very elements, moral and commercial, 
 in regard to which the framers of the constitution 
 7
 
 98 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 had said, " We have reconciled them." The new 
 school of Yancey and Seward had triumphed 
 even then; and Webse*r in the North, and Clay 
 in the South, although wresting from the very 
 jaws of fate another great victory for constitu- 
 tional government in the Compromise Measures 
 of 1850, were, in effect, behind the age were 
 crying, " Peace ! peace ! when there was no 
 peace!" 
 
 The Yancey-Seward school of irreconcilability 
 had already sapped the foundations of the Union. 
 
 If the authority of Mr. Lincoln counts for any- 
 thing (and I am quite aware that the modern 
 school of surf ace -skimming biographers do now 
 utterly renounce and repudiate the old-fashioned 
 conservatism of the martyr President), it may 
 not be unprofitable to recall his endorsement of 
 Clay's policy of compromise and conciliation. 
 On the 1 6th of July, 1852, he delivered a public 
 address at Springfield, Illinois, upon the life and 
 character of Henry Clay. 
 
 It is suggested by Mr. Lincoln in this eulogy 
 that we should study the political philosophy of 
 Clay, not in the light of his own age and genera- 
 tion only, but in the light of the future progress 
 of the national confederacy, and with the certain 
 conviction that history will not fail to repeat 
 itself. The doctrine of compromise and concili- 
 ation, as true foundation of our political system, 
 will have abundant opportunity to be tested in
 
 A STUDY OF HENRY CLAY. 99 
 
 the future, and every school of civics should un- 
 derstand this, and either teach it, or repudiate it. 
 It will walk by the side of the American states- 
 man of succeeding generations; it will boldly 
 confiont the dogma of Irreconcilability and the 
 advocates of Force, with that sentence of Clay, 
 from which General Grant borrowed his cele- 
 brated utterance : " Let us have peace, and be- 
 come once more united as a band of brothers!" 
 
 When clouds are lowering around the ship of 
 state, and angry billows of strife threaten to 
 engulf her, amid the contending elements the 
 spirit of Henry Clay will walk, and above the 
 storm will ring out his earnest exhortation to his 
 countrymen : " Rely on that great principle of 
 compromise and concession, which lies at the 
 bottom of our institutions, which gave birth to 
 the constitution itself, and which should con- 
 tinue to regulate us in our onward march to glory 
 and renown!" 
 
 In our study of Clay as orator and pacificator, 
 we should take nothing at second-hand. There 
 was in Greece an oracle of Apollo, in appealing 
 to which, those who desired to consult it had to 
 look into a well, wherein they beheld, as in a 
 mirror, the answer to their questions. Let the 
 student of history, in like manner, go to the clear 
 streams of his own oratory in order to behold the 
 true image of Henry Clay. Follow him through 
 the three eventful periods of our history when
 
 100 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 his vigilance, his eloquence, and his burning 
 patriotism exhorted to peace the maddened fury 
 of faction and party violence. Consider 1820, 
 1833, and 1850. 
 
 "If my plan of peace," cried he, "and accom- 
 modation and harmony is not right, present us 
 your plan!" 
 
 ( In the second volume of Colton's life will be 
 yfound Clay's own account of the part he took in 
 ; the history of the admission of Missouri. He 
 i tells us how, when every other experiment had 
 failed, and the country stood just over the preci- 
 pice of dissolution and civil war, he hit upon a 
 new expedient an invention, so to speak, in par- 
 liamentary procedure. He proposed and suc- 
 ceeded in securing a joint committee composed 
 from both Houses, and this committee reported 
 his scheme of settlement, which was to admit 
 Missouri with the obnoxious clause in her consti- 
 tution prohibiting the admission of free people 
 of color within her limits ; but with a proviso that 
 if there were any provision in her constitution 
 repugnant to the constitution of the United 
 States, she should forbear to enforce that provi- 
 sion, and by some solemn and authentic act should 
 so declare, whereupon the President should make 
 proclamation, and thereupon and without any 
 further legislation by Congress, Missouri was 
 to be admitted into the Union. The adroit and 
 consummate statesmanship of this device or in-
 
 A STUDY OF HENRY CLAY. IOI 
 
 vention of Clay consisted in the fact that the 
 joint committee was so constituted, with refer- 
 ence to the critical issue which portended danger 
 to the Union, that once its members became 
 pledged to a common course of action, their con- 
 current votes rendered the passage of the meas- 
 ure agreed upon in committee morally certain. 
 This expedient, as a means of solution of dis- 
 tracting questions, I regard as much superior to 
 the Electoral Commission resorted to in 1876, 
 and for several reasons : First, because it is not 
 of doubtful constitutional authority, and, sec- 
 ondly, it is less liable to result in a purely parti- 
 san decision. Clay had recourse to the same 
 expedient in 1850, and with the same success. 
 
 Let the student take up for himself his speeches 
 on the Compromise Bill, introduced by him in 
 .the Senate of the United States in February, 
 1832. "The Bill of Abominations" as the tariff 
 adopted in 1828 (May 19) by the Adams admin- 
 istration was called, had brought the country to 
 the verge of civil war. General Jackson had 
 issued his celebrated Proclamation, and sent 
 General Winfield Scott to Charleston to execute 
 the law. " Every portent of a desperate and 
 bloody struggle was visible." The highest com- 
 pliment ever paid to Clay was at this crisis, 
 wrung from his bitter and lifelong opponent, 
 John Randolph. Randolph had loved Jackson, 
 and hated Clay. His life was now fast ebbing
 
 102 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 away. He denounced the principles of the 
 Proclamation, its authors and abettors as " damned 
 to everlasting fame,'" Too feeble to stand, he ad- 
 dressed his old constituents from his seat, and 
 sent forth a living flame of eloquence from an 
 expiring taper of life. "Jackson," said he, "is 
 obstinate, headstrong, and fond of a fight. I fear 
 matters must come to an open rupture. If so, 
 this Union is gone." Then pausing, raising his 
 finger, and seeming to breathe more freely, he 
 added: "There is one man, and one man only, 
 who can save this Union that man is Henry 
 Clay." 
 
 We may not concur in Clay's solutions of the 
 great questions then agitating the country the 
 tariff, public lands, and internal improvement. 
 We may find that he trampled under foot every 
 sound principle of political economy, and ad- 
 vanced heresies in regard to a surplus revenue 
 which even our own unscrupulous and absurdly 
 extravagant age would not tolerate. But far 
 above questions of temporary governmental pol- 
 icy, we shall find his doctrine of compromise and 
 concession, as the basis of constitutional liberty, 
 commending itself to our conscience, to our 
 reason, and to our patriotism. 
 
 "The bill," said he, "is founded in a spirit of 
 compromise. Now, in all compromises there 
 must be mutual concessions." . . . "The rest of 
 the Union might put down the South, and reduce
 
 A STUDY OF HENRY CLAY. 103 
 
 it to submission ; but to say nothing of the un- 
 certainty and hazards of all war, is that a desira- 
 ble state of things? Ought it not to be avoided, 
 if it can be honorably prevented?" 
 
 "The people of the United States," he ex- 
 claims, " are brothers, made to love and respect 
 each other. Momentary causes may seem to 
 alienate them, but, like family differences, they 
 will terminate in a closer and more affectionate 
 union than ever." 
 
 God grant that Henry Clay may prove to be a 
 true prophet! 
 
 / Finally, in this connection, we should take up 
 ( and analyze his speeches on the Compromise of 
 si 850, delivered in the Senate in the winter and 
 spring of that year (commencing in January, 
 / ending in May). I cannot go over them. They 
 are electric with eloquence, burning with patri- 
 otism. They accomplished their object, and, for 
 the time, saved the Union. Although opposed 
 to Clay's Compromise resolutions in 1833, Daniel 
 Webster was now able to rise to the height of the 
 grand argument. He followed very closely in 
 the wake of Clay, and on the masonry of the 
 latter's resolutions and arguments, built his Doric 
 columns and Corinthian capitals of imperishable 
 eloquence. 
 
 Opposing them were Calhoun of their own era, 
 and younger men of the later era of civil war. 
 Clay deigned to notice but two of the latter
 
 IO4 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 Jefferson Davis and William H. Seward. These 
 men were leading the irreconcilables upon either 
 side, Davis in a strain of invective which has 
 been compared to Demosthenes; while Seward 
 spoke to the people words of revolution, but de- 
 livered them as if from some far-off pinnacle of 
 historic reverie, inapproachable by meaner minds. 
 He himself (Seward) lived to see the day when 
 a younger generation of extremists outstripped 
 his own progress by strides longer than those 
 with which he and Chase had outstripped Clay 
 and Webster; and now, in turn, his own younger 
 rivals, such as Elaine and Trumbull of the Re- 
 construction era, are lagging in the rear of new 
 and more daring leaders, who urge the pace far 
 beyond their immediate predecessors. So it is, 
 and will ever be, when we depart from the spirit 
 of Compromise. The goal of one generation of 
 extremists will be the red flag dropped at the 
 starting-point of their successors, until consolida- 
 tion and strong government may leave us a re- 
 public only in name. 
 
 In our discussion of Clay as patriot and states- 
 man, we cannot omit to consider the counts in 
 the indictment framed by the surface-skimming 
 biographers, who have recently taken a contract 
 (apparently) to startle history from her equipoise 
 and reverse her verdicts of a half-century. 
 
 It is charged against him as a crime that he 
 did not unequivocally and persistently oppose
 
 A STUDY OF HENRY CLAY. 105 
 
 the re-annexation of Texas to the American 
 Union. 
 
 I use the word "re-annexation" deliberately, 
 and I take up the gage as to its correctness. If, 
 as is admitted, a large part of the State of Texas, 
 as she afterwards appeared on the map of Mex- 
 ico, had been part of Louisiana, as ceded to the 
 United States by France, then her re-incorpora- 
 tion into the Union was, to all intents and pur- 
 poses, a rc-anncxation. 
 
 I maintain that the most serious blot upon 
 Clay's escutcheon is that he hesitated, and con- 
 sented to occupy a position somewhat equivocal 
 upon this great question, and that he did this 
 out of an ill-judged spirit of complaisance to the 
 prevalent epidemic of fanatical hostility to the 
 South, thinly disguised under the .cloak of phi- 
 lanthropy. 
 
 Let us look at this question, if possible, in its 
 true light. Who was Henry Clay, and what his 
 record? Is not this the man whose clarion voice 
 rang throughout the Union in defence of Jeffer- 
 son for the acquisition of Louisiana, at a time 
 when the Federal party, almost to a man, con- 
 demned that policy? Is not this the orator who 
 stubbornly and successfully maintained that the 
 boundary of West Florida extended to the Per- 
 dito, and that no square inch of that (then slave) 
 territory should be relinquished? Is not this the 
 same man who contended with a zeal excelled
 
 106 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 by none, and only equalled by that of John 
 Quincy Adams, against the relinquishment to 
 Spain of Texas, then claimed as a part of the 
 Louisiana purchase? Were not Henry Clay and 
 John Quincy Adams the two statesmen who in 
 pursuance of their original policy, only a few 
 years before, proposed to buy from Mexico for a 
 large sum this very domain of Texas, imperial 
 in extent, exhaustless in resources and natural 
 advantages, boundless in the promise of future 
 development ? 
 
 And yet the indictment of our surface-skim- 
 mers charges that this statesman, this extreme 
 advocate of federal expansion, should have re- 
 fused the overtures of Texas, and abandoned her 
 to foreign and hostile influences, upon the ground 
 poor, miserable, hypocritical pretext that it 
 was that her institutions were the same as were 
 those of New York when the Union was formed ! 
 
 In fact, the straightest path to emancipation 
 in Texas was through re-annexation, as the event 
 has proved. This Clay must have foreseen, and 
 implicitly believed. It seems incredible that the 
 thin disguise of philanthropy with which hostility 
 to Southern and Western expansion concealed 
 its true character, could have deceived Clay. 
 He had seen and known that President Monroe 
 had yielded this very territory to Spain (at a time 
 when its character as slave territory was not 
 urged as an objection) the more readily, be-
 
 A STUDY OF HENRY CLAY. IO/ 
 
 cau.se our Northern brethren had become uneasy 
 and jealous about the expansion of Southwestern 
 territory. 
 
 This spirit of subserviency to unworthy sec- 
 tionalism, Clay, at that day, as did Adams also, 
 bitterly condemned. Why should he yield to 
 it now (1845), at a time when Texas, having 
 achieved her independence, offered herself as a 
 voluntary gift to the American people? 
 
 How, in the name of decent consistency, could 
 the Clay who had proposed the Panama mission, 
 leading up, as has been well said, to " an Ameri- 
 can system of nations, breathing the air of re- 
 publicanism, asserting a young and haughty 
 independence of monarchical Europe," now con- 
 sent to see Texas brought under the protectorate 
 of England and France, individual or united, 
 which was the alternative proposed in case we 
 rejected her application for re-incorporation into 
 the American Union? 
 
 What possible argument could be urged against 
 the acquisition of Texas that would not have ap- 
 plied with equal force and reason against the 
 acquisition of Louisiana and Florida? Not one! 
 not a shadow of ground for one. 
 
 Had Clay been true to his own record, and 
 said, as James K. Polk fearlessly and unequivo- 
 cally proclaimed, "I have no hesitation in 
 declaring that I am in favor of the immediate re- 
 annexation of Texas to the territory and govern-
 
 108 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 ment of the United States"! it is more than 
 probable he would have been elected President 
 instead of Polk. The pretext that Mexico had 
 not yet acknowledged the independence of Texas 
 was both disingenuous and cowardly, or rather, 
 it would have been cowardly had it been sincere. 
 Mexico had not then, nor has she yet, acknowledged 
 Texan independence. Nevertheless, the latter 
 had declared her own independence, and achieved 
 it, and had been in its full and undisturbed en- 
 joyment since the battle of San Jacinto, in 
 March, 1836. Mexico had no more title to or 
 control over her, than had Spain over Mexico 
 herself. 
 
 It is almost incredible, therefore, that the 
 great "friend of the South American republics," 
 who defied the power of Spain in 1820, should 
 now be willing to sacrifice the destiny of Texas 
 to a silly apprehension of exciting the hostility 
 of Mexico! 
 
 To show the inconsistency of Clay's position 
 in hesitating to accept Texas, we have only to 
 recur to his own speech in 1810, wherein he ad- 
 vocated the immediate military occupation of the 
 territory called West Florida, under the Louis- 
 iana purchase, or treaty, of 1803. 
 
 Said he : " Allow me, sir, to express my admir- 
 ation at the more than Aristidean justice, which 
 in a question of terrritorial title, between the 
 United States and a foreign nation, induces cer-
 
 A STUDY OF HENRY CLAY. 109 
 
 tain gentlemen to espouse the pretensions of the 
 foreign nation!" How applicable this language 
 to the little band of Federal- Whigs, who were, 
 in 1845, sustaining the preposterous pretensions 
 of Mexico against our own country ! 
 
 I do not hesitate, therefore, to repeat what I 
 have before said : that the most serious blot upon 
 the escutcheon of Henry Clay was his failure to 
 declare, in unequivocal language, openly and 
 patriotically, for the re-annexation of Texas. 
 
 If, as our surface-skimming and Teutonic bio- 
 graphers would have us believe, the war of 1812 
 was a "blunder"; the Seminole war a "dis- 
 grace" ; the annexation of Texas a " mistake" ; 
 and the war with Mexico and the acquisition of 
 California a " crime" then let us and them go one 
 step further and denounce the Rebellion of 17/6, 
 and admit that America has nci'cr imaged but one jus- 
 tifiable war and that was against her own citizens! 
 
 The second charge in the indictment against 
 Clay is that, in common with Webster and Lin- 
 coln, he desired to see every provision of the 
 federal constitution carried out and maintained 
 in good faith. The charge against him is that 
 from the national and federal obligation to obey 
 the whole constitution, he was unwilling to 
 grant an indulgence to nullify and disobey the 
 third clause of the second section^of the fourth 
 article, in favor of certain individuals and States, 
 who claimed such a dispensation in behalf, as
 
 HO HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 they alleged, of humanity and conscience. This 
 claim neither Clay, Webster, Lincoln, nor Tilden 
 would allow. On the contrary they, each and 
 all, resisted such a demand upon the ground that 
 the deliberate and permanent continuous viola- 
 tion of a compact in one essential stipulation, 
 absolves the opposite party, in all other respects, 
 from its obligation. 
 
 But the singular and historically anomalous 
 position of Massachusetts, and the other nullify- 
 ing States, at this epoch (1850) was that while 
 their feet rested upon a violated compact, which 
 they deliberately trampled in the dust, they, at 
 the same time, brandished aloft the sword of 
 coercion and extermination against all who, in 
 any other particular, claimed the right to be ab- 
 solved from the bonds of the constitution! In 
 this respect, they went beyond the Nullifiers of 
 1812 and 1833. 
 
 It was against the paralogic of this untenable 
 position, that Samuel J. Tilden, one of the most 
 comprehensive of our statesmen, wrote his cele- 
 brated letter to William Kent (1860). It was 
 against the inconsistency, not to say perfidy of 
 this pretension, that Daniel Webster, " the great 
 Expounder of the Constitution," thundered his 
 protest from the very centre of Faneuil Hall. 
 It was against the manifest unfairness of this 
 attitude, that Abraham Lincoln raised his voice. 
 
 I do not concede what one of our surface-skim-
 
 A STUDY OF HENRY CLAY. I I I 
 
 ming biographers observes (in effect), tha* a 
 great man must have an ancestor. Lincoln had 
 no ancestor. He was autochthonous (self- 
 sprung), and among the Greeks the autochtho- 
 nous man was dearer to the gods. God is the 
 ancestor of a truly great man. There was about 
 Mr. Lincoln a certain rugged sincerity or sense 
 of fairness which caused him to be called " HON- 
 EST ABE." Therefore, in common with Clay, 
 Webster, and Tilden, he most emphatically re- 
 pudiated, throughout his whole career, without a 
 single day's exception, the pretension that a 
 given section or paragraph of the constitution, 
 however repugnant to the finest sense of human- 
 ity, could be permanently and deliberately repu- 
 diated, without a dissolution of the whole com- 
 pact. This also was Clay's position, Said he: 
 " Now the officers of the General Government are 
 bound to take an oath to support the constitution 
 of the United States. All state officers are re- 
 quired by the constitution to take an oath to sup- 
 port it, and all men who love their country, and 
 are obedient to the laws, are bound to assist in 
 the execution of those laws, whether funda- 
 mental or derivative." 
 
 He thence argued, and with logic which no 
 sane man will attempt to resist, that the article 
 in question that every article of the constitution 
 should be faithfully observed. If Clay were 
 wrong, then let us abandon written constitutions,
 
 112 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 and return to the code of temporary inclination 
 and unrestrained power. But if he was right, 
 let us vindicate history, and abandon the unten- 
 able charge against him which we are now consid- 
 ering. Let us admit that the constitution should 
 at that era have been faithfully adhered to, in 
 every section of every article; and that the same 
 rule should be enforced to-day, no matter who 
 may suffer, or who object. The inviolability of 
 written constitutions is the corner-stone of repub- 
 lican government. 
 
 I come, finally, to consider the last count in 
 the surface-skimming indictment of Henry Clay, 
 namely, that he advocated the preservation of 
 the Union by adhering to the -genius of the 
 constitution, in its spirit of compromise, and 
 resisted the doctrine of a "higher law," and an 
 irreconcilable conflict between the different sec- 
 tions of the Union. Said he : " A divine law ! a 
 natural law! And who are they that venture 
 to tell us what is divine, and what is natural 
 law? Where are their credentials of prophecy?" 
 
 The theory of irreconcilability had for its ad- 
 vocates, as we have seen, Toombs and Yancey in 
 the South, Seward and Giddings in the North. 
 These were men of ability, in a certain sense 
 great men : in some respects they might be called 
 the same men, living in different latitudes. But 
 Clay belonged to a higher order. He repudi- 
 ated both the new Southern propaganda, with its
 
 A STUDY OF HENRY CLAY. 113 
 
 monstrous absurdities and barbarisms about 
 re-opening the slave-trade, and "the legitimate 
 expansion of slavery," and the contemporaneous 
 Northern hydrophobia of treason, which ex- 
 claimed, as did Wendell Philips in a lecture in 
 Faneuil Hall, " God d n the constitution !" 
 
 Henry Clay's loftier patriotism touched those 
 regions that Shelley sings of: 
 
 Higher still and higher, 
 
 From the earth them springest, 
 
 Like a cloud of fire ; 
 The deep blue thou wingest, 
 
 And singing, still dost soar. 
 
 It was from the empyrean of these everlast- 
 ing heights, whence the sun of patriotism never 
 fades, that Clay uttered his last great appeal for 
 the Union: 
 
 " Mr. President, I trust that feelings of attach- 
 ment to the Union, of love for its past glory, of 
 anticipation for its future benefits and happiness ; 
 a fraternal feeling that ought to be common 
 throughout all parts of the country ; the desire to 
 live together in peace and harmony, to prosper 
 as we have prospered heretofore ; to hold up to 
 the civilized world the example of one great and 
 glorious Republic, fulfilling the high destiny 
 that belongs to it, and demonstrating beyond all 
 doubt man's capacity for self-government these 
 motives and these considerations will, I confi- 
 dently hope and fervently pray, animate us all!" 
 8
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 CONTAINING REFERENCES FOR EACH PAGE OF THE CLAY 
 ARTICLE. 
 
 Colton's Memoir, 74-75. 
 
 i Colton (Speeches), 38 and 186. 
 
 1 Colton, 177; 2 Id. 661, 663. 
 
 2 Colton, 58, 66 1. 
 2 Colton, 147, 171. 
 
 For the monarchical views of John Adams see Library 
 Am. Literature, 3d vol., p. 125, and Maclay's Diary, 
 
 Shepard's Van Buren, 109. 
 
 2 Colton, 71. 
 
 2 Colton, 94; Id. 77, 168, and Henry Clay, by Carl 
 Schurz, vol. i, p. 175. 
 
 Am. State Papers, vol. 2, 240-265. 
 
 Life and Times of the Tylers, vol. i, 379. 
 
 De imperio Pompeii oratio : " Fuit enim profecto quibus- 
 dam si/i/nuis viris quadam ad ai)iplitndiiie>n et ad 
 gloriam et ad res magnas bene gerendas divinitus ad- 
 juncta FORTUNA." 
 
 2 Colton, 158, 1 68. 
 
 i Colton, 4. 
 
 i Bigelow's Tilden, 284-330. 
 
 Lincoln's Inaugural Address, Lamon's Life of 
 Lincoln, 530.
 
 HOW WE GOT TO WASHINGTON. 
 
 THE life of old countries, it is somewhere 
 said, is memory; that of new, hope. The 
 former commemorate the great events in their 
 history by monuments, and consecrate hallowed 
 spots with altars and cathedrals. The latter 
 press forward so fast to attain objects before 
 them, they cannot spare time for time is money, 
 to think much about things behind them. 
 There are gaps in American history that never 
 may be filled. Letters, documents and papers, 
 the treasured secrets of some of the greatest of 
 our statesmen, have been devoured in the attic 
 by mice or sent to the mill with paper rags. 
 Sparks does not give the origin of the estrange- 
 ment between Washington and Jefferson. Ban- 
 croft, in spite of all his research, was utterly 
 wrong in his attack on President Reed. The 
 trouble was not with Sparks or Bancroft, but 
 with the channels of information. The facts 
 had not come out, the sources of history had 
 been dried up. 
 
 But we are getting on. The booksellers tell 
 us Peter Force's Archives are in demand, and 
 Hazard's State Papers are now sought after by
 
 Il6 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 others besides antiquarians and historical socie- 
 ties. We do not propose to go back quite so far, 
 but only as far as the first Congress under the 
 Federal Constitution. About that time the first 
 great compromise took place between the North 
 and South. Two questions were at issue upon 
 which the fate of the Union hinged the as- 
 sumption by the General Government of the 
 debts of the States, and the selection of a site 
 for the Federal capital. A brief account of those 
 important events may not prove uninteresting. 
 George Alfred Townsend says that, in selecting 
 a location for the capital, the fathers " looked for 
 no omens or sacred birds to fix their choice." 
 True enough, for they were not pagans. But if 
 they had followed that ancient superstition, 
 neither omens nor sacred birds would have di- 
 rected them to a better destination. President 
 Washington, who descried and first pointed out 
 the advantages of the site on the Potomac, 
 himself laid the corner-stone of the Capitol in 
 1793, and the new city received his name. He 
 appointed commissioners to proceed at once 
 with the work of laying out the city, and al- 
 though many drawbacks were encountered in the 
 preparation of plans and the construction of the 
 public buildings, the year 1800 saw the high 
 officers of state, legislative, executive, and judi- 
 cial, repairing in a body to the infant seat of 
 government. Over ninety years have since gone
 
 HOW WE GOT TO WASHINGTON. 117 
 
 by, and in that time Washington city has become 
 one of the great capitals of Christendom. In the 
 year 1800 three small vessels from Philadelphia 
 sailed up the Potomac bearing all the property, 
 effects, and archives of the Federal Government 
 to the new residence with the Indian name in the 
 woods on that river. What a change has been 
 wrought since the first lady occupant of the 
 White House, the clever Mrs. John Adams, com- 
 municated in a letter to her daughter her first 
 impressions of Washington city, and hung up 
 her clothes to dry in the great unfinished audi- 
 ence-room of the Executive Mansion. 
 
 "I arrived here on Sunday last," says Mrs. 
 Adams, whose letter is dated November 21, 
 1 800, " and without meeting any accident worth 
 noticing, except losing ourselves when we left 
 Baltimore, and going eight or nine miles on the 
 Frederick road, by which means we were obliged 
 to go the other eight through woods, where we 
 wandered two hours without finding a guide or 
 the path. Fortunately, a straggling black came 
 up with us, and we engaged him as a guide to 
 extricate us out of our difficulty ; but woods are 
 all you see from Baltimore until you reach the 
 city, which is only so in name. Here and there 
 is a small cot, without a glass window, inter- 
 spersed among the forests, through which you 
 travel miles without seeing a human being. . . . 
 The ladies from Georgetown and in the city
 
 Il8 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 have, many of them, visited me. Yesterday I 
 returned fifteen visits. But such a place as 
 Georgetown appears ! Why, our Milton is beau- 
 tiful but no comparisons. . . . We have indeed 
 come into a new country. You must keep all 
 this to yourself, and when asked how I like it, 
 say that I write to you that the situation is beau- 
 tiful, which is true. The house is made habita- 
 ble, but there is not a single apartment fur- 
 nished, and all within-side, except the plastering, 
 has been done since Briesler came. We have 
 not the least fence, yard, or other convenience 
 without, and the great unfinished audience-room 
 I make a drying-room of to hang up the clothes 
 in. ... The Senate is much behindhand. No 
 
 Congress has yet been made. 'Tis said is 
 
 on his way, but travels with so many delicacies 
 in his rear that he cannot get on fast lest some of 
 them should suffer. Thomas comes in and says 
 a House is made; so to-morrow the President 
 will meet them." 
 
 Do we not discover in this sprightly letter just 
 a touch of the ironical tone the New England 
 members infused into all the debates of the first 
 and second sessions of the first Congress upon 
 the proposed residence of Government at Wash- 
 ington ? Undoubtedly so ; but it is not surprising 
 in Madam Abigail, for her liege lord was one of 
 the most strenuous opponents of the Potomac 
 river in all stages of the controversy. When
 
 HOW WE GOT TO WASHINGTON. 119 
 
 he was Vice-President John Adams showed ex- 
 treme violence on this subject, thus verifying 
 Dr. Franklin's opinion of him "always an hon- 
 est man, often a wise one; but sometimes wholly 
 out of his senses." But let us tell how Wash- 
 ington came to be selected. To do this as it 
 must be done by some future historian for no 
 one has yet done it properly would require a 
 volume. We propose only to throw a ray of 
 light here and there on the dark places, not to 
 write a volume; rather to call attention to the 
 want than attempt to supply it. 
 
 The choice, then, of the Federal city was the 
 result of a compromise, for the issue was nar- 
 rowed down to the simple alternative of going to 
 the " Indian place with the long name in the 
 woods on the Potomac," or of submitting to the 
 dissolution of the Union. 
 
 As soon as the Union was formed the question 
 came under discussion for a permanent seat of 
 government. But the pendency of the revolu- 
 tionary war rendered the matter of less impor- 
 tance then than it came to assume afterwards. 
 Articles of Confederation and perpetual union 
 were adopted by Congress, November 15, 1777, 
 and were acceded to by the States and finally 
 ratified June 9, 1778. The Confederation en- 
 dured from the third to the twelfth year of inde- 
 pendence. By resolution of Congress, February 
 21, 1787, a convention of the States was called,
 
 120 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 and September lyth of the same year the consti- 
 tution of the United States, having been adopted 
 by the convention, was submitted to the people 
 of the several States for ratification or rejection. 
 Delaware ratified first, December 7, 1787; and 
 following Delaware, all of the States ratified dur- 
 ing the years 1787-88-90 Rhode Island acced- 
 ing to the constitution last, May 29, 1790. There 
 were no less than twelve removals of the seat of 
 government between the years 1774 and 1800. 
 The following table exhibits the dates and vari- 
 ous places of meeting, beginning with the first : 
 
 Philadelphia, Sept. 5, 1774. Princeton, June 30, 1783. 
 
 Baltimore, Dec. 20, 1776. Annapolis, Nov. 26, 1783. 
 
 Philadelphia, March 4, Trenton, Nov. i, 1784. 
 
 1777. 
 
 Lancaster, Sept. 27, 1777. New York, Jan. 11, 1785. 
 
 Yorktown, Pa., Sept. 30, Philadelphia, Dec. 6, 1790. 
 
 1777. 
 
 Philadelphia, July 2, 1778. Washington, Nov. 22, 1800. 
 
 In the first Congress, under the new constitu- 
 tion, was begun the memorable struggle over the 
 selection of a permanent seat of government. 
 Then, as so often since, the North and South 
 stood in bitter hostile array, each eager to secure 
 the prize. The advantages to accrue to the dis- 
 trict to be selected were fully appreciated, and, 
 with the exception of the years of the late war, 
 never during our entire history did sectional
 
 HOW WE GOT TO WASHINGTON. 121 
 
 feeling- run higher than during the agitation and 
 before the determination of this question. 
 
 The seven great actors in the scene were Gen- 
 eral Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, 
 Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Robert 
 Morris, and Fisher Ames. At one stage of the 
 struggle the Congress was virtually broken up, 
 the New England States, led by Fisher Ames, re- 
 fusing to take any further part in its proceedings, 
 and threatening to secede from the Union. It was 
 at this juncture Hamilton and Jefferson came to- 
 gether in a patriotic spirit to save their country 
 at all hazards. At the dinner-table of Mr. Jef- 
 ferson the compromise was agreed to, whereby 
 New England secured the assumption of the 
 debts of the States by the Government of the 
 United States, and the South obtained for the 
 Potomac river the permanent seat of govern- 
 ment, after a temporary residence of ten years at 
 Philadelphia. It was thought at the time that 
 Hamilton had outwitted Jefferson in the bargain ; 
 but the verdict of history has reversed that opin- 
 ion, and all can now see that the Sage of Monti- 
 cello looked farther into the future than his 
 astute rival. 
 
 There were three sessions of the first Congress 
 held under the constitution of the United States. 
 The two first sessions constituted an epoch in 
 American history. They were held in New 
 York, in the old City Hall at the corner of Wall
 
 122 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 and Nassau streets. Here, too, on the balcony 
 of the same building, the very spot where his 
 statue now stands, Washington was inaugurated 
 President, April 30, 1789. 
 
 The two questions of vital interest to the 
 whole people here indicated had to be met at the 
 threshold of the government upon which the two 
 great rival parties of Federalists and Republicans 
 were formed ; angry feeling was stirred up, and 
 differences of opinion seemed to be irreconcil- 
 able. These, as above stated, were the assump- 
 tion plan of Alexander Hamilton, and the selec- 
 tion of a permanent seat of government. The 
 thirteen original States were almost rent asunder 
 in the very hour of their union by the conflict of 
 views upon these tw r o questions. The excitement 
 was increased by a debate which had just taken 
 place upon the bill to fund the public debt. The 
 finances were in a deplorable condition, and na- 
 tional bankruptcy was imminent. 
 
 It was then that Alexander Hamilton came 
 forward with his celebrated report, afterwards 
 immortalized in eloquence by Daniel Webster. 
 Hamilton's statesmanship was of the highest 
 order, but he was enamoured of the British con- 
 stitution, and would have imported certain mon- 
 archical features into our own. The remedies 
 he now proposed, however, to relieve the people 
 of their burdens were marked by great wisdom. 
 The funding scheme was in the main a sound one,
 
 HOW WE GOT TO WASHINGTON. 123 
 
 although some of its features were objectionable. 
 During the revolution the greatest difficulty 
 Washington encountered, and which none but he 
 could have overcome, was the want of money to 
 pay the soldiers and procure supplies for the 
 army. Paper or Continental money was resorted 
 to, but broke down. Certificates of debt were 
 next given to individual creditors, with a pledge 
 of payment as soon as the Confederation should 
 become able to meet its obligations. But so 
 great was the distress of the soldiers and the 
 people generally, they were compelled in many 
 cases to part with these debentures for a mere tithe 
 of their face value, often at less than ten cents 
 on the dollar. Rings of speculators sprang up 
 and industriously circulated the report far and 
 wide that Continental bonds would never be re- 
 deemed. These cormorants by trick and cheat 
 bought up for a nominal price immense sums of 
 the national certificates of debt. As grand as 
 was Hamilton's funding scheme it had this grave 
 defect, it made no distinction between suffering 
 creditors, the original holders of the bonds, and 
 rapacious speculators who had gotten into their 
 clutch at a few cents on the dollar immense 
 blocks of this indebtedness. But the measure 
 was engineered through successfully by the Ham- 
 ilton party, and Congress provided that all this 
 paper should be redeemed at par. 
 
 Besides -this debt of Congress, or, as it is now
 
 124 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 called, the national debt, the States themselves 
 during the war had contracted heavy liabilities 
 of their own. The excitement produced by the 
 passage of the funding measure had not yet 
 subsided, when the bill was introduced for the 
 assumption by the General Government of the 
 separate debts of the States. Upon this subject 
 one of the most acrimonious debates which ever 
 occurred in the history of the American Con- 
 gress now took place. The bill to select a per- 
 manent seat of government was at the same time 
 before Congress. 
 
 In the course of the deliberations upon these 
 questions two eminent parliamentary leaders 
 came forward, Fisher Ames and James Madison. 
 Five years later Mr. Ames delivered on the Jay 
 Treaty the most impassioned speech which had 
 ever then been heard in Congress ; but his tactics 
 as a parliamentarian, his fiery powers of attack, 
 his lightning-like strokes upon his adversary, 
 were never displayed to such advantage as now, 
 in 1790, when he stepped forward as the cham- 
 pion of assumption of the State debts, and the 
 determined foe of a Southern location for the 
 seat of government. Opposed to him on each 
 question was James Madison, pronounced by 
 Washington to be the greatest debater of the age. 
 The mental equipment of the two men was en- 
 tirely different. Ames was vehement, headlong, 
 and possessed of a Ciceronian style of declama-
 
 HOW WE GOT TO WASHINGTON. 12$ 
 
 tion. Madison was conspicuous for moderation, 
 and was always cool, wary, and imperturbable in 
 debate. His reading in constitutional and gen- 
 eral history was unequalled, and lie had an un- 
 usual facility in applying the inexhaustible stores 
 of his knowledge to all cases as they arose. 
 Above all stood his powers as a reasoner, after- 
 wards so wonderfully displayed in his celebrated 
 Virginia report on the Alien and Sedition laws. 
 
 Mr. Ames relied chiefly on patriotic sentiment, 
 and made light of the rigid rule of construction 
 in deploying his forces and opening up the line 
 of his argument to the House. He drew a glow- 
 ing picture of the revolutionary struggle, and of 
 the heroic sacrifices of the people in the common 
 cause. He ingeniously blended the debts of the 
 States with the national burdens, and denounced 
 the argument that would put them on a separate 
 footing as sheer sophistry. He declared the 
 State debts were incurred for defensive purposes 
 during the war. Their treasure, he held, was 
 poured out prodigally by the States in the cause 
 of independence, and aided powerfully to beat 
 back the armies of Great Britain. He did not 
 envy the soul of that man, he exclaimed with 
 undue personality, who quibbled over constitu- 
 tional objections to Government assumption of 
 debts thus nobly incurred by the individual States 
 for the good of all. In spicy flings like the last 
 about constitutional quibblers, and in the mere
 
 126 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 "carte and tierce of digladiation," as it is some- 
 where called, Mr. Ames was the superior of Mr. 
 Madison. 
 
 In reply to this animated speech, Madison 
 grounded himself on constitutional doctrine, and 
 pointed out the limitations of power with which 
 Government was clothed. Proceeding with a lu- 
 cid review of the organic law, he showed that the 
 people had not delegated to Congress the power 
 or right to assume State liabilities. He foresaw 
 danger, he said, to the life of the Union in this 
 early attempt to transcend the letter of the con- 
 stitution. What Mr. Ames called a quibble pre- 
 sented itself to his mind in a different light. 
 After a searching argument upon the constitu- 
 tional view of the subject, Mr. Madison next 
 went on to speak of the injustice of the claim 
 then before Congress. He classified the States 
 into debtor and creditor divisions, and asked 
 whether it would be observing good faith with 
 the States themselves, some of which owed hardly 
 twenty thousand dollars, while others owed sev- 
 eral millions, to consolidate such unequal debts 
 into a single mass, and transfer the burden of 
 payment from those who owed the money to 
 others who did not owe it? If the United States 
 should assume the State debts, a uniform tax 
 would have to be laid upon the people of the 
 Union at large in order to raise a revenue to dis- 
 charge the debt. Would not the creditor States,
 
 HOW WE GOT TO WASHINGTON. 
 
 he inquired, regard legislation which should 
 saddle on them the burdens of the debtor States 
 not only as a hardship, without constitutional 
 warrant, but as the exercise of arbitrary and 
 despotic power on the part of Congress ? 
 
 The inexorable logic of Madison made a pro- 
 found impression on the House, and carried dis- 
 may into the ranks of the speculators. In vain 
 did Hamilton try to throw the mantle of his own 
 respectability over those pioneer jobbers of Wall 
 Street. His special pleading in behalf of the 
 stock-gamblers did not avail when subjected to 
 the iron logic of the father of the constitution. 
 The drastic William Maclay heard Madison's 
 argument, and in jotting down the day's doings 
 in his Journal says : " His speech produced a 
 revolution." 
 
 The newspapers fanned the excitement by 
 fiery editorials, and roused the public mind to a 
 feverish state. "This measure," says Jefferson, 
 " produced the most bitter and angry contest ever 
 known in Congress before or since the union of 
 the States." At length Madison and Ames mar- 
 shalled their forces, and the decisive test of a 
 vote was reached. The Assumption bill was 
 rejected, and the darling project of Hamilton and 
 Ames was slaughtered in the House of Repre- 
 sentatives. Madison had triumphed; but Ames 
 and the New England members, burning with 
 rage, quit the Congress in a body, and a deadlock
 
 128 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 ensued. Congress continued to meet from day 
 to day and adjourn for want of a quorum. All 
 public business was suspended, and the hands of 
 Government were tied. Destruction threatened 
 to overtake the American Union. 
 
 "The Eastern members particularly," Mr. Jef- 
 ferson says, " who, with Smith from South Caro- 
 lina, were the principal gamblers in these scenes, 
 threatened a secession and dissolution. Hamil- 
 ton was in despair." 
 
 To give accuracy to the portraits of history a 
 knowledge is required of the secret springs of 
 action, the hidden motive, and ultimate design 
 of individual actors on the scene of public affairs. 
 Without such knowledge history is but a detail 
 of names, places, and dates. "Of centennial 
 sermons and Fourth of July orations," says Hil- 
 dreth, "whether professedly as such, or in the 
 guise of history, there are more than enough. 
 It is due to our fathers and ourselves to present 
 the founders of our American nation unbedaubed 
 with patriotic rouge, wrapped up in no fine-spun 
 cloaks of excuses and apology, without stilts, 
 buskins, tinsel, or bedizenment, in their own 
 proper persons, often rude, hard, narrow, super- 
 stitious, and mistaken, but always earnest, down- 
 right, manly, and sincere." 
 
 The Government was brought to the verge of 
 dissolution in 1 790 by the defeat of the bill that 
 provided for the assumption by the Federal Gov-
 
 HOW WE GOT TO WASHINGTON. 129 
 
 ernment of the debts of the States. The Resi- 
 dence bill, the one to provide for a permanent seat 
 of government, was, as we have seen, before Con- 
 gress at the same time. On these two measures 
 parties were formed. Their complexional differ- 
 ences never have been accurately traced. To 
 throw a few glints of light on the dark places is 
 as much as we may hope to do here. It is gen- 
 erally supposed Washington and Hamilton acted 
 together; that Jefferson and Washington were 
 opposed. This is a mistake. There never was 
 much real affection between the two former, 
 while there was a warm friendship at one time 
 between Washington and Jefferson. Between 
 Madison and the father of his country there 
 existed for many years an ardent affection ; their 
 relations were of the most intimate kind ; a ten- 
 derness, such as is found between a father and 
 son, marked their intercourse. Sparks relates 
 in his " Memoirs of Fifty Years " that old Benja- 
 min Talmadge of Litchfield, "Connecticut, a fa- 
 vorite aide of Washington in the revolution, 
 once told him that Washington and Hamilton 
 often widely differed. "I never thought," said 
 Talmadge, " the feelings of Washington toward 
 him were more than respect for his exalted abil- 
 ities." He also said that Hamilton's feelings for 
 his chief were those of respect, not love. There 
 was old John Adams, one of the leading actors 
 in the scenes of the first and second Congresses. 
 9
 
 130 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 He never thought Washington was sufficiently 
 mindful of his obligation for the part the old 
 Braintree statesman took in making the Virgin- 
 ian commander-in-chief in the revolution. Prob- 
 ably he had forgotten the part he took in the 
 Conway cabal against the father of his country. 
 .Going up once to a picture of Washington, he 
 exclaimed : " Had I kept my mouth shut as close 
 as you, I would not now be out of office." 
 Adams and Hamilton felt a deep-rooted dislike 
 for each other. The seven men mentioned were 
 the principal actors in the great struggle of 1789 
 and 1790 over the Assumption and Residence 
 bills. Mr. Sedgwick also took a prominent part, 
 but followed the lead of Hamilton and Ames on 
 both measures. Washington, Jefferson, and 
 Madison were the advocates of the Potomac 
 river as a location for the capital; Adams and 
 Robert Morris preferred Philadelphia or Ger- 
 mantown, and Hamilton and his friends some 
 spot on the Susquehanna in the State of Pennsyl- 
 vania. 
 
 In the first session of the First Congress a 
 committee of the House was appointed to bring 
 in a bill for the selection of the permanent seat 
 of government. Before they reported, however, 
 Alexander White, the first member who took 
 his seat from Virginia, had presented to the 
 House on the i5th of May, 1789, a resolution of 
 the legislature of that State, adopted December
 
 HOW WE GOT TO WASHINGTON. 13! 
 
 27, 1788, offering to the acceptance of the Fed- 
 eral Government ten miles square of territory, or 
 any less quantity, in any part of that State, 
 which Congress may choose, to be occupied and 
 possessed by the United States as the seat of the 
 Federal Government. On the following day 
 Joshua Seney, one of the representatives from 
 Maryland, presented to the House an act of the 
 legislature of that State, also offering ten miles 
 square of territory in any part of the said State 
 for the seat of the Federal Government. Besides 
 Virginia and Maryland, which meant the Alex- 
 andria and Georgetown parties, New York pre- 
 ferred her claims to the consideration of Congress ; 
 Philadelphia was clamorous for the national prize ; 
 Baltimore was at court with her advocates ; the 
 boroughs of Lancaster and Yorktown, Pennsyl- 
 vania, were not without earnest friends; Wil- 
 mington, Delaware, appeared among the compet- 
 itors; while other places did not quite despair, 
 in the chapter of accidents, of becoming the 
 capital of the United States. 
 
 The committee reported August 27, 1789. 
 "The seat of government of the United States," 
 they said, " should be located with such respect 
 to the circumstances of wealth, population, and 
 extent of territory, as may be consistent with 
 convenience to the navigation of the Atlantic 
 Ocean, and having due regard to the situation of 
 the Western country." The debate was opened
 
 132 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 in Committee of the Whole, September 3d, Elias 
 Boudinot of New Jersey temporary chairman, 
 and continued to the fifth. A series of resolu- 
 tions, the first being substantially the one just 
 cited, was adopted September 7. The second 
 of these resolutions was as follows : 
 
 "Resolved, That the permanent seat of the 
 Government of the United States ought to be at 
 some convenient place on the east bank of the 
 river Susquehanna, in the State of Pennsylvania, 
 and that, until the necessary buildings be erected 
 for the purpose, the seat of government ought to 
 continue at the city of New York." 
 
 It was moved to strike out "east bank of the 
 river Susquehanna, in the State of Pennsylva- 
 nia, " and insert " north bank of the river Poto- 
 mac, in the State of Maryland." The motion 
 was lost yeas 21; nays 29. "The borough of 
 Wilmington, in the State of Delaware," was pro- 
 posed as a substitute, but suffered the same fate 
 as the Potomac yeas 19; nays 32. The next 
 substitute offered was " Potomac, Susquehanna, 
 or Delaware." Lost. The next was "Banks of 
 either side of the river Delaware, not more than 
 eight miles above or below the Falls of Dela- 
 ware." Lost. The succeeding one was, "or 
 Maryland" after " Pennsylvania," and to strike out 
 "city of New York" and insert "Philadelphia," 
 but this too shared the fate of all the others. 
 The only successful amendment was " banks" for
 
 HOW WE GOT TO WASHINGTON. 133 
 
 "east bank of the Susquehanna," adopted, yeas 
 26; nays 25. Thus amended the resolution 
 passed the House. 
 
 The third resolution was as follows : 
 "Resolved, That the President of the United 
 States be authorized to appoint three commis- 
 sioners to examine and report to him the most 
 eligible situation on the banks of the Susque- 
 hanna, in the State of Pennsylvania, for the per- 
 manent seat of the Government of the United 
 States ; that the said commissioners be author- 
 ized, under the direction of the President, to pur- 
 chase such quantity of land as may be thought 
 necessary, and to erect thereon, within four 
 years, suitable buildings for the accommodation 
 of the Congress and the officers of the United 
 States; that the Secretary of the Treasury, to- 
 gether with the commissioners so to be appointed, 
 be authorized to borrow a sum not exceeding 
 $100,000, to be repaid within twenty years with 
 interest, not exceeding the rate of 5 per centum 
 per annum, out of the duties on import and 
 tonnage, to be applied to the purchase of the 
 land and the erection of the buildings aforesaid ; 
 and that a bill ought to pass in the present ses- 
 sion in conformity with the foregoing resolution." 
 This resolution was adopted yeas 29; nays 
 21. It was ordered, pursuant to these resolu- 
 tions, that a bill be brought in, and Messrs. 
 Ames, Lawrence, and Clymer were appointed
 
 134 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 a" committee to frame the bill, which had its first 
 and second reading and was committed the 
 day following. September 17, the bill was 
 amended, and on the 22d after an animated 
 debate, in which Mr. Madison took the leading 
 part in opposition, it passed the House yeas 31 ; 
 nays 17. 
 
 The bill was sent to the Senate on the day of 
 its passage by the House. A motion was made 
 in the Senate to strike out the words " at some 
 convenient place on the banks of the Susque- 
 hanna in the State of Pennsylvania," and was 
 adopted yeas 1 1 ; nays 7. It was next moved 
 to insert in place of the words stricken out, " at 
 some convenient place on the northern banks of 
 the river Potomac," but this was lost. The 
 following substitute was then offered : " in the 
 counties of Philadelphia, Chester, and Bucks, 
 and State of Pennsylvania." The vote on this 
 stood yeas 9, nays 9, and there being a tie vote, 
 the Vice-President, John Adams, voted in the 
 affirmative, and the motion prevailed. Other 
 important amendments in the same direction 
 were adopted by the Senate, which passed the 
 bill September 26, by a vote of- 10 to 7. 
 
 On the return of the bill to the House for con- 
 currence in the Senate's amendments, an acrimo- 
 nious debate ensued, but the Hamilton party, 
 dreading the Potomac men, supported as they 
 were by Washington and Jefferson, resolved to
 
 HOW WE GOT TO WASHINGTON. 135 
 
 accept the city of Philadelphia and Germantown 
 rather than let Mr. Madison carry the capital 
 to the Potomac. Madison, finding himself 
 beaten, adroitly introduced this amendment: 
 " Provided that nothing herein contained shall be 
 construed to affect the operation of the laws of 
 Pennsylvania within the district ceded and ac- 
 cepted until Congress shall otherwise provide by 
 law." This amendment passed the House yeas 
 3 1 ; nays 24. When the bill was returned to the 
 Senate for concurrence in this amendment, the 
 influence of Washington and Jefferson was 
 brought to bear in that body, and a motion to 
 postpone the whole subject to the next session of 
 Congress was adopted by the Senate. To Mr. 
 Madison is to be given the credit of preventing 
 the passage of the bill in the House without the 
 preceding amendment. The matter went over to 
 the next Congress, and it was thus Pennsylvania 
 lost the golden opportunity of securing the per- 
 manent seat of government. 
 
 The battle in the first Congress ended in a 
 practical victory for General Washington and 
 Mr. Madison. The fight was a triangular one. 
 
 General Hamilton, through his friends, Ames, 
 Sedgwick, and others, controlled the question 
 in the House. Vice-President John Adams, 
 through his influence as presiding officer, con- 
 trolled the question in the Senate. Hamilton 
 and Adams were enemies; but they had one
 
 136 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 point in common they were both bitterly op- 
 posed to the Potomac. Thus, when Madison, 
 the friend of Potomac, after an angry debate, 
 was beaten by Ames the friend of Susquehanna 
 in the House ; and after the victorious Susque- 
 hanna men had been in turn slaughtered by 
 Adams, in favor of Philadelphia, in the Senate ; 
 then the far-seeing Madison came forward with 
 his constitutional proviso, and gave the Philadel- 
 phia party their quietus for the session, and the 
 whole subject went over to the Congress of 
 1790. 
 
 It was during this stormy debate, when some 
 of the New England members were denouncing 
 the South, that the calm Madison, father of the 
 Constitution, said he felt himself bound to de- 
 clare that Virginia never would have entered 
 into the Union if the events of that day had been 
 foreseen. He uttered the words looking Mr. 
 Ames full in the face, and a profound sensation 
 was created in the House, for Madison was 
 known as a man who never dealt in personal- 
 ities. 
 
 The first measure of the Congress of 1790 was 
 the passage by concurrent vote of both houses of 
 a resolution which declared that all business un- 
 finished at the former session should "be re- 
 garded as if it had not been passed upon by 
 either." Thus the opposing clans on the resi- 
 dence question were once more brought face to
 
 HOW WE GOT TO WASHINGTON. 137 
 
 face on equal terms. And now a powerful lobby 
 was on hand corrupting those whom they might 
 reach, for there were scamps as well as brave 
 men before Agamemnon. Foreign capitalists 
 and their domestic agents were on the spot gath- 
 ering the latest news from within, and filling 
 Federal Hall with their selfish intrigues. Em- 
 bryo surveyors and fussy engineers dashed over 
 the scene, map in hand, capturing passing mem- 
 bers to point out to them eligible situations for 
 the seat of government, and to whisper a word 
 for themselves and their plans in the ears of 
 Representatives and Senators. In one word King 
 Lobby w r as in the field, and Federal Hall was 
 distracted by the scheming horde. 
 
 May 31, 1790, Mr. Butler of South Carolina 
 submitted in the Senate a bill to determine the 
 permanent seat of government. On the same 
 day it was resolved by the House that the next 
 
 session should be held at . A motion to fill 
 
 the blank with the words " On the banks of the 
 Delaware" was defeated. After a struggle in 
 favor of other places, the blank was filled by 
 " Philadelphia" as the place where the next ses- 
 sion should be held. June 2, a committee of 
 the Senate was appointed, to whom was referred 
 the bill to determine the permanent seat. The 
 House resolution in favor of Philadelphia was 
 also referred to the same committee, viz. , Messrs. 
 Butler, Henry Johnson, Lee, and Dalton. June
 
 138 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 8, the resolution of the House in favor of Phil- 
 adelphia was defeated, 1 5 to 1 1 . The bill for a 
 permanent seat was then debated. The com- 
 mittee had reported in favor of the eastern or 
 northeastern bank of the Potomac, and that such 
 sums of money and grants of land as the States 
 might offer, with which and on which to erect 
 the public buildings, should be accepted by Con- 
 gress. No special recommendations as to the tem- 
 porary seat of government were contained in the 
 Senate report. This report, after a sharp debate, 
 was finally brought to a vote, and again John 
 Adams became the Nemesis of the Potomac. 
 The vote stood 12 to 12, and the Vice- President 
 voted in the negative and killed the scheme. 
 The bill itself was next brought forward, and 
 again the Potomac men were beaten 15 to 9. 
 Next Baltimore was rejected 17 to 7. 
 
 A desperate game of filibustering motions next 
 ensued. They were all, one after another, de- 
 feated. About eighteen years ago Mr. Elaine 
 read Mr. Lamar a lecture on the floor of Con 
 gress in regard to Congressional filibustering, 
 and declared such a device was a modern innova- 
 tion of the pro-slavery men, and was unknown 
 in the early annals of Congress. We were 
 equally surprised at the boldness of the school- 
 master, and at the submissive manner in which 
 his didactics were received. Filibustering has 
 flourished vigorously at almost every session of
 
 HOW WE GOT TO WASHINGTON. 139 
 
 Congress for a hundred years. John Randolph's 
 caustic speeches, and the powerful speech of 
 William Gaston in 1816 on the tyranny of the 
 previous question, might be consulted with profit 
 by Mr. Elaine on this subject. 
 
 The House was now on its mettle, and resented 
 the Senate's rejection of Philadelphia as a tem- 
 porary residence by again passing the Philadel- 
 phia resolution June loth, by 32 to 29. But the 
 next day Baltimore was accepted in lieu of Phila- 
 delphia, and passed the House by the remarkable 
 vote of 53 to 6. Thus the Monumental City 
 loomed up as the prospective seat of government 
 of the infant Republic. But the sense of the 
 Senate had yet to be taken, and Baltimore had 
 few friends in that body. It was rejected there, 
 yeas 10; nays 15. The long and desperate 
 struggle w r as now drawing to an end. On the 
 28th of June (four of the great actors in the 
 scene, Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton and 
 Madison, having in the interval agreed upon 
 the first great compromise under the constitu- 
 tion) the Potomac river won the capital, and 
 Philadelphia the temporary seat until the perma- 
 nent residence could be sufficiently built up to be 
 made the abode of Congress and the Federal 
 officials. On that day the Senate passed the 
 amended bill that the " River Potomac, at some 
 place between the mouths of the eastern branch 
 and Connogochegue, be and the same is hereby
 
 140 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 accepted for the permanent seat of the Govern- 
 ment of the United States." The bill passed by 
 a vote of 1 6 to 9. 
 
 "I am fully convinced," says Maclay in his 
 Journal, " Pennsylvania could do no better. The 
 matter could not be longer delayed. It is, in fact, 
 the interest of the President of the United States 
 that pushes the Potomac. He (Washington) , by 
 means of Jefferson, Madison, Carroll and others 
 urged the business, and if we had not closed with 
 these terms a bargain would have been made for 
 the temporary residence in New York. " * July 9, 
 1790, the House of Representatives, which had 
 rejected the Potomac at every previous stage 
 of the struggle, likewise passed the Senate bill 
 in favor of that river, but only by the narrow 
 vote of yeas 32 ; nays 29. President Washington 
 communicated to the Senate his approval of the 
 bill July 1 6, and Congress adjourned at New 
 York, August 12, to meet again at Philadelphia 
 December 6, 1790. 
 
 Attention has already been called to the great 
 controversy over the bill for the assumption by 
 the General Government of the debts of the sev- 
 eral States in which Ames and Madison took the 
 leading part in debate. That bill, as we have 
 seen, was defeated, and the New England mem- 
 bers threatened a dissolution of the Union. 
 "Hamilton was in despair," according to Jeffer- 
 
 * Journal of William Maclay, 1789-1791, p. 312.
 
 HOW WE GOT TO WASHINGTON. 141 
 
 son. Those two celebrated men then sat down 
 together and agreed upon the compromise. The 
 debtor States were placated by assumption, and 
 the Southern States by securing the seat of gov- 
 ernment. 
 
 Without mutual concessions neither the North 
 nor South was able to carry its favorite measure. 
 John Adams would not yield his opposition to 
 the Potomac, but Hamilton won over Robert 
 Morris, and he carried the Senate in spite of 
 Adams's hostility. History will award to Jeffer- 
 son the credit of gaining the larger prize, though 
 he deeply regretted his part in the compromise 
 afterwards. He always preferred the Potomac 
 to any other place, but thought Hamilton's finan- 
 cial measures fraught with incalculable dangers 
 to the liberties of the people. 
 
 During the ten years that Philadelphia was 
 the temporary seat of government, John Adams 
 never ceased his antagonism to the District of 
 Columbia. General Washington's hands were 
 tied more than once by the hostility of Congress, 
 and its refusal to supply the money necessary to 
 prosecute the work of completing the public 
 buildings by the year 1800, as designated in the 
 bill. The hope was entertained that if the resi- 
 dence on the Potomac should not be prepared by 
 that time, the law requiring the Federal Govern- 
 ment to be transferred thither would become in- 
 operative by non-compliance with the statute.
 
 142 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 To baffle these enemies of the Potomac, General 
 Washington made a personal appeal to the legis- 
 latures of Maryland and Virginia, which hand- 
 somely responded by advancing to him between 
 two and three hundred thousand dollars as a loan 
 for the erection of the public buildings, and the 
 infant city began to grow into urban shape, and 
 was ready for occupancy when the Government 
 went there in the year 1800. In less than a 
 single century Washington has become one of 
 the most beautiful cities in the world. 
 
 J. F. McL.
 
 BENJAMIN ROBBINS CURTIS. 
 
 JUDGE CURTIS, a man of more various learn- 
 ing in the law than any other New England 
 lawyer with whose life we are acquainted, cer- 
 tainly is entitled to a good biographer. Be- 
 longing to the school of Webster and Story, 
 and reflecting on his era the mingled influ- 
 ence of that austere reasoning which Marshall 
 and Taney shed upon the bench, Judge Curtis 
 exerted a large influence for good over his coun- 
 trymen at a time when so many others directly 
 intrusted with the administration of affairs were 
 exerting a powerful influence for evil. Every 
 conservative restraint in revolutionary times may 
 be accounted a fortunate possession to the people 
 among whom it is found, 
 
 " In visiting the Americans," says De Tocque- 
 ville, the most profound foreign writer upon our 
 institutions, " and in studying their laws, we per- 
 ceive that the authority they have intrusted to 
 members of the legal profession, and the influ- 
 ence which these individuals exercise in the gov- 
 ernment, is the most powerful existing security 
 against the excesses of democracy. Men who 
 have more especially devoted themselves to legal 
 pursuits derive from those occupations certain
 
 144 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 habits of order, a taste for formalities and a kind 
 of instinctive regard for the regular connection 
 of ideas, which naturally render them very hos- 
 tile to the revolutionary spirit and the unreflect- 
 ing passions of the multitude. In all free gov- 
 ernments, of whatsoever form they may be, 
 members of the legal profession will be found 
 at the head of all parties." The career of Judge 
 Curtis furnishes a conspicuous example of the 
 justness of this observation. 
 
 Although he held but one political office, that 
 of member of the Massachusetts Legislature in 
 1851, his influence upon the affairs of his native 
 State, and later on those of the whole country, 
 when he was an Associate Justice of the Supreme 
 Court of the United States, and afterwards, during 
 his last years, when he had returned to the bar 
 in the fulness of his fame, was as commanding 
 and salutary as that of any other single citizen 
 in the Union. 
 
 The story of his life, with a judiciously ar- 
 ranged selection from his writings, is contained 
 in two volumes. They were edited by Mr. Ben- 
 jamin R. Curtis of Boston, a son of Judge Curtis. 
 The biographical part of the work, which occu- 
 pies the first volume, was prepared by Mr. 
 George Ticknor Curtis, brother of the Judge. 
 
 One of the most difficult things to write well is 
 a biography. The few really great ones may be 
 counted on the ends of the fingers. " Rari nan-
 
 BENJAMIN ROBBINS CURTIS. 145 
 
 tcs in gurgite vasto." The life of Agricola is 
 immortal, less on account of the hero, admirable 
 man though he was, than on that of the lumi- 
 nous pen of Tacitus, who, notwithstanding he was 
 the son-in-law of the Roman commander, has 
 enriched the world with a full-length image of his 
 hero set in the most faultless biography of profane 
 letters. In modern times, and especially in our 
 own country, we have had a plethora of books of 
 biography. Very few of them are of value to 
 sober minds or an aid to the historian. Even 
 Jefferson was in doubt whether Wirt's life of 
 Patrick Henry belonged to his shelf for romance 
 or shelf for history. It was in connection with 
 this book of Wirt that St. George Tucker said, 
 in 1813: " American biography, at least since 
 the conclusion of the peace of 1783, is a subject 
 which promises as little entertainment as any 
 other in the literary world. Our scene of action 
 is so perfectly domestic as to afford neither nov- 
 elty nor variety. Even the biographer of Wash- 
 ington has been reproached with imposing upon 
 his readers the history of a nation, instead of the 
 life of an individual. This leads me to notice 
 that part of your letter which relates to the sub- 
 ject of biography. How would you be able to 
 give any entertainment to your readers in the 
 'Life of Patrick Henry' without the aid of some 
 of his speeches in the General Assembly, in Con- 
 gress, in Convention, or in the Federal Court? 
 10
 
 146 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 What interest could be excited by his marrying 
 
 a Miss C , and afterward a Miss D ; and 
 
 that somebody, whom I will not condescend to 
 name, married one of his daughters, etc. ? No 
 human being would feel the smallest interest in 
 such a recital; and I never heard anything of 
 him, except as connected with the public, that 
 could amuse for a moment. The same may be 
 said of Lee,Pendleton and Wythe; and the same 
 may be said of every other man of real merit in 
 Virginia. They have all glided down the cur- 
 rent of life so smoothly (except as public men), 
 that nobody ever thought of noticing how they 
 lived, or what they did ; for to live and act like 
 gentlemen was a thing once so common in Vir- 
 ginia that nobody thought of noticing it. 
 
 " It is clear to my apprehension that unless a 
 man has been distinguished as an orator, or a 
 soldier, and has left behind him either copies or 
 notes of his speeches, or military exploits, that 
 you can scarcely glean enough out of his private 
 life, though he may have lived beyond his grand 
 climacteric, to fill a half dozen pages that any 
 body would trouble himself to read. . . . The 
 truth is that Socrates himself would pass unno- 
 ticed and forgotten in Virginia if he were not a 
 public character, and some of his speeches pre- 
 served in a newspaper ; the latter might keep his 
 memory alive for a year or two, but not much 
 longer."
 
 BENJAMIN ROBBINS CURTIS. 
 
 The Memoir of Curtis is not obnoxious to 
 Judge Tucker's criticism. It is neither the his- 
 tory of a nation nor an epithalamium, though in 
 the latter regard Curtis beat Patrick Henry, for 
 the judge led three wives to the altar, while the 
 " forest-born Demosthenes" contented himself 
 with two. But Judge Curtis was preeminently 
 one of those "public characters" whom Tucker 
 excepted in his slashing critique on the unenter- 
 taining nature of American biography, and who 
 has left behind him ample literary remains to 
 edify and instruct the next age. In his biog- 
 rapher, too, he has been fortunate. We began 
 to read the first volume with some misgivings, 
 for while the ripe learning, both legal and gen- 
 eral, of George Ticknor Curtis, author of the 
 "Memoir," and his fitness as a profound and 
 elegant writer to handle such a theme, are too 
 firmly established to be drawn into discussion 
 here, the circumstance of his kinship to Judge 
 Curtis, that he is his brother, suggested some 
 doubt and excited a little fear. These apprehen- 
 sions were dispelled before we had finished the 
 first chapter. Mr. Curtis, like the author of the 
 Life of Agricola, proved to be too true an artist, 
 too severe a narrator of history, to be led astray 
 by his affections, or to put a single laurel in the 
 wreath of his distinguished relative to which he 
 is not justly entitled. 
 
 The name of Curtis is a historical one in Mass-
 
 148 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 achusetts. A minute and interesting genealogi- 
 cal account of the family is given in the first of 
 the fourteen chapters of the "Memoir." Wil- 
 liam and Sarah Curtis, who came out from Eng- 
 land to Boston in 1632, were the progenitors 
 from whom most persons in the Old Bay State 
 bearing that name are descended. Shakespeare 
 introduces a Curtis in the "Taming of the 
 Shrew." The name was a common one in Eng- 
 land two centuries and a half ago. " In the parish 
 register of Brighton, in Northamptonshire," says 
 our biographer, "there is a record that, in 1620, 
 Philip Curtis married Amy Washington. She 
 was a sister of John Washington, the grand- 
 father of our first President." 
 
 Benjamin Robbins Curtis was born at Water- 
 town Square, a village about seven miles distant 
 from Boston, on the 4th of November, 1809.^ His 
 father was bred in the merchant marine, and his 
 mother was the daughter of Mr. James Robbins, 
 a manufacturer at Watertown. George Ticknor 
 Curtis, the only other child of this marriage, was 
 born November 28, 1812. The father died 
 abroad while the boys were yet children, and 
 the support and care of the latter devolved on 
 their mother^ a lady of great force of character, 
 and benevolence and, sweetness of disposition. 
 She was enabled by good management and the 
 assistance of Mr. Elisha Ticknor, the father of 
 the celebrated scholar and author, George Tick-
 
 BENJAMIN ROBBINS CURTIS. 149 
 
 nor, and the grandfather by marriage of the 
 Curtis boys, to afford her sons the rudiments of 
 education, and to send them in due time to Har- 
 vard University. Benjamin entered as a fresh- 
 man in 1825.") Oliver Wendell Holmes was one 
 of his classmates, and member of one of the col- 
 lege societies of which young Curtis was also a 
 member. In a letter to the biographer concern- 
 ing this society, Doctor Holmes said : " I do not 
 remember any of the members, except your 
 brother and William Henry Channing. I should 
 perhaps not remember the society at all but for 
 the fact of 'Ben Curtis' having taken part in a 
 discussion, and shown in that first effort such 
 extraordinary clearness of statement that we all 
 saw at once that he must be distinguished in the 
 legal profession if he adopted it. His was the 
 first horoscope that we cast, and from that hour 
 his record was but the fulfilment of our unques- 
 tioning prophesy." Young Curtis piade good 
 studies and twas graduated in 1829, holding 
 second place in his class. He entered the "Law 
 School of the University in September of the 
 same year. 
 
 Before that time the famous Law School at 
 Litchfield, Connecticut, presided over by the dis- 
 tinguished Tapping Reeve and James Gould, had 
 held the highest rank among American law 
 schools. Some of the greatest men in America 
 pursued their legal studies at Litchfield, among
 
 150 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 the number a Vice-President of the United 
 States, two Judges of the Supreme Court of the 
 United States, forty judges of the highest State 
 courts, thirteen senators, forty-six Congressmen, 
 several Cabinet members, and not a few foreign 
 ministers. It was under that incomparable edu- 
 cator, President Dwight of Yale, and afterwards 
 under the law professors at Litchfield, that John 
 C. Calhoun laid the foundations of that thorough 
 education which qualified him to become one of 
 the greatest statesmen of modern times. 
 
 But in 1829 the Harvard Law School rose to 
 the highest rank, and, under the guidance of 
 Story and Ashmun, became the worthy successor 
 to the Old Connecticut School. " The first jurist 
 living," as Lord Brougham called Judge Story, 
 was no sooner established as Dane Professor of 
 Law at Cambridge than he was surrounded by 
 an eager band of young men from various parts 
 of the Union, graduates of other colleges press- 
 ing forward with those of Harvard, in the race 
 for legal learning. Among these promising 
 young men Benjamin R. Curtis was conspicuous. 
 From his early youth he had evinced a taste for 
 the law. ^ His moral and intellectual habitudes 
 showed in him so strong a bias for jurispru- 
 dence, independently of all accidents of "associa- 
 tion or employment, that it seemed, as his biog- 
 rapher says, " nature made him for a lawyer, and 
 a great one." Under Story and Ashmun young
 
 BENJAMIN ROBBINS CURTIS. 151 
 
 Curtis laid the foundations of his education in 
 the law. " He entered upon its study with zeal," 
 says our author, " rapidly acquiring what is so 
 essential to a beginner a knowledge of the 
 books of the law and of how to use them." Early 
 in 1831, when eighteen months of his course re- 
 mained to be completed, he left the Law School 
 to enter the office of General Nevers, at North- 
 field. This step was connected with a romance. 
 Young Curtis was in love with his cousin, Miss 
 
 Woodward, and, in-*iew,^f-4he "law's delay," he 
 was anxious to-put himself in the way of making* 
 money as soon as possible, a faculty for which 
 he was always distinguished, in order to hasten 
 the time of his marriage. General Nevers was 
 one of those county court lawyers, with limited 
 law but great energy, who had made money as a 
 collecting lawyer, and who now aspired to be- 
 come sheriff of his native county. The office 
 was an appointive one. Before retiring into it, 
 General Nevers looked about him for a junior to 
 take charge of his law office. James C. Alvord, 
 a young man of brilliant talents from Greenfield, 
 had come to the lectures of Judge Story. Be- 
 tween Alvord and Curtis an intimate friendship 
 grew up, and the former introduced the latter to 
 General Nevers. The General, who was an odd 
 and shrewd old fellow in his way, soon found 
 that Curtis had more law than himself, and al- 
 though eighteen months intervened before the
 
 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 young man would be entitled to be admitted as 
 an attorney of the Common Pleas, the General 
 opened the way for him to settle in Northfield, 
 with a prospect of succeeding to the business 
 from which the former intended to retire.^ In 
 a letter to his friend, Mr. George W. Phillips of 
 Boston, written at Northfield, February n, 1832, 
 Mr. Curtis explained his reasons for taking up 
 his residence in that place. \ "I believe," wrote 
 he, " you never rightly understood my motives 
 for coming here. )The first, certainly, was to 
 get a living by my profession immediately. But 
 I had others which weighed not a little with me. 
 I did not like the influenco^of Boston and its so- 
 ciety upon young men. I-beHeved then, and I 
 , that at the end of six or eight years 
 
 rhould be a better man and a better lawyer and 
 
 V^VO-V-i r r , 
 
 stoiuH have been of far more use to the cominu- 
 nity if I came here, than $ could if I went into 
 your city. 1 have as yet seen no reason to doubt 
 the justice of my conclusion." 
 
 Young Curtis returned to the Cambridge Law 
 School in the spring of 1832, and spent the sum- 
 mer term there. Judge Story's " Commentaries 
 on Equity Jurisprudence" had not then been 
 published, and Northfield offered no facilities 
 for studying the doctrine and practice of courts 
 of equity. Outside of Boston there was at that 
 day almost an entire ignorance at the Massachu- 
 setts Bar of this department of the profession,
 
 BENJAMIN ROBBINS CURTIS. 153 
 
 and the young eleve appreciated the importance 
 of getting an early start in it, and the difficulty 
 which awaits the lawyer who, having been bred 
 up in the rigid rules of the common law, attempts 
 later on to master the more liberal principles of 
 equity. 
 
 After having spent the spring and summer 
 term at Cambridge, Mr. Curtis returned to 
 Northfield, and was admitted as an attorney of 
 the Court of Common Pleas at Greenfield in Au- 
 gust, 1832. He now entered upon a country 
 practice, and on the 8th of May, 1833, at the 
 house of Mr. George Ticknor in Boston, his and 
 his bride's uncle, Mr. Curtis and Miss Wood- 
 ward, a descendant of Miles Standish, were 
 united in marriage. "Miss Woodward," says 
 the biographer, "had a little fortune of her own, 
 just sufficient to furnish tastefully a small house 
 in Northfield, in which the young couple imme- 
 diately commenced housekeeping." 
 
 It was a most fortunate occurrence that the 
 young lawyer returned to the Law School. 
 What to do, and how to do it, are the two great 
 things in every man's education which it is nec- 
 essary to teach him. Such a profound and 
 charming lecturer as Story knew perhaps better 
 than any other man in America how to impart 
 these lessons. " For learning, industry and tal- 
 ent," said Chancellor Kent in a letter on Story 
 to the Louisiana Law Journal in 1841, "he is the
 
 154 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 most extraordinary jurist of the age." Curtis 
 drank deep at this pure well. And now began 
 in earnest his deep converse with the books, es- 
 pecially in the mysteries of special pleading, the 
 complicated intricacies of which with its techni- 
 cal distinctions and subtle refinement of forms, 
 his quiet retreat at Northfield so happily enabled 
 him to memorize, digest and master. He got all 
 of Chitty's forms by heart, the nar or declara- 
 tion, pleas, replications, rebutters, surrebutters, 
 rejoinders, surrejoinders, etc., as well as the 
 reasons which underlie them, and the uses that 
 they serve. His biographer relates an amusiug 
 anecdote of his walking up and down the nursery 
 with his sick baby in his arms, hour after hour 
 in the vigils of the night, soothing it by repeat- 
 ing all these forms, and discovering that as a 
 lullaby they acted quite as well as anything in 
 "Mother Goose," while they imprinted them- 
 selves indelibly on his own mind by this novel 
 practice. 
 
 His thirst for knowledge was insatiate, and in 
 this seed-time at Northfield, where he also en- 
 tered at once upon an active practice, Mr. Curtis 
 laid Coke, the Year Books and the later Reports 
 all under contribution, and grounded himself 
 thoroughly in the common law. In three years 
 he had outgrown Northfield, and wisely removed 
 to Boston to enter upon that brilliant career 
 which, like those of Sir Thomas More and Lord
 
 BENJAMIN ROBBINS CURTIS. 155 
 
 Somers, from humble beginnings, was to ascend 
 step by step to the highest rung in the ladder of 
 legal and judicial fame. 
 
 We have dwelt more in detail upon the earlier 
 days of Judge Curtis than their relative impor- 
 tance in the story of his life might appear to jus- 
 tify. But his after life is familiar to all. He soon 
 took a place with Rufus Choate at the head of 
 the bar of New England, in that forum where 
 Webster figured so grandly, and where Shaw 
 presided so well. " It was said soon after my 
 father's death," remarks the editor of the vol- 
 umes before us, " by a distinguished member of 
 the Boston Bar, who had known him for forty 
 years, that all that part of his life which preceded 
 his removal to Boston, in 1834, was known only 
 by tradition. This portion of his history is now 
 for the first time fully related in the following 
 Memoir." The unexplored field is always more 
 interesting in the life of a great man than any 
 other part to critical inquirers. 
 
 When Curtis went to Boston Jackson's second 
 turbulent Administration was in progress. Web- 
 ster's grand tilt with Hayne occurred some time 
 before, and he had just come out of the still more 
 tremendous debate with Calhoun. It has always 
 seemed to us to show the weak side of human 
 nature in contrasting the relative importance 
 which the North and South have attached to 
 these two debates. In the North the Webster-
 
 156 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 Hayne controversy of 1830 has dwarfed the Web- 
 ster-Calhoun debate of 1833 out of all proportion 
 to the magnitude of the latter. In the South 
 scarcely anything is heard of the former or its 
 matchless display of rhetorical eloquence, while 
 the very school boys are familiar with the history 
 of the constitutional battle of 1833 between the 
 Castor and Pollux of our American galaxy. Each 
 side is prouder of that one of the two controver- 
 sies in which it thought it did the best. They 
 were giants in those days, but withal high-bred 
 gentlemen. At a levee given by General Jack- 
 son on the evening of the day when Webster 
 made his sublime appeal for the Union in reply 
 to Colonel Hayne, for once Jackson was not lion- 
 ized above all others. " Black Dan" was the lion 
 of the White House that night. Both Mr. 
 Webster and Colonel Hayne were in the East 
 Room. The eager multitude pressed round 
 the former, and there, too, came Hayne, hands 
 extended and chivalrous words of congratulation 
 on his lips. " How are you this evening, Col- 
 onel Hayne?" said the Massachusetts senator. 
 "None the better for you, sir," was the gallant 
 reply of the South Carolinian. Thus, too, was it 
 with Webster and Calhoun. With the exception 
 of a single acrimonious passage-at-arms between 
 them in 1838, during a debate on the Sub-Treas- 
 ury plan which Calhoun favored indeed was the 
 real originator of, and not Van Buren as the
 
 BENJAMIN ROBBINS CURTIS. 157 
 
 former's financial speech of 1834 proves, and 
 which plan Webster opposed with great vehe- 
 mence nothing ever occurred during the long 
 lives of both to mar for a single moment their 
 warm friendship and high respect for each other. 
 Mr. Webster, according to Everett, whose words 
 we quote, "regarded Mr. Calhoun as decidedly 
 the ablest of the public men to whom he had 
 been opposed in the course of his political life. 
 These kindly feelings on Mr. Webster's part," 
 continues Everett, "were fully reciprocated by 
 Mr. Calhoun." 
 
 It was in those days of great political excitement 
 over constitutional questions, that Benjamin R. 
 Curtis took his position at the Boston Bar. He 
 was an earnest disciple of the Webster-Story 
 'school. Later on, when Choate and Curtis were 
 at the top of the ladder, Webster said in a letter 
 to Mr. Blatchford, written from the court room : 
 " Mr. B. R. Curtis is now speaking in reply to 
 .Mr. Choate, on the legal question. He is very 
 clever. With very competent learning, his great 
 mental characteristic is clearness ; and the power 
 of clear statement is the great power at the bar." 
 
 Young lawyers in love with their noble profes- 
 sion will find the course pursued by Curtis on his 
 removal to Boston full of practical lessons, which 
 may be studied with advantage. He entered into 
 a partnership with Charles Pelham Curtis, a dis- 
 tant relative, and a man of no mean capacity as
 
 158 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 a lawyer. But the subject of the Memoir con- 
 tinued his studies with the greatest assiduity. 
 The range of inquiry now widened to the whole 
 circle of legal science, and Mr. Curtis seemed 
 to have adopted the rule of Zeno, which Burke 
 followed to the end, rypatrxsw SiSairxonevuy to grow 
 old in learning. His family was his solace dur- 
 ing these days of dry labor. In a letter written 
 in 1837, to Mr. George Ticknor, who spent three 
 years in Europe, going soon after his nephew 
 came to Boston, he said: " I find in my home the 
 only, and I sometimes think insufficient, protec- 
 tion from that hardness and dryness of mind 
 which a perpetual contact with the actual affairs 
 of life, and a constant struggle with the interests 
 and passions of men almost inevitably pro- 
 duce. ... I have no dislike to the practice or 
 study of the law ; nay, I believe I may say, with 
 out affectation, that I have a strong love for its 
 rough chances. . . .It has been truly said that 
 a lawyer can no more regulate the amount of 
 business he will do than an engineer can blow a 
 barrel of gunpowder half-way down ; so I think 
 of those who are dependent on me, and blessing 
 my stars for my good fortune, rejoice in the cli- 
 ents who make me work so hard, but withal pay 
 me so well." 
 
 Endowed with a lucid and analytical mind in 
 an eminent degree and with the judicial temper- 
 ament, Mr. Curtis trusted in no respect to mere
 
 BENJAMIN KOBlilNS CURTIS. 159 
 
 eloquence, in which, both in its higher and lower 
 qualities, he was naturally deficient. He rea- 
 soned all the time, and could not and would not 
 appeal to the passions. He went sturdily at work 
 with maritime law, and delved down into Scott 
 amid the intricacies of admiralty jurisdiction and 
 procedure. The Circuit Court of the United 
 States required him to familiarize himself with 
 the distinctive system of equity pleading. Com- 
 mercial law, patent law, revenue law, the law of 
 real property, and of wills and testaments, and 
 lastly constitutional law, and the solid edifice of 
 the law of nature and nations, as the last-named 
 is laid down and expounded in Grotius, Vattel, 
 Puffendorf, and Burlamaqui, and by the great 
 ethical lights of antiquity, were all approached, 
 pondered over, commonplaced, digested, and 
 mastered by Mr. Curtis during his first seventeen 
 years of residence in Boston, from the time that 
 he left Northfield to that when the death of 
 Judge Woodbury opened a way for him to a seat 
 on the bench of the Supreme Court of the United 
 States. 
 
 His speeches, arguments, essays and letters 
 may all be studied with profit by the lawyer, the 
 politician, and the historical inquirer, for they 
 were made and written during a deeply interest- 
 ing epoch of our history. In none of them is 
 there the slightest tinge of the partisan. Educa- 
 tion, taste, and associations had made Curtis an
 
 160 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 American citizen in the broadest sense, and fitted 
 him to moderate where he could not control, and 
 to instruct the minds where he could not curb the 
 passions of his countrymen. In the case of the 
 slave " Med," which he argued with consummate 
 ability, Chief Justice Shaw decided against him. 
 When Judge Curtis came afterward to file a dis- 
 senting opinion of his own in the celebrated Dred 
 Scott case, it was found that he had made good 
 use of the learning of Shaw, and enriched it with 
 a mastery of reasoning laid down by Lord Mans- 
 field in the Somersett case. The latter was not 
 an analogous cause, but its learning had evidently 
 been acquired by Judge Curtis. 
 
 President Fillmore in 1851 appointed Mr. Cur- 
 tis to the Supreme Court of the United States for 
 the Circuit comprising the States of Massachu- 
 setts, Maine, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. 
 Mr. Webster recommended the appointment, Mr. 
 Choate favored it, and the President, before he 
 received Mr. Webster's letter on the subject, had 
 Curtis in his mind for the place. The nomina- 
 tion was confirmed by the Senate. Judge Curtis 
 remained on the bench from 1851 to 1857. He 
 was at his best as a judge. In that great tribunal, 
 to which he came while yet a young man, he 
 brought an affluence of learning, a capacity for 
 work, a dignity of personal character, and a flu- 
 ency of logical diction in preparing his allotted 
 share of the opinions of the court, which did not
 
 BENJAMIN ROBBINS CURTIS. l6l 
 
 discredit the wisdom of a Story who had gone 
 before, or the high standards of the court itself. 
 
 Judge Curtis 's most famous opinion was the 
 one he wrote in the Dred Scott case. The air 
 was full of electricity, sectional passions were 
 stirred to their profoundest depths, and the South 
 was beginning to respond to the thunder tones 
 of the Abolitionists in the same angry key. It is 
 scarcely to be wondered at that the serene atmos- 
 phere of the Bench was disturbed by currents 
 that ran counter to each other. The politicians 
 were raving like madmen; what marvel that a 
 Taney and a Curtis, differing as they did in the 
 Dred Scott case, should emit a few angry sparks? 
 The greatest reason for regret is that partly 
 from this cause, and partly on account of the in- 
 adequacy of his income, Judge Curtis soon after 
 resigned his seat on the bench. 
 
 The biographer gives an interesting and 
 learned account of the legal aspects of the Dred 
 Scott case. Judge Curtis, as we have already 
 said, dissented from the opinion of the court, and 
 held that no question except that raised by a plea 
 to the jurisdiction could properly be decided by 
 the Supreme Court ; in other words it was ultra 
 vires to pass on a question not formally before the 
 court; and that any opinion pronounced under 
 such circumstances is not binding. 
 
 A somewhat warm and lengthy correspondence, 
 it will be remembered, took place between Judge 
 
 ii
 
 1 62 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 Curtis and Chief Justice Taney in regard to the 
 publication of the opinions delivered in this 
 famous case, and the refusal of Mr. Carroll, the 
 clerk of the court, to furnish Judge Curtis, on his 
 request, with a copy of the majority opinion of the 
 tribunal. 
 
 When we recall the exciting days in which this 
 opinion was delivered, and the feeling which was 
 aroused even among members of the judiciary, 
 in common with the political and social circles of 
 the whole country, it is matter of satisfaction to 
 find the venerable Chief Justice and Mr. Justice 
 Curtis observing the decorum and moderation of 
 lofty judges under unusual provocations to feel- 
 ing. There was some asperity of tone in their 
 letters, but no recrimination and no show of vio- 
 lent temper. It is pleasing to relate the fact that 
 a few years later on, when the great Chief Justice 
 had just passed away, one of the most discrimi- 
 nating and noble tributes paid to his memory was 
 the one delivered by Judge Curtis at a meeting 
 of the Bar of Boston. 
 
 At that meeting, held October 15, 1864, he 
 spoke at considerable length, and among other 
 things said : " I have been long enough at the 
 bar to remember Mr. Taney 's appointment, and 
 I believe it was then a general impression in this 
 part of the country that he was neither a learned 
 nor a profound lawyer. This was certainly a 
 mistake. His mind was thoroughly imbued with
 
 BENJAMIN ROBIilNS CURTIS. 163 
 
 the rules of the common law, and whatever may 
 have been true at the time of his appointment, 
 when I first knew him he was master of all that 
 peculiar jurisprudence which it is the special 
 province of the courts of the United States to ad- 
 minister and apply. His skill in applying it was 
 of the highest order. His power of subtle analy- 
 sis exceeded that of any man I ever knew, a power 
 not without its dangers to a judge as well as to 
 a lawyer; but in his case it was balanced and 
 checked by excellent common sense and by great 
 experience in practical business, both public and 
 private. ... It is certainly true I am happy to 
 be able to bear direct testimony to it that the 
 surpassing ability of the Chief Justice and all his 
 great qualities of character and mind, were more 
 fully and constantly exhibited in the consulta- 
 tion-room while presiding over and assisting the 
 deliberations of his brethren, than the public 
 knew or can ever justly appreciate. There his 
 dignity, his love of order, his gentleness, his 
 caution, his accuracy, his discrimination, were of 
 incalculable importance. The real intrinsic char- 
 acter of the tribunal was greatly influenced by 
 them, and always for the better." (Vol. 2, pp. 
 
 338-339-) 
 
 We regret that space will not permit a more 
 extended review. There is a wealth of materials 
 to draw from notices of the great men of his 
 time ; glimpses at the dark scenes of the war ; a
 
 164 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 matchless paper on "Executive Power," which, 
 as a supplement to Chief Justice Taney's admir- 
 able opinion in the Merryman Habeas Corpus 
 case, affords the best answer to and condemna- 
 tion of the revolutionary usurpations of power 
 which sometimes took place during the war that 
 was made at the time ; besides other and notable 
 contributions to our political and general history. 
 
 Judge Curtis entertained a high opinion of 
 Charles O' Conor, for we are told at page 167 of 
 the first volume "that he regarded Charles 
 O' Conor's management of the Forrest divorce 
 case as the most remarkable exhibition of pro- 
 fessional skill ever witnessed in this country." 
 
 During the last seventeen years of his life 
 Judge Curtis made about $650,000 from his 
 professional labors. His retirement from the 
 Supreme Court, therefore, worked him no dis- 
 advantage in a pecuniary point of view. The most 
 celebrated cause in which he figured during his 
 career, and the one in which he distinguished 
 himself above all others, was the impeachment 
 of President Johnson, for whom he appeared as 
 leading counsel. His argument was as far supe- 
 rior to that of Mr. Evarts as a luminous consti- 
 tutional retraction of our polity and laws back to 
 first principles, as Mr. Evarts 's speech was to his 
 as a clever and cogent appeal to the preposses- 
 sions of the senatorial jury, or as Mr. Groes- 
 beck's was to that of Mr. Evarts as an example
 
 BENJAMIN ROBBINS CURTIS. 165 
 
 of forensic eloquence. The historian, when he 
 sums up the case of the President's impeach- 
 ment, will, we are quite sure, award the highest 
 praise to Judge Curtis among the distinguished 
 lawyers engaged in that great and momentous 
 constitutional struggle. 
 
 A Republican senator, when accused afterwards 
 of infidelity to his party because he voted to ac- 
 quit the President, made this reply : " Judge Curtis 
 gave us the law and we followed it." The day 
 after he opened his argument another Republican 
 senator inquired of a political friend whether he 
 had heard it. " No," was the reply, "but I read 
 it, and I wish I hadn't." 
 
 Mr. Johnson offered the Judge the position of 
 Attorney-General of the United States, but from 
 a disinclination to enter into the field of politics 
 again, and from no disagreement with the Presi- 
 dent, the judge politely declined the offer. 
 
 Benjamin R. Curtis died at Newport on the 
 1 5th of June, 1874. The author of the Memoir, 
 speaking of his brother's death, thus happily 
 says : " When the golden bowl is broken what 
 boots it to know why its charmed circle did not 
 longer remain intact? 'The days of our age are 
 threescore years and ten ; and though men be so 
 strong that they come to fourscore years, yet is 
 their strength then but labor and sorrow ; so soon 
 passeth it away and we are gone!' ' 
 
 J. F. McL.
 
 DANIEL O'CONNELL* 
 
 BY DANIEL B. LUCAS, LL.D. 
 
 IN order to understand the discussion which I 
 propose of Daniel O'Connell his principles 
 and politics it is necessary to know something 
 of the surrounding historic atmosphere, in which 
 they were formed, and through which they should 
 be viewed. Conceding something to your pre- 
 sumed familiarity with Irish history, I may spare 
 both you and myself the painful recital of the 
 early subjugation, and the subsequent Cromwell- 
 ian policy of supplanting the native Catholic Irish 
 by colonies of English Protestants. The religion 
 of the former was to be suppressed ; their lands 
 confiscated; their language interdicted; in a 
 word, by a species of international venesection, 
 so to speak, Ireland was to be made English as 
 much so as Surrey or Kent. Cromwell failed, as 
 had Elizabeth before him. He had as well have 
 undertaken to change the climate, or divert the 
 winds around the Giant's Causeway. 
 
 * An address delivered at the Opera House in the city of Wheeling, 
 on the sixth of August, 1886 ; repeated by invitation at Norwood Insti- 
 tute Hall, in the city of Washington, on the thirteenth of April, 1888 ; 
 and subsequently, in the hall of the House of Delegates of West Vir- 
 ginia, in the city of Charleston.
 
 168 HOUR CLASS SERIES. 
 
 Ireland remained essentially Irish. You have 
 heard much of the Penal Code. Its provisions 
 were perhaps never equalled in any country, bar- 
 barous or civilized, for systematic cruelty and 
 oppression.-*-It is not denied that any priest who 
 remained for three days in Ireland, without at- 
 tending Protestant worship, was to be put to 
 death as a felon ; that the priests could not cele- 
 brate mass under heavy penalties ; that no Cath- 
 olic could send his child to a Catholic school in 
 Ireland; neither could he send him abroad for 
 education, under penalties still heavier; he could 
 not attend mass ; he could not keep Catholic rel- 
 ics or books of worship, and his house might be 
 searched for such articles by any magistrate ; he 
 could not go beyond the sea without license from 
 the king ; should he convert a Protestant, he was 
 to suffer death as a felon. All Catholics must 
 cause their children to be baptized by Protestant 
 clergymen ; they must attend Protestant worship ; 
 they were disabled from important or liberal em- 
 ployments ; from keeping arms in their houses, 
 from maintaining suits at law, from being execu- 
 tors, administrators, or guardians, from practis- 
 ing law or medicine, from holding offices, civil 
 or military. They could not travel more than 
 five miles from home, without a license from the 
 king ; if they were required to renounce their re- 
 ligion, and refused, they were liable to be ordered 
 to abjure the realm, and if they did not depart,
 
 DANIEL O'CONNELL. 169 
 
 or, having departed, returned, were to suffer 
 death ; they could not hold, possess, nor inherit 
 land ; their lands to be inherited by the nearest 
 Protestant relative ; any son being (or professing 
 to be) converted to Protestantism, took the whole 
 inheritance. 
 
 These were some of the provisions of the Penal 
 Code, as it existed in the eighteenth century.. 
 Under it, the Catholic Irish, composing almost 
 the entire aboriginal population, and four-fifths 
 of the whole, were made aliens in their own coun- 
 try, and were at the same time prohibited from 
 going abroad. ' Sydney Smith denounced this 
 code, as " the most cruel and atrocious system of 
 persecution ever instituted by one religious per- 
 suasion against another" ; while Edmund Burke 
 characterized it as "a truly barbarous system, 
 where all the parts are an outrage on humanity 
 and the rights of nature. "I It is true that in the 
 latter part of the eighteenth century, the code, 
 after an obdurate struggle, was somewhat ame- 
 liorated. Its coarser and more brutal features 
 were mollified, but many humiliating and insult- 
 ing disabilities were still preserved. / The Cath- 
 olic freeholders could vote, but they were still 
 disqualified to hold any office, from lord lieuten- 
 ant down to gamekeeper. They were excluded 
 practically from the juries, and from all the mu- 
 nicipalities ; they could not bear arms, nor keep 
 nor expose them for sale; they could not be
 
 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 king's counsel, sergeant, nor attorney-at-law. It 
 was this disqualification in tailorhood government 
 not to be able to wear a silk gown at the bar 
 which bore most hardly upon Daniel O'Connell 
 at the commencement of his career, before he 
 had reached a height of renown where all tailors, 
 gown-makers, and court-embroiderers were as 
 powerless to exaggerate or exalt him, as Phidias 
 or Praxiteles to embellish the front of Mt. Athos. 
 ^hAnd, if possible, worse than the civil disabilities 
 of the code was the Tithe Oppression, whereby 
 the population were compelled to contribute an 
 enormous tax to sustain a church which nine 
 tenths of them despised, and to support a set of 
 English or worse than English vicars and rectors 
 without parishioners, and too often without re- 
 ligion. By what ingenious devices and methods 
 this iniquitous tax was made to bear almost ^x 
 clusively upon the humble cottager and poor 
 laborer, it is not important to inquire. The fact, 
 however is beyond controversy.!^*- 
 
 The Irish Dissenters, though much more highly 
 favored, were not better reconciled to this system, 
 nor more loyal, than the Catholics themselves. 
 At one time a small government provision (rcgi- 
 um donum) was made for Presbyterian ministers 
 This was afterwards abolished, and the sect that 
 clearly saw the injustice of being themselves 
 compelled to contribute to the Established 
 Church, could not understand why Catholics
 
 DANIEL O'CONNELL. i;i 
 
 should be relieved from sustaining the Dissent- 
 ing ministry. In fact, wherever Ireland was 
 concerned, the very demon of inconsistency 
 seemed to pervade every order of religious be- 
 lief. Swift the Churchman, Lucas the Baptist, 
 John Wesley the Methodist, Wilberforce the Phi- 
 lanthropist all of these great and patriotic men 
 foamed at the mouth with the very froth and 
 rabies of religious madness, at the proposition 
 that an Irish priest should be permitted, on his 
 own soil, to say mass in an Irish barn to a native 
 Irish Catholic assembly, without incurring the 
 penalty of death, or branding on the cheek 
 The result of all these years of tyranny and 
 persecution, religious, and political, culminated 
 in "the Protestant Revolt" of 1798. That ended 
 in the Legislative Union. After this, Daniel 
 O Connell. 
 
 At the age of twenty-five, about the beginning 
 of the present century, he made his first political 
 speech. It was in favor of the repeal of the 
 Legislative Union, and contained, also, the great 
 principle of absolute Religious Liberty. Edu- 
 cated at French Catholic colleges (St. Omers and 
 Douay), O' Connell certainly did not derive this 
 principle from his own church, which had prac- 
 tised on the Continent all of the persecutions 
 from which it suffered in Great Britain. I know 
 that the impression is frequently sought to be 
 made that his inspiration was from Italy, and not
 
 172 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 from Ireland that he was less a patriot than a 
 religious enthusiast. The misfortune is that this 
 impression has been cultivated as sedulously by 
 some of his friends, as by a majority of his ene- 
 mies, the latter framing an indictment in the 
 same language which the former employ to indite 
 a eulogy. On the one hand, Father Burke tells 
 us that O'Connell "derived his genius, his 
 strength, his greatness from the Catholicity that 
 was in him." While, upon the other part, Mr. 
 Lecky says: "O'Brien looked mainly to the in- 
 terests of his country; O'Connell to the interest 
 of his church." Now, from this estimate of his 
 motives, we must appeal from friend and enemy, 
 from priest and schismatic, Jp O'Connell himself. 
 
 There was a religion in O' Council's methods 
 above the recognition of all sectarianism, and as 
 much superior to Philip and Mary, or John 
 Knox, or Bishop Aylmer, as the Sermon on the 
 Mount is to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, 
 or the Test Act of 1673. 
 
 The advance in liberalism from the English 
 writ de heretico comburendo to Jefferson's Act of 
 Religious Liberty (1785), or from Bishop Cran- 
 mer's scheme of ecclesiastical laws, to the tenth 
 amendment of the constitution of the United 
 States, was, as it seems to me, greater than was 
 wrought by Martin Luther. 
 
 The Act of Jefferson reformed the Reforma- 
 tion itself. The other early American statutes
 
 DANIEL O'CONNELL. 
 
 173 
 
 for example, that of Lord Baltimore in Maryland 
 (1649), and the later one of the freemen and 
 planters of Pennsylvania (1682), were merely 
 toleration acts broad toleration acts, securing 
 " Christian liberty" to all denominations. But 
 Jefferson's act went further, and included not 
 only all sects but all religions, and all negations 
 of religion. It was intolerant of toleration itself 
 From it the word " Christian" was expressly 
 omitted. It was made broad enough to include 
 " the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Ma- 
 hommedan, the Hindoo and the Infidel." It was 
 as comprehensive as the universal reason of man- 
 kind. Now, up "to this very consummation of 
 complete religious liberty, marched the convic- 
 tions of the Great Liberator. Almost in the lan- 
 guage of Jefferson, he declares : " I go into Parlia- 
 ment for freedom for all men Jew and Gentile, 
 Heathen and Christian ; I would place no limit on 
 the human mind. But if the case were reversed, 
 if the Catholic sought this control over the relig- 
 ion of the Protestant, the Protestant should com- 
 mand my heart, my tongue, my arm, in opposi- 
 tion to so unjust, so insulting a measure. So 
 help me God! I would, in that case, not only 
 feel for the Protestant, and speak for him, but I 
 would fight for him, and cheerfully sacrifice my 
 life in defence of the great principle for which I 
 have ever contended the principle of UNIVERSAL 
 AND COMPLETE RELIGIOUS LIBERTY."
 
 174 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 "But, above all," cried he, "we are strong in 
 the justice of our cause, and in the unextinguish- 
 able right of man, in every soil and climate, to 
 unlimited Liberty of Conscience." 
 
 Again : " The man is a tyrant who interferes 
 between the conscience of his brother-man and 
 his God." 
 
 " It is an insult to reason, an invasion of natural 
 liberty, to say to any man, he is merely tolerated 
 in worshipping his God as he shall think fit." 
 
 " Let us rather endeavor to amalgamate the 
 Catholic, the Protestant, the Presbyterian, the 
 Dissenter, the Methodist, the Quaker, into the 
 Irishman." 
 
 The truth is, O'Connell was truer to his Church 
 than the Church was to herself. He made her 
 the Mother of Liberty. So, also, was he truer to 
 the English constitution, than were the English 
 themselves. In agitating for Catholic Emancipa- 
 tion, he sought to awake the constitution from 
 the nightmare of Puritan intolerance, which had 
 been succeeded by the delirium of the Restora- 
 tion. "Before the Rebellion" (of Cromwell), 
 says Mr. Yonge, " no one was excluded from the 
 English Parliament on account of his religion." 
 
 " And so, of this measure (Catholic emancipa- 
 tion), as it was now carried (1829), it will appar- 
 ently be correct to say, that though it did make 
 an important change in the practical working of 
 the constitution, it made it only by reverting to
 
 DANIEL O CONNELL. 175 
 
 the fundamental principles of civil and religious 
 liberty to which every subject had a right." 
 
 Mr. Hallam is quite clear that Ireland was 
 as much entitled o the common law, to Magna 
 Charta, and to the constitution, as was England 
 herself.* 
 
 As the price of Catholic Emancipation, it was 
 at one time (1814) proposed to give the crown 
 the power of confirming or rejecting the pon- 
 tifical nominations for the prelacy of Ireland. 
 This was known, in Irish politics, as the question 
 of "the veto." Among the controversialists, Dr. 
 Milner, and among the patriots, Grattan, Plun- 
 ket, and Fingal, were all vetoists. O'Connell 
 opposed them all, and triumphed. The same 
 unbending- and uncompromising purpose that 
 finally_cgnjC[ueredJWellington,not^ only resisted 
 Grattan,_Fingal, and Milner, butjconfronted the 
 Pope Jijmself with a denial of his right to intej- 
 fere. 
 
 The question of " the veto" was not, in the es- 
 timation of O'Connell, purely a religious ques- 
 tion, nor by any means, mainly such. It was 
 essentially a political question. 
 
 Had it been entirely ecclesiastical, he would 
 have yielded to the Pope, who favored it; but 
 being a blow aimed at religious liberty, an in- 
 tegral part of civil liberty, he denied the power 
 of the Holy See to interfere. 
 
 * 2 Hall. Const Hist. 547.
 
 1/6 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 "Let our determination never to assent," said 
 he, " reach Rome. It can be easily transmitted 
 there ; but even should it fail, I am still deter- 
 mined to resist. I am sincerely a Catholic, but I 
 am not a Papist. I deny the doctrine that the 
 Pope has any temporal authority, directly or in- 
 directly in Ireland ; we have all denied that au- 
 thority on oath, and we would die to resist it. 
 He cannot, therefore, be any party to the act of 
 Parliament we solicit, nor shall any act of Parlia- 
 ment regulate our faith or conscience." 
 
 Thus true to his watchwords, absolute Relig-- 
 ious Liberty, without compromise, did the Great 
 Liberator lead on the fight for fifteen years 
 longer, until he finally succeeded in wresting 
 from England the unqualified Emancipation Act 
 of 1829. 
 
 A triumph still greater than his defeat of the 
 veto, was that he succeeded in turning the Dis- 
 senters of Ireland over to the banner of Catholic 
 Emancipation. 
 
 In 1641, General Lucas Taafe, the gallant de- 
 fender of Ross, before surrendering, attempted to 
 stipulate for liberty of conscience. " I meddle 
 with no man's conscience," Cromwell answered, 
 " but if by liberty of conscience you mean liberty 
 to exercise the mass, I judge it best to use plain 
 dealing, and let you know that, where the Parlia- 
 ment of England has power, that will not be 
 allowed."
 
 DANIEL O'CONNELL. 177 
 
 This answer Mr. Froude* applauds ; but before 
 an American audience, in this year of our Lord 
 1886, one had as well undertake to defend human 
 sacrifice. The age of the Druids, thank God, is 
 over! 
 
 One of the causes of complaint urged by the 
 Regicides against Charles I. was "the lenity 
 shown to convicted priests, who, though liable to 
 capital punishment, had been suffered to escape 
 with a very short imprisonment;" and Mr. Hai- 
 lam tells us that " not merely from their own ex- 
 clusive bigotry, but from a political alarm, by no 
 means ungrounded, the Presbyterians stood firm- 
 ly against all liberty of conscience." Now, it was 
 the pride and glory of O'Connell not only to 
 defy the Pope, when attempting to assert tem- 
 poral power ; not only to defeat the whole English 
 Hierarchy, when arrayed against liberty of con- 
 science ; but also to convert the Irish and Scotcn 
 Presbyterians from the traditions of two cen- 
 turies of intolerance and bigotry into friends and 
 advocates of Catholic toleration. In a letter to 
 the Catholics of Ireland in 1819, he wrote: "But 
 the third and best cause of our gratitude remains 
 to be told. It is to be found in the conduct of 
 the Protestants of Ireland; all that Ireland can 
 boast of Protestant rank, fortune, talent, and in- 
 dependence, came forward to assert on our behalf 
 the great principle of Religious Liberty." 
 
 * L Froude, ''English in Ireland," 127. 
 12
 
 178 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 Many Dissenters signed the monster petitions 
 to Parliament, and others enrolled themselves in 
 the Catholic Association. 
 
 Thus O'Connell carried forward the great 
 movement over ministers, Pitt, Perceval, Can- 
 ning, Peel, and Wellington; over the viceroys 
 and secretaries; over the Commons; over the 
 Lords ; over the King until, finally, the contest 
 culminated in the passage of the Emancipation 
 Act of 1829. 
 
 This act was passed in the Commons, almost 
 unanimously, and in the Lords by a majority of 
 104, in a total vote of 322. On the i3th of April 
 it received the royal signature (1829). 
 
 Thus was this great Act consummated on the 
 anniversary of the birth of Thomas Jefferson, 
 the author of the first statute of unqualified relig- 
 ious liberty a statute which remains as an en- 
 during monument to its author, only incomplete 
 in that it is all inscription, and must seek for its 
 imperishable marble in the grateful bosoms of 
 each succeeding generation of freemen. 
 
 Daniel O'Connell was not only the friend of 
 universal religious liberty, but he was, intus et in 
 cute, a Democrat, that is to say, a believer in the 
 ultimate sovereignty of the people. 
 
 Although educated under foreign auspices 
 and sacerdotal influences, unfriendly, perhaps, 
 to popular liberty, he was by nature a Dem- 
 ocrat.
 
 DANIEL O'CONNELL. 179 
 
 Cries Victor Hugo: " Le peuple est une mer 
 aiissi!" (The people, too, are a sea!) 
 
 From the outset of his political career, O'Con- 
 nell embarked his fortunes upon this popular sea, 
 with compass to the polar star of " the rights and 
 liberties of the people." Said Fitzgerald, his 
 opponent for County Clare at O' Council's first 
 election to Parliament, " I have polled the gentry 
 to a man !" 
 
 But O'Connell had polled the people, and into 
 Parliament he went, the first Catholic elected to 
 the Commons for more than one hundred and 
 fifty years.* 
 
 When the Emancipation Bill was passed, Parlia- 
 ment had the bad grace to accompany it with dis- 
 franchisement of the forty-shilling freeholders. 
 "This," says Mr. Yonge, "was the first and only 
 act since the Revolution, restricting the fran- 
 chise, "f 
 
 O'Connell met these restrictionists with a doc- 
 trine of political ethics, which he frequently 
 avowed " that every man had a natural right to 
 vote!" 
 
 Soon afterwards, came the great civic revolu- 
 tion introduced by the Reform Bill of 1832. 
 O'Connell was among its staunchest supporters, 
 and it was universally conceded that without his 
 assistance and the Irish vote which he wielded, 
 the bill could not have gone through.^: In 1838 
 
 * 1828. * Yonge, 281. * Lecky, 278.
 
 180 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 he laid down his platform : " The four principles 
 of our new agitation are, ist, complete corporate 
 reform; 2d, extension of the suffrage; 3d, total 
 abolition of compulsory church support; 4th, 
 adequate representation in Parliament." 
 
 These doctrines at that day (1838), were de- 
 nounced as revolutionary, and their agitation 
 constituted that " wild movement for radical re- 
 form," for which Lecky condemns O'Connell. 
 But let the event decide between the Agitator 
 and his accusers. The Corporate reform has 
 come ; Suffrage is extended ; compulsory Church 
 support is, in Ireland, a thing of the past. Thus, 
 has time pronounced with solemn arbitrament 
 and historic emphasis, in favor of the agitation 
 of the great Reformer, who foreshadowed at the 
 beginning of the century these beneficent reforms 
 which have marked its progress, and will adorn 
 its close. 
 
 When Lord Mayor of Dublin, he was snubbed 
 by the Government, as according to custom, 
 he ought to have been made a baronet. All Ire- 
 land felt the slight which had been put upon her 
 favorite son, and her citizens proposed to resent 
 it by according an ovation to the Liberator on his 
 return from England. This mortified him that 
 it should enter into any Irish head to suppose 
 that a title possessed in his eyes any value. 
 "Why then," wrote he "why then, I do ask it, 
 should my friends mix up my name with titles
 
 DANIEL O'CONNELL. l8l 
 
 and matters of that description?" The office of 
 Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer became 
 vacant. It was tendered to O'Connell. Or did 
 he prefer the Master of the Rolls, the choice of 
 that was offered him (1832). " No," said he: "I 
 dreamed a day-dream was it a dream? that 
 Ireland still wanted me." 
 
 In this country and at this day, it is almost im- 
 possible to imagine the extent of the temptation or 
 the value of the sacrifice in declining these offices. 
 
 The whole Anglo-Irish government was built, 
 and from the earliest times had rested upon an 
 elaborate, premeditated, and recognized system 
 of simony, bribery, rewards, pensions, and titles. 
 Dublin Castle was the centre around which re- 
 volved a whole planetary system of honors and 
 emoluments, beyond the illumination of which 
 all was darkness and obscurity. Grattan had 
 been pronounced the only unpurchased orator. 
 Flood, Fitzgerald, Ponsonby, Castlereagh, Can- 
 ning, Plunket, Saurin, Shiel O my God! where 
 shall we end this list, which, with few excep- 
 tions, might be pronounced the death-roll of Irish 
 honor? Reviled, ridiculed, bellowed down in 
 Parliament, " the best-abused man in Europe" 
 one thing remained to be tried by the Govern- 
 ment to silence O'Connell: he must be bought! 
 Every tailor in Ireland must go to work to fix 
 him up a gown as Chief Baron, or Master of the 
 Rolls.
 
 1 82 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 The experiment failed. O'Connell could not 
 be bribed. They had as well have gone about 
 to measure for a gown one of their old Norse 
 giants, or sent their tailors to draw their tape- 
 lines about the rock-loined girth of old Scarig, or 
 Holyhead, where they plant their everlasting 
 feet in the suds of the sea, and lift their giant 
 heads into the tumultuous clouds of an Irish sky ! 
 Another unpurchasable orator had been born in 
 Ireland, who could not be tempted by a place, a 
 peerage, or a pension. "Yes," replied he, "I 
 will take a bribe and my bribe is a Repeal of 
 the Union!"* 
 
 As an Irish Democrat, O'Connell believed in 
 the ultimate sovereignty of the people, as recog- 
 nized by the glorious Revolution of 1688; that 
 royalty was a trust, and rulers responsible for 
 their good faith; that every subject who paid 
 tribute and allegiance to the government, was 
 entitled to representation and to a vote in the 
 election of its administrators. ' He was, never- 
 theless, an admirer and supporter of the British 
 constitution, because founded on the will of the 
 English people, and best adapted to their own 
 circumstances and history. "We are partial," 
 said he, " to a legitimate and well-modelled mon- 
 archy in an hereditary line, and we, at the same 
 time, reverence the majesty of the people. 
 While we bear a true allegiance to the British 
 
 * 2. Daunt, 64.
 
 DANIEL O'CONNELL. 183 
 
 constitution, we will say that life is not worth 
 enjoyment without the blessings of freedom." 
 
 Thus we see that O'Connell was a universal 
 Democrat. He recognized the ultimate sover- 
 eignty of the people everywhere. 
 
 But beyond question, the crowning glory of 
 Daniel O'Connell's career consisted in his great 
 doctrine of Pacific Agitation. It was this doc- 
 trine which gave him rank as a discoverer, and 
 the author of a new dispensation in the religion 
 of political life, which is even now slowly, but 
 surely, working out the redemption of Ireland, 
 the progress of which is retarded only when its 
 spirit is violated, and its precepts departed from. 
 To transfer the battle from the plane of brute force 
 to that of reason and conscience ; to throw upon 
 its legally constituted conservators and guardians 
 the responsibility for any breach of the peace ; to 
 cause the self-restraint of the multitude to im- 
 peach the impatience of judicial tribunals, to 
 assemble a nation in tents, and make the rostrum 
 greater than the barricade ; to raise up walls of 
 defence around ancient liberties by a voice more 
 musical than Amphion's golden lyre, which 
 raised the walls of Thebes ; this was the great 
 triumph of Daniel O'Connell. 
 
 Between Wolfe Tone and John Mitchell ; be-" 
 tween Robert Emmett and Smith O'Brien; 
 between '98 and '48, he raised up by the inspira- 
 tion of this gospel of pacific agitation the mag-
 
 184 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 nificent continent of Emancipated Ireland, like a 
 beautiful island risen out of the sea. 
 
 Modern historians and philosophers may talk 
 of "the froth of oratory," and the decline of the 
 power of eloquence ; nevertheless, a great orator 
 with a great thought behind him is still the most 
 potential engine of truth which this planet can 
 set in motion. The pen is mightier than the 
 sword, but the tongue is greater than the pen. 
 
 From Socrates to the Saviour of mankind; 
 from Pericles to Patrick Henry; from Demos- 
 thenes to Daniel O'Connell, eloquence spoken 
 thought has ruled the world! The voice of 
 Daniel O'Connell in behalf of liberty and against 
 violence was needed for all ages. It was an 
 everlasting tocsin and an eternal protest. It was 
 to oratory what the Marseillaise is to song. 
 Nay, it surpassed the hymn of France, because 
 its immortal refrain was not "To Arms, "but "to 
 the tribunal of Reason," which is first peaceable, 
 and in time omnipotent. 
 
 Cried he at the monster meeting of Mullagh- 
 mast (1843) ^1'Ireland! l an d of my forefathers, 
 how my mind expands and my spirit walks abroad 
 in something of majesty, when I contemplate the 
 high qualities, inestimable virtues, the true pu- 
 rity and piety, and religious fidelity of the inhab- 
 itants of your green fields and productive moun- 
 tains. 
 
 " Oh ! my friends, it is a country worth dying
 
 DANIEL O'CONNELL. 185 
 
 for; but above all it is a country worth being 
 tranquil, determined, submissive, and docile for. 
 Disciplined as you are in obedience to those who 
 are breaking the way, and trampling down the 
 barriers between you and your constitutional lib- 
 erty, I will see every man of you having a vote, 
 and every man protected by the ballot from the 
 agent or the landlord. I will see labor protected, 
 and every title to possession recognized. 
 
 " When you are industrious and honest, I will 
 see prosperity again throughout your land. The 
 busy hum of the shuttle and the tinkling of the 
 smithy shall be heard again. We shall see the 
 nailer employed, even until the middle of the 
 night, and the carpenter covering himself with 
 his chips. I will see prosperity in all its grada- 
 tions spreading through a happy, contented, re- 
 ligious land. I will hear the hymns of a happy 
 people go forth at sunrise to God in praise of His 
 mercies, and I shall see the evening sun set amid 
 the uplifted hands of a religious and free popu- 
 lation. Every blessing that man can bestow and 
 religion can confer upon the faithful heart, shall 
 be spread throughout the land. Stand by me 
 join with me I will say, be obedient to me and 
 Ireland shall be free !" - 
 
 None of the prophets among men has spoken 
 to his countrymen nobler or more inspiring 
 words than these ! 
 
 This pouring out of the Spirit of Liberty upon
 
 1 86 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 a downtrodden people, trained in the faith of 
 perfect obedience to all lawful authorities, con- 
 stituted the new political religion in Ireland the 
 dispensation of O'Connell. How he scorned and 
 spat upon their senseless factions, and oathbound, 
 secret, treasonable organizations : their " Peep 
 o' Day Boys," and "White Boys," and "Ribbon 
 Men," and bloody Orange Lodges. All of these 
 were an abomination to O'Connell, as indeed to 
 the God that made and inspired him. He wished 
 to see those distinctions which had been the bane 
 of his country, sunk in the single name of Irish- 
 man. In a letter to the people of Ireland (1824), 
 he says : " We do not come to tell you that you 
 have no grievances to complain of, or that there 
 are no oppressions to be redressed. We are sorry 
 to be obliged to admit that you have just cause 
 of complaint, and that there exist many and bit- 
 ter grievances which ought to be redressed. But 
 we most solemnly assure you that secret and 
 illegal societies that Ribbonism, and White- 
 boyism, and violence, and outrage, and crime, 
 have always increased the quantity of misery and 
 oppression in Ireland, and never produced any 
 relief, or mitigation of the suffering of the 
 people." 
 
 A peaceable, determined, unanimous people, 
 sublimely calm and patient, but as unalterable in 
 purpose as a law of nature this was the Ireland 
 of Daniel O'Connell.
 
 DANIEL O'CONNELL. l8/ 
 
 His philosophy was that the constant reitera- 
 tion of truth,* in season and out of season the 
 ceaseless agitation for justice provided it can be 
 restrained within the bounds of order and author- 
 ity, must in the end prevail. 
 
 "It is not sufficient," said he, "once or twice, 
 or ten, or fifty times to meet this enemy, False- 
 hood, or vindicate our friend, Truth. Will the 
 gentlemen contend that Falsehood and Delusion 
 are all powerful, Candor and Truth vain and im- 
 potent ? In the first encounter, they may be de- 
 feated by proud and overbearing and stupid 
 prejudice, I admit; but Candor and Truth have in 
 them a reviving principle ; and returning again 
 and again to the contest, they must ultimately 
 prevail. I, therefore, rely on the force of Truth." 
 
 ^hese JL _tlien A jwere the elements of O'Connell's 
 agitation : First, correct and sound political prin- 
 ciples ; associationstTToroughly organized, sitting 
 with open halls, for remonstrance, appeal, peti- 
 tion, discussion, and education of popular opin- 
 ion ; mass meetings addressed by eloquent and 
 determined patriots ; voluntary contributions by 
 the people to sustain the press and carry forward 
 the work; overall, like a rainbow over the sea, 
 the arc of self-restraint, order and submission to 
 authority. 
 
 After the success of the Emancipation bill, the 
 primary object of his agitation was the repeal of 
 
 * i. Daunt, 224.
 
 1 88 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 the Legislative Union. Mr. Fronde, who de- 
 lights in historical paradox and peremptory judg- 
 ments, - informs us quite dogmatically that, 
 "O'Connell was not sincere about Repeal; he 
 knew that in his day, at least, it would never 
 be." O'Connell did not, and could not, know 
 anything of the sort. A careful study of his own 
 utterances would have saved a doubt upon this 
 subject, and would have carried more thorough 
 conviction than the elaborate vindication of his 
 sincerity by Mr. Lecky. 
 
 In the Hall of the Royal Exchange, Dublin, in 
 January, 1800, he made his first political speech, 
 amid the clanging of the English musket, as the 
 soldiery grounded arms on the flag-stones of the 
 building. This speech was against the Union. It 
 and the resolutions adopted on the same occasion, 
 were framed to meet the overtures of Pitt, who 
 made to the Catholics of Ireland those delusive 
 promises of emancipation which he afterwards 
 signally failed to redeem. 
 
 In 1810, in the same hall, he addressed an 
 aggregate meeting of freemen and freeholders : 
 "Let the most timid amongst us," said he, 
 "compare the present probability of repealing 
 the Union, with the prospect that in the year 
 1795 existed of that measure being ever brought 
 about. Who, in 1795, thought a Union possible? 
 Pitt dared to attempt it, and he succeeded ; it only 
 requires the resolution to attempt its repeal in
 
 DANIEL O'COXXKLL. 189 
 
 fact, it requires only to entertain the hope of re- 
 pealing it, to make it impossible that the Union 
 should continue; but that pleasing hope can 
 never exist whilst the infernal dissensions on the 
 score of religion are kept up. " 
 
 Again he said to his constituents of the County 
 Clare: "The Repeal of the Union, I may be 
 asked shall I be able to effect this? Who would 
 be believed, if, two years ago, he should have 
 been hazardous enough to say that this day I 
 would stand the unquestioned representative of 
 the County of Clare ?'L^ 
 
 I might continue these interpretations of 
 O'Connell from his own lips, until no candid 
 mind, if sane, should doubt his sincerity in the 
 effort to repeal the act of Legislative Union. As 
 for the actual probabilities of his success, had he 
 been properly supported by his own countrymen, 
 it now seems reasonably certain that a Federal 
 Union, with domestic self-government, would 
 have been accomplished in his own life-time. 
 
 Immediately after his release from imprison- 
 ment,* upon the reversal of the Irish Court 
 of Queen's Bench by the House of Lords, the 
 Whigs, it is said, made overtures for an alliance 
 with him, on the basis of an Irish domestic Par- 
 liament and a Federal Union. That he was will- 
 ing to meet them half-way appears from his own 
 letters. But as we learn from O'Niell Daunt, every 
 
 * Cusack, 701. Lecky, 290. 2. Daunt, chap. 14, p. 220.
 
 I QO HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 Impracticable in Ireland (including Daunt him- 
 self), was aroused to bitter opposition to the plan, 
 until the Young Irelanders walked out of Concor- 
 dia Hall, and the Great Liberator exclaimed in an- 
 guish of spirit : " I am opposed by one-half of my 
 friends and deserted by the other half."* It was 
 this that broke his heart. It was this that clouded 
 his intellect with "inexpressible sadness." It 
 was this that caused his physicians to prohibit 
 the mention of the name of Ireland in his pres- 
 ence. When to patriotic anxiety, and imprison- 
 ment, were added desertion and insubordination, 
 the work was done. But had the O'Connell of 
 '43 been the O'Connell of '23, it seems morally 
 certain that the same statesmanship that liber- 
 ated the Catholics of Ireland would have estab- 
 lished a greater Irish Parliament than Pitt and 
 Castlereagh dissolved, and would have converted 
 their Legislative Union into a Federal Union 
 greater than that which they established. 
 
 Before closing the subject of the Repeal Agita- 
 tion, I must direct your attention to the Monster 
 Meetings. 
 
 Whether we view these through the magnifi- 
 cent descriptive powers of Mr. Lecky, or in the 
 .light of the testimony of eye-witnesses, such as 
 Henry Giles and O'Neill Daunt, we are forced 
 to conclude that history has presented no such 
 astonishing phenomena since John the Baptist 
 
 "1844.
 
 DANIEL O'COXNELL. 19! 
 
 went out in the Wilderness, " followed by a great 
 multitude." I am entirely afraid to speak of the 
 numbers of people who assembled in the open air 
 to listen to O'Connell at Tara, at Mullaghmast, 
 or at Clontarf . Is it credible that a multitude 
 greater than the population of West Virignia 
 should assemble in an out-door meeting to listen to 
 O'Connell as he described the wrongs of Ireland, 
 and preached her deliverance ; that there should 
 be no drunkenness, no tumult, no shillelahs, no 
 accidents ; and that all the spies of England should 
 find no greater disturbance to report, than that 
 the receding tide of the human sea did actually 
 sweep away, at Carlow, one old woman's ginger- 
 bread stall ! 
 
 If this is history, it is indeed stranger than 
 fiction, and is calculated to cast a gloom over our 
 own prosaic and commercial times, and make us 
 exclaim with Coleridge, "O! for a great man 
 with a principle behind him!" 
 
 In 1840, O'Connell addressed 50,000 at Ennis. 
 at Limerick 100,000, and* at Leinster 200,000. 
 In 1843, there were held thirty monster meetings 
 in six months. At Tara, there were assembled 
 1,000,000, and at Mullaghmast, 400,000. It was 
 at the latter place that he uttered the words 
 which gave the attorney-general, Saurin, a pre- 
 text for his arrest, trial, and conviction under the 
 Conspiracy Act. 
 
 O'Connell had now nearly reached the limit
 
 IQ2 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 of threescore and ten allotted to man's useful- 
 ness. 
 
 The prospect of Repeal was for the time reced- 
 ing under the combined influence of English 
 prosperity and Irish fatuity. The people, under 
 the insubordination and delusions of the " Young 
 Irelanders," were slipping away from him. 
 Famine was stalking abroad in his beloved Ire- 
 land. His trial gave him an opportunity to close 
 his career, by a forensic effort worthy of himself 
 and his cause. It also gave the House of Lords 
 an opportunity to vindicate the English system 
 of jurisprudence, as superior, with all its defects, 
 to that of the Continent, or of more absolute gov- 
 ernments. For, if a jury of Ireland could be 
 found to convict the noblest of her sons, an 
 English tribunal was also found to liberate Eng- 
 land's most powerful accuser and denouncer. 
 
 Though his imprisonment terminated his own 
 career, yet as the blood of the martyrs is the seed 
 of the church, so from the wrath of Mullaghmast, 
 and the walls of Richmond jail, have germinated 
 all of his great principles, until even now they 
 seem capable of bearing the fruit of that regu- 
 lated and rational liberty for which he struggled. 
 
 "I do not stand here," said he, "my own 
 client. I have clients of infinitely more impor- 
 tance. My clients in this case are the Irish peo- 
 ple, my client is Ireland, and I stand here the 
 advocate of the rights and liberties and constitu-
 
 DANIEL O'CONNELL. 193 
 
 tional privileges of that people. My only anx- 
 iety is that their sacred cause their right to in- 
 dependent legislation should be in the slightest 
 degree tarnished or impeded by anything in 
 which I have been the instrument. I am con- 
 scious of the integrity of my purpose; I am 
 conscious of the purity of my motives ; I am con- 
 scious of the inestimable value of the object I 
 had in view the Repeal of the Union." 
 
 Again he said : " It has been proved to you that 
 this maxim received universal acceptation among 
 us : that the man who commits a crime gives strength 
 to the enemy! This sentiment was printed upon 
 flags and banners ; it was attached to all our doc- 
 uments ; it was inscribed upon our platform, and 
 painted on the walls of the Agitation. It was 
 universally acknowledged among us, as the car- 
 dinal maxim of our political lives." 
 
 Once more : " You have heard again and again 
 of my assertion that the most desirable of all polit- 
 ical ameliorations were purchased at too dear a price, 
 if obtained at the expense of human blood. That is 
 the principle of my political career; and if I 
 stand prominent among men for anything, it is 
 for the fearless and unceasing announcement of 
 that principle." 
 
 Such, then, as I have sketched and illustrated 
 
 by quotations, were the principles of Daniel 
 
 jO^Connell: absolute religious liberty; universal 
 
 democracy, or the essential sovereignty of the 
 
 13
 
 iQ4 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 people; universal suffrage; free trade, and the 
 abolition of the Corn Laws; free juries, and the 
 abolition of test-oaths as qualifications upon suf- 
 frage, office, or employment. He was the bitter 
 opponent of Red Republicanism. Communism^ 
 Chartism, and all manner of unbalanced confra- 
 ternities based upon skepticism, or aimed at the 
 disintegration of the social fabric. He drove the 
 Chartists out of his associations, and thwarted 
 .their revolutionary designs in Ireland. All 
 political mixers of the glycerine of ignorance 
 with the nitric acid of revenge, constituting the 
 Dynamiters of his day, met in him their sternest 
 opponent. 
 
 His method as a reformer was pacific agita- 
 tion, which, as defined and limited by him, was 
 to the conflict between liberty and oppression, 
 what the invention of printing was to the battle 
 between learning and ignorance. Many of his 
 proposed reforms were regarded, in his own day, 
 as chimerical ; but said he : " The history of the 
 world is not yet over!" And as this history has 
 been unfolded, one by one, on its curtain, have 
 his cartoons revealed themselves: one by one 
 have they borne testimony to his wonderful ge- 
 nius and immortality of touch. How a historian 
 and dialectician, as able as Mr. Lecky, can doubt 
 his beneficent influence upon the destiny of Ire- 
 land seems beyond comprehension, and can only 
 be accounted for as the fruit of a Trinity College
 
 DANIEL O'CONNELL. 195 
 
 graft upon Irish stock, transplanted and culti- 
 vated in the atmosphere of a London fog. If 
 Ireland has realized any reforms at all during 
 the present century, they are undoubtedly attrib- 
 utable to the agitation of O'Connell. We must 
 measure his influence not by the result of Catho- 
 lic Emancipation alone, but by comparing the 
 policy and opinions of Lord John Russell, whom 
 he left in power in 1846, with those of Pitt, whom 
 he found in office in 1 800 ; and having compre- 
 hended the measure of this advance, let us com- 
 pare the views of Russell in '46 with those of 
 William E. Gladstone in '86, and it will be found 
 that the trend of public opinion upon Irish ques- 
 tions has been steadily forward towards the reali- 
 zation of those principles which Daniel O'Connell 
 first, among public men of his day, held forth 
 and maintained. Many of these principles, then 
 denounced as extreme and violent, have become 
 as universally accepted as the Copernican system. 
 There is a marked difference betwen the esti- 
 mates made of O'Connell before 1829, and those 
 made "after that date. The sketch of Mr. Richard 
 Lalor Shiel, made in 1823, is of O'Connell the 
 barrister simply, and has nothing of interest 
 about O'Connell the Liberator. "O'Connell's 
 style," says he, "is vigorous and copious, but 
 incorrect. The want of compactness in his peri- 
 ods, however, I attribute chiefly to inattention. 
 As to his general powers of eloquence, he rarely
 
 196 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 fails in a case admitting of emotion to make a 
 deep impression upon a jury ; and in a popular 
 assembly he is supreme." 
 
 In 1825, Shiel heard him in Free-Masons' Hall, 
 in London. Shiel followed him and failed. His 
 estimate of O'Connell's success before an English 
 audience may be regarded as not partial to the 
 speaker, but if anything the reverse. His de- 
 scription is photographic, without anything what- 
 ever chromatic about it. He tells us that O'Con- 
 nell spoke for three and a half hours, and carried 
 away with him not only the bulk of his hearers, 
 but made a most favorable impression upon " the 
 literary and English portion of the audience." 
 This was many years before O'Connell's fame 
 and power were at their height. Shelton Mc- 
 Kenzie, who heard him, says of him : " He has 
 been compared at times to the great orators 
 whom Ireland has produced, but he resembles 
 none of them singly. He has less imagination 
 than Curran, less philosophy than Burke, less 
 wit than Canning, less rhetoric than Shiel, less 
 classicality than Bush, less eloquence than 
 Plunket, less pathos than Grattan; but he had 
 more power than any of them."* When John 
 Randolph was in England, lie had daily access to 
 the House of Commons and to the House of 
 Lords. By order of Lord Londonderry himself, 
 
 * Shiel's Irish Bar, 222.
 
 DANIEL O'CONNELL. 197 
 
 he had the entree by the private entrance near 
 the throne. He was himself the most brilliant 
 speaker in Congress while there, a scholar of 
 cultivated taste, who had heard the finest orators 
 in Europe and America. When he heard Q'Con- 
 nell he exclaimed: "This is the man, these are 
 the lips, the most eloquent that speak English in 
 my day." Wendell Phillips heard him in Exeter 
 Hall, and was so intoxicated with his eloquence 
 that he loses his self-possession in his effort to 
 describe him. "Webster," says he, "could awe 
 a senate, Everett could charm a college, and 
 Choate cheat a jury ; Clay could magnetize the 
 millions, and Convin lead them captive; O'Con- 
 nell was Clay, Corwin, Choate, Everett, and 
 Webster in one." 
 
 Henry Giles heard him before a Scotch audi- 
 ence on Calton Hill, overlooking Edinburgh, 
 " where his triumph was as complete as it could 
 have been in Ireland, and more splendid in its 
 circumstances." The estimate of him on the 
 Continent was equally exalted. Montalembert, 
 Ventura, Lacordaire, have all testified to the 
 unrivalled power of his eloquence. Upon such 
 testimony, therefore, as ought to satisfy history, 
 I think we should have no difficulty in reaching 
 the conclusion that as an orator for the popular 
 assembly, O'Connell has had no equal since De- 
 mosthenes. For temporarily moving the mul- 
 titude, perhaps Henry or Otis was his equal ; but
 
 198 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 for permanently inspiring a people, no man but 
 Demosthenes was his rival. 
 
 Never was a role more difficult than O'Con- 
 nell's. Go as far as he might, he fell short of 
 the expectations of his own church, while, how- 
 ever moderate his demands, the Orange faction 
 and the advocates of Protestant ascendency 
 stood ready to commit him to the Tower. " Would 
 to God," he exclaims in a letter to Dr. McHale 
 of Tuam, " I could have your Grace and Dr. Mur- 
 ray understand each other." Later on the Young 
 Irelanders undertook to resuscitate the old doc- 
 trine of violence, which he had devoted his life 
 to eradicate from the Irish heart. Despite of 
 them, he held out. "I will not take," he said, 
 " nor allow to be taken, one step inconsistent 
 with law." 
 
 Just out of prison, he was applauded when he 
 entered the House of Commons; a radical re- 
 former and a Democrat, he received three votes 
 for the throne of Belgium ; a private subject, he 
 granted his autograph at the request of a King 
 whom he admired, but he refused it to an Em- 
 peror whom he despised ; a Roman Catholic, he 
 was endorsed by Dissenters, and embraced by 
 the Quakers; in an intemperate age, he was 
 strictly sober ; a convict, he was eulogized by the 
 judge who sentenced him ; the greatest pacifica- 
 tor of his age, he was bound over in two thou- 
 sand pounds to keep the peace ! Such was the
 
 DANIEL O'CONNELL. 199 
 
 strange, almost incredible career of Daniel 
 O'Connell, the Liberator, the Repealer, the Agi- 
 tator, the Orator, the Great Commoner, and the 
 Greatest Irishman. 
 
 NOTE. The full titles of the books referred to in the marginal refer- 
 ences are the following: " The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth 
 Century, by James Anthony Froude, M. A.;" 'Personal Recollections 
 of the late Daniel O'Connell, M. P., by William J. O'N. Daunt, Esq.;" 
 *' Life of Daniel O'Connell, the Liberator his times, political, social, and 
 religious, by Sister M. F. Cusack ;'* ''Sketches of the Irish Bar, by the 
 Rt. Hon. Richard Lalor Shiel, M. P., with Memoir and Notes, by R. 
 Shelton McKenzie, D. C. L.;" "Lectures and Essays on Irish and 
 Other Subjects, by Henry Giles;" "The Constitutional History of 
 England, by Henry Hallam," in two volumes; "The Constitutional 
 History of England, from 1760 to 1860, by Charles Duke Yonge, M. 
 A.;" "The Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland, by William Edward 
 Hartpole Lecky."
 
 A HISTORIC LANDMARK. 
 
 AMONG all the landmarks of old New York 
 there is scarcely one left that has so ancient 
 and eventful a history as the Hall of Records, or 
 Register's Office, in the City Hall Park. Long 
 before its massive marble and granite neighbors 
 which to-day overshadow it were dug out of the 
 bowels of the earth, when Broadway was but a 
 country road, the old pile known as the Hall of 
 Records lifted its head proudly over " the Fields," 
 the most substantial building of the ancient town. 
 Erected many years before the Revolution, as we 
 learn from Onderdonk's " Incidents of the British 
 Prisons and Prison Ships at New York," probably 
 about the middle of the last century, it became 
 the gloomy abode of debtors and criminals, and 
 was the second jail built in the city of New York. 
 Even under the colonial government the New 
 Jail, as it was called, with its bars and bolts, its 
 cells and grated windows, was a disgrace to that 
 age of despotism. Frequent notices in the pro- 
 vincial newspapers told of the sufferings of the 
 inmates. "The debtors confined in the gaol," 
 says Gaine's Gazette and Mercury of July 27, 1772, 
 " impressed with a grateful sense of the obliga-
 
 202 HOUR CLASS SKKIES. 
 
 tions they are tinder to the respectable public for 
 the generous contributions that have been made 
 for them, beg leave to return their sincere and 
 hearty thanks for the same, particularly to the 
 worshipful, the Corporation of the City of New 
 York, to the reverend, the clergy of the English, 
 Dutch and Presbyterian churches and their re- 
 spective congregations, by whose generous dona- 
 tions they have been comfortably supported dur- 
 ing the last winter, and preserved from perish- 
 ing in a dreary prison with hunger and cold." 
 But the dreary prison of that day was a haven of 
 delight to what it became in revolutionary times. 
 In the old maps of New York the New Jail oc- 
 cupies a prominent place. It appears in Mon- 
 tressor's plan of the City, showing the several 
 streets and public buildings surveyed in 1767, 
 and inscribed to his Excellency, Sir Henry 
 Moore, Governor of the Province of New York. 
 The land upon a part of which it stands was first 
 known as the Fields, afterward as the Common, 
 and finally as the Park. This land, probably as 
 famous a spot as any in American history, was 
 ceded to the city by Governor Dongan April 22, 
 1686, and a second cession to the city to remove 
 ambiguities was made by the Montgomerie 
 charter of February n, 1730. It has remained 
 ever since in the uninterrupted possession of the 
 Corporation of New York, and has always been 
 preeminently the property of the people. Here
 
 A HISTORIC LANDMARK. 203 
 
 they met to organize resistance to the Stamp Act 
 and to hang Governor Golden in effigy. Here 
 Alexander Hamilton, while yet a stripling of 
 seventeen, made his first speech in the cause of 
 freedom. Here General Lamb addressed a great 
 meeting called to denounce the Mutiny Act. 
 When Alexander McDougal, who wrote the 
 hand-bill for this meeting, was arrested and 
 lodged in the New Jail, the people rallied to his 
 support, and daily crowded the jail to express 
 their sympathy with him. The proceedings 
 against McDougal were printed on the forty-fifth 
 page of the Assembly Journal. Forty-five was 
 the watchword of the friends of John Wilkes. 
 On this occasion, to show their defiance of their 
 oppressors, the Sons of Liberty adopted the ca- 
 balistic phrase " Forty-five" as their own counter- 
 sign. The following item is from Hall's Journal 
 of February 15, 1770: "Yesterday the forty-fifth 
 day of the year, forty-five gentlemen, friends of 
 Captain McDougal and the glorious cause of 
 American liberty, went in decent procession to 
 the New Gaol and dined with him on forty-five 
 pounds of beefsteaks cut from a bullock of forty- 
 five months old." 
 
 The New Jail was the silent witness of many 
 a sharp battle around the liberty pole in the 
 Fields between the Sons of Liberty and the 
 emissaries of the King. Again and again was 
 the pole cut down by the soldiers; again and
 
 204 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 again did the people put up a new one. On the 
 1 7th of January, 1770, over 3,000 citizens assem- 
 bled in the Fields to denounce the minions of 
 the tyrant who had again approached by night 
 and cut down the cherished pole. Placards were 
 posted through the city on the next day scurril- 
 ously denouncing the Sons of Liberty and defy- 
 ing them to erect another pole. The people ral- 
 lied in the Fields, and a battle took place which 
 lasted for two days. The hardest fighting oc- 
 curred directly in front of the jail. The victory 
 remained with the patriots, and for the fifth 
 time, in spite of the Common Council which 
 refused permission, in spite of the soldiery who 
 sought by violence to prevent it, a liberty pole 
 was erected in the Fields. Wiley, Mott, Sears, 
 McDougal, John Lamb, Marinus Willett, and 
 many other well-known Sons of Liberty figured 
 in this battle, which according to the learned 
 antiquarian the late Henry B. Dawson, the 
 people of New York should never forget, as it 
 contributed in no small degree to prepare the 
 popular mind for the impending revolution. 
 
 Having witnessed such lively scenes during 
 colonial times, the New Jail was now about to 
 become an abode of cruelty and oppression which 
 entitles it to be known as the American Bastile. 
 Captain William Cunningham, British Provost 
 Marshal of New York during the revolutionary 
 war, or during the seven years that the enemy
 
 A HISTORIC LANDMARK. 205 
 
 occupied the city, took charge of the jail, which 
 was thereafter known as the Provost Jail. Gen- 
 eral Gage gave this man his appointment, and a 
 more cold-blooded villain did not come to the 
 surface during the whole struggle than Captain 
 Cunningham. Lossing says there is a tradition 
 that he was finally hung for his crimes at New- 
 gate, in England, but Bancroft, who examined 
 the records of that prison, could find no such 
 name. Cunningham's animosity to the Ameri- 
 cans was probably increased by his recollection 
 of the many sound beatings he got from the Sons 
 of Liberty in former bouts with fists and cudgels 
 in the Fields. In attempting to cut down a 
 liberty pole on the 6th of March, 1775, he had 
 been severely handled. He took refuge in an 
 outhouse, but was arrested and lodged in the 
 New Jail. All this no doubt rankled deeply, 
 and when afterwards he came to lord it over 
 American prisoners in the same prison where he 
 had been confined himself, he proved to be a 
 very monster of cruelty. 
 
 There were other places of confinement for the 
 patriots in the city, such as the Sugar House in 
 Liberty Street, the New or Middle Dutch Church 
 at Nassau and Cedar streets, the North Dutch 
 Church, etc., but the New Jail was especially re- 
 served for the more famous prisoners, for civil, 
 military, and naval rebels of particular note. 
 He who entered this dungeon left hope behind.
 
 206 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 Cunningham's quarters were on the right of the 
 main door. The guard room was on the opposite 
 side. The deputy's room was within the first 
 barricade. This was another precious rascal, 
 Keefe by name, fit associate of Cunningham. 
 The entrance was guarded night and day by 
 two sentinels. The first and second barricades, 
 grated, barred, and chained, were similarly 
 guarded ; as was also the rear door. Sentinels 
 were further stationed on the platform in front 
 of the grated door at the foot of the second flight 
 of stairs leading to the rooms and cells in the 
 second and third stories. When a prisoner, 
 escorted by a file of soldiers into the hall, was 
 delivered over to Cunningham, that petty despot 
 paraded the whole guard, then opened his record 
 book and demanded the name, rank, age, size, 
 etc. of his victim, which he duly entered, after 
 which arms gleamed, bars and bolts were un- 
 locked, chains clanked, and the prisoner was 
 marched to a dark cell, which closed on him 
 oftentimes for life, as many succumbed under 
 Cunningham's barbarities. The chief prisoners 
 were confined in the northeast chamber on the 
 second floor, which was derisively called " Con- 
 gress Hall." So closely were they crowded to- 
 gether here, that at night when they lay down 
 with aching bones on the hard floor, if they 
 wished to change position, they would turn all 
 of them at once by word of command, " Right
 
 A HISTORIC LANDMARK. 2O/ 
 
 left," being packed and wedged into an almost 
 solid mass of human bodies. In this horrible 
 den were immured at various times many distin- 
 guished American citizens and officers. If those 
 old walls could speak, what tales of agony and 
 torture they could disclose which were suffered 
 there by our forefathers over a hundred years 
 ago! 
 
 It was in this provost jail that the renowned 
 Ethan Allen, hero of Ticonderoga, was impris- 
 oned for eight months. Strange to say, his bi- 
 ographers have ignored the fact, and while the 
 provost jail is mentioned by them, for Allen 
 speaks of it by name in his "Narrative," where 
 and what the building was, its interesting and 
 gloomy history as a revolutionary bastile, were 
 facts about which his biographers are completely 
 silent. 
 
 After having been carried as a prisoner to 
 England, Allen was brought back and placed on 
 parole in New York, being restricted to the city 
 limits. While in this situation he was tempted 
 by General Howe with brilliant bribes of land in 
 Vermont and a high command in the British 
 army. "I replied," says Allen in his Narrative, 
 " that if by faithfulness I had recommended my- 
 self to General Howe, I should be loth by un- 
 faithfulness to lose the General's good opinion. 
 Besides that, I viewed the offer of land to be 
 similar to that which the devil offered to Christ
 
 208 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 when the damned soul had not one foot of land 
 upon earth. This closed the conversation, and 
 the gentleman turned from me with an air oi 
 dislike, saying that I was a bigot, upon which 1 
 retired to my lodgings." 
 
 Ethan Allen, not long after, was consigned to 
 the tender mercies of Captain Cunningham. 
 The gallant patriot was first cast into a cell, and 
 denied even bread and water for three days. 
 Then a piece of fat pork and a hard biscuit were 
 given to him, which he devoured as though they 
 were the most tempting viands. The late ven- 
 erable John Leveridge, who died at the age of 
 ninety-four, in the year 1886, had a fund of 
 anecdote about the Provost Jail and the distin- 
 guished prisoners there incarcerated. Mr. Lev- 
 eridge related to the present writer, who was 
 well acquainted with the old gentleman, a story 
 of Cunningham, who it seems was a hard drinker. 
 A prisoner was released and sent back a treat to 
 his fellow-sufferers. Cunningham, though not 
 invited, joined the circle, and addressing himself 
 too deeply to the jug, soon became very drunk. 
 He crawled or was dragged into the bunk of 
 Ethan Allen, having first dropped the key of the 
 bastile on the floor. The next morning, as his 
 stupor began to wear off, Cunningham rubbed 
 his eyes and looked around to find out where he 
 was. Seeing Allen there laughing at him and 
 pointing to the floor, he looked down, and was
 
 A HISTORIC LANDMARK. 209 
 
 thunderstruck to behold the key of the jail. 
 Thinking there had been a general jail delivery, 
 he started up and clutched his key in great 
 alarm. "Never fear, captain," said the gallant 
 Ethan Allen, " you were my guest last night, and 
 although there was the key to unlock the door 
 and walk out, I could not abuse the rights of 
 hospitality by escaping and leaving you here in 
 this plight." Cunningham begged Allen to say 
 nothing about it, snatched up his key, and re- 
 tired to sleep off his debauch in more comfort- 
 able quarters. Among the notable men confined 
 in the New Jail with him, Colonel Allen men- 
 tions Captain Travis of Virginia, " a gentleman 
 of high spirits," Judge John Fell of Bergen 
 County, New Jersey, William Miller of West- 
 chester County, New York, Colonel Otho Holland 
 Williams, Majors Brinton Payne and Levi Wells, 
 and Captains Vandyke (probably Van Zandt), 
 Randolph, and Flahaven. Once during his im- 
 prisonment Allen and Travis had a sharp fight, 
 and according to the account of it, afterwards re- 
 lated by the instructive Mr. John Pintard in his 
 interesting reminiscences of the gloomy den, the 
 redoubtable Vermonter was quite vanquished by 
 the fiery Virginian. When the fight was over, 
 the combatants again became good friends, and 
 so continued to the end. 
 
 After a long and wearing imprisonment Allen 
 was released and exchanged. He first visited 
 14
 
 210 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 General Washington at Valley Forge, by whom 
 he was received in the most friendly manner, 
 and then set out for Bennington, where he was 
 welcomed with unbounded manifestations of joy 
 by the Green Mountain Boys. 
 
 When the British evacuated New York on the 
 memorable 25th of November, 1783, it is said 
 that Cunningham was one of the last to leave the 
 city. He and his deputy lingered at the provost 
 jail until General Washington and his gallant 
 army had advanced down Chatham Street and 
 were entering Pearl Street. Then the two birds 
 of evil escaped from the jail and made off for the 
 ships. As they were leaving, some of the Brit- 
 ish convicts who were confined in the jail, cried 
 out, "What is to become of us?" "You may all 
 go to the devil together," said Keefe, throwing 
 the ponderous bunch of keys upon the floor and 
 hurrying off with Cunningham. 
 
 In the year 1831, the jail was converted into 
 the Hall of Records, and set apart for the accom- 
 modation of various officials of the city govern- 
 ment. The bell was removed and placed over 
 the Bridewell, which then stood in the Park, and 
 the bastile of the revolution was remodelled and 
 renovated from a dingy prison into a handsome 
 and imposing structure, with a portico and six 
 lofty columns ornamenting each end of the build- 
 ing. Massive and magnificent structures of gran- 
 ite and stone now tower up above it in the Park
 
 A HISTORIC LANDMARK. 2 I I 
 
 and adjacent streets, but this old eighteenth cen- 
 tury jail contains beneath its ancient roof to-day 
 the title-deeds to all the lands in the city of New 
 York, a deposit representing more value in dollars 
 and cents than is to be found in any other single 
 house in the civilized world. 
 
 J. F. McL.
 
 ORIGIN OF THE STAR SPANGLED 
 BANNER. 
 
 THE childhood of the present writer was passed 
 in a historic house at Upper Marlboro', 
 Maryland, the residence of his father from 1843 
 to 1850. It was a spacious, old-fashioned frame 
 house with many gables, situated at the north- 
 western end of the village, and afforded a fine 
 view of the surrounding country. Here lived, at 
 the time of our second war with Great Britain, 
 Dr. William Beanes, a distinguished citizen of 
 Maryland, and it was from this house he was 
 carried off by the enemy, who took him from 
 his bed* at night, hardly allowing him time to 
 put on his clothes, and subjected him to cruel 
 and unmerited treatment on board one of their 
 ships. 
 
 With the generous resolution of seeking at all 
 hazards his friend's release, and under an express 
 commission from President Madison, Francis 
 Scott Key visited the British squadron then lying 
 at the mouth of the Potomac, and about to get 
 under way for the attack on Baltimore. In a 
 letter to his mother dated Georgetown, Septem- 
 ber 2, 1814, Key said: " I am going in the morn-
 
 214 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 ing to Baltimore, to proceed in a flag- vessel to 
 General Ross. Old Doctor Beanes of Marlboro* 
 is taken prisoner by the enemy, who threaten to 
 carry him off. Some of his friends have urged 
 me to apply for a flag to go and try to procure 
 his release. I hope to return in about 8 to 10 days, 
 though it is uncertain, as I do not know where to 
 find the fleet."* The enemy detained Key as a 
 temporary prisoner pending the bombardment of 
 Fort McHenry. Their fierce attack and complete 
 repulse, which he thus witnessed, kindled the in- 
 spiration that found instant expression on the back 
 of a letter in that grandest of national anthems, the 
 Star Spangled Banner. It was a veritable battle- 
 hymn, conceived in the rapture of the strife, 
 and springing forth like another Pallas Athene 
 with a mighty war shout from the poet's teem- 
 ing brain. 
 
 Intimately connected with the origin of this 
 imperishable song, the imprisonment of Dr. 
 Beanes is entitled to a place in history, and the 
 prisoner himself as the friend and companion of 
 Mr. Key, during the storm of battle when the 
 Star Spangled Banner was written, borrows 
 something of reflected light from the halo of 
 immortality that encircles the poet. An inter- 
 esting account of the circumstances under which 
 the song was written is contained in a letter of 
 Chief Justice Taney to Charles Howard of Balti- 
 
 * Hist Reg. XXVIII., 37.
 
 ORIGIN OF THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER. 2 I 5 
 
 more, who married a daughter of Mr. Key. 
 "Dr. Beanes," the Chief Justice informs us, 
 " was the leading physician in Upper Marlboro' , 
 and an accomplished scholar and gentleman. 
 He was highly respected by all who knew 
 him ; was the family physician of Mr. West, and 
 the intimate friend of Mr. Key. He occupied 
 one of the best houses in Upper Marlboro', and 
 lived very handsomely; and his house was se- 
 lected as the quarters of Admiral Cockburn and 
 some of the principal officers of the army, when 
 the British troops encamped at Marlboro' on 
 their march to Washington. These officers were 
 of course furnished with everything that the 
 house could offer, and they in return treated him 
 with much courtesy, and placed guards around 
 his grounds and out-houses, to prevent depreda- 
 tions by their troops."* 
 
 Their harsh conduct to Dr. Beanes afterwards 
 was scarcely a fair requital for such hospitality. 
 There are several accounts of the affair, and 
 some obscurity in relation to the cause of the 
 sudden rage of the British against the Doctor. 
 Gleig says Dr. Beanes was a guerilla, who led 
 the people of Marlboro' in a foray against the 
 stragglers from the British army during their 
 retreat from Washington, killing some and mak- 
 ing prisoners of others. But Gleig's " Narrative" 
 abounds in errors and scurrilous statements, the 
 
 * Tyler's Memoir of Roger Brooke Taney, 112.
 
 2l6 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 latter perhaps intended as sarcasms upon what 
 he styles the "low cunning" of Americans and 
 " the desire to overreach and deceive, so univer- 
 sal among the people of this nation." He is 
 the same voluminous writer whose Memoirs of 
 Warren Hastings Macaulay unmercifully lashes. 
 " If it were worth while to examine this perform- 
 ance in detail," says the great reviewer, "we 
 could easily make a long article, by merely point- 
 ing out inaccurate statements, inelegant expres- 
 sions, and immoral doctrines. But it would be 
 idle to waste criticism on a bookmaker." 
 
 Having reached Nottingham, the British com- 
 mander, according to Gleig, sent back his cav- 
 alry to Marlboro' to find out whether the Ameri- 
 cans were pursuing him. The troopers rode to 
 the village, found no traces of the Americans, 
 and were returning to the British headquarters, 
 when one of their stragglers, who had been 
 seized as a marauder at Marlboro' but escaped, 
 overtook the cavalry and told them, says Gleig, 
 the following story: "The inhabitants of that 
 village, at the instigation of a medical practitioner 
 called Beans, had risen in arms as soon as we 
 were departed, and falling upon such individuals 
 as strayed from the column, put some of them to 
 death and made others prisoners." So ran the 
 tale. "The troopers," continues Gleig, "imme- 
 diately wheeled about, and galloping into the 
 village, pulled the doctor out of his bed, (for it
 
 ORIGIN OF THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER. 2 I/ 
 
 was early in the morning) and compelled him 
 by a threat of instant death to liberate his pris- 
 oners, and mounting him before one of the party, 
 brought him in triumph to the camp."* 
 
 Chief- Justice Taney writing' in 1856, many 
 years after the occurrence, and after Gleig's un- 
 veracious book had been republished in America, 
 apparently puts some credence in the story of the 
 British soldier, and seems to follow Gleig's ac- 
 count in his own communication to Mr. Howard. 
 He says: "On the return of the army to the 
 ships, after the main body had passed through 
 the town, stragglers, who had left the ranks to 
 plunder, or from some other motive, made their 
 appearance from time to time, singly or in small 
 squads ; and Dr. Beanes put himself at the head 
 of a small body of citizens to pursue and make 
 prisoners of them. Information of this proceed- 
 ing was by some means or other conveyed to the 
 English camp; and the detachment of which I 
 have spoken was sent back to release the pris^ 
 oners and seize Dr. Beanes. They did not seem 
 to regard him, and certainly did not treat him as 
 a prisoner of war, but as one who had deceived 
 and broken his faith to them." f 
 
 The only contemporaneous authority for the 
 statement that Dr. Beanes at the head of the 
 
 * Gleig's Narrative of the Campaigns of the British Army at Wash- 
 ington, Baltimore, and New Orleans, 149. 
 t Tyler's Memoir of Roger Brooke Taney, 112.
 
 2l8 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 citizens of Marlboro* attacked British stragglers 
 is Gleig, and his only witness is one of those 
 stragglers themselves, probably a petty plunderer 
 whose easy escape shows he had not been kept 
 in very close custody. That Chief- Justice Taney 
 was in some doubt as to the exact facts of the 
 case, caused by the lapse of time, forty- two years 
 having intervened between the occurrence and 
 his letter on the subject, or that his recollection 
 was confused by Gleig's story, is indicated in the 
 following remark, wherein with that nice sense 
 of truthfulness which always distinguished that 
 great man, he rather argues a probability than 
 states a fact: " Something must have passed," he 
 says, " when the officers were quartered at his 
 house on the march to Washington, which, in 
 the judgment of General Ross, bound him not to 
 take up arms against the English forces until the 
 troops had reembarked. It is impossible, on any 
 other grounds, to account for the manner in 
 which he was spoken of and treated. But what- 
 ever General Ross and the other officers might 
 have thought, I am quite sure that Dr. Beanes 
 did not think he was in any way pledged to ab- 
 stain from active hostilities against the public 
 enemy. And when he made prisoners of the 
 stragglers, he did not consider himself a prisoner 
 on parole, nor suppose himself to be violating 
 any obligation he had incurred. For he was a 
 gentleman of untainted character and a nice
 
 ORIGIN OF THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER. 219 
 
 sense of honor, and incapable of doing anything 
 that could have justified such treatment. Mr. 
 Key imputed the ill-usage he received to the 
 influence of Admiral Cockburn, who, it is still 
 remembered, while he commanded in the Chesa- 
 peake, carried on hostilities in a vindictive temper, 
 assailing and plundering defenceless villages or 
 countenancing such proceedings by those under 
 his command." * 
 
 It will be seen from this letter that Key, a far 
 more respectable witness than Gleig's straggler, 
 puts the responsibility on Cockburn, the buc- 
 caneer of the Chesapeake, whose conduct at the 
 capital stamps him a true Cossack. 
 
 On the 24th of August, 1814, the tide of war 
 brought the enemy to the gates of Washington, 
 and after the unfortunate battle of Bladensburg, 
 Admiral Cockburn and General Ross entered 
 our republican seat of government, and applied 
 the torch ruthlessly, after the manner of barba- 
 rians, to the public buildings and stores, not even 
 sparing private property in their rage for de- 
 struction. When the Dutch captured London 
 and burned some edifices they displayed less of 
 the Vandal spirit than the riotous incendiaries of 
 Cockburn and Ross in the capital of the United 
 States. Never were the English arms stained 
 with more indelible disgrace. They burned the 
 Capitol, the President's house, General Wash- 
 
 *Ibid, 115.
 
 220 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 ington's house, built for the father of his country 
 on Capitol Hill, the Arsenal, newspaper offices 
 why swell the recital ? until so mighty a flame 
 filled the heavens that a professor at Georgetown 
 College, standing by night on the college grounds 
 two miles distant, read a letter in the light of that 
 baleful conflagration.* 
 
 The panic-stricken flight of the British army 
 from Washington verified the adage that there is 
 but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous. 
 A little after midday on the 25th of August a 
 tempest burst over the devoted city with such 
 unprecedented violence as to unroof many build- 
 ings and completely demolish others. Some 
 thirty Englishmen were killed by the flying 
 debris, and the whole body was scattered in un- 
 seemly flight. Gleig's account says that several 
 cannon were blown out of position by the hurri- 
 cane, and for two hours a darkness like night 
 overspread the city. A previous explosion of 
 several kegs of powder in a dry well near the 
 Arsenal, through the carelessness of one of their 
 soldiers, had caused a horrible slaughter among 
 the troops of the enemy. But the storm put 
 them to flight. The demoralized victors left the 
 city with the utmost celerity, and rushed back to 
 their ships pursued by the imaginary spectres of 
 the skies. 
 
 On the 26th of August, according to the ac- 
 
 * Diary of Rev. John McElroy, S. J.
 
 ORIGIN OF THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER. 22 I 
 
 count which the present writer heard in boyhood 
 at Marlboro', Dr. Beanes was sitting in his parlor 
 with some friends w r hen a negro came in with 
 the news of the British retreat. There indeed 
 they were on the outskirts of the village in full 
 flight to their ships at Nottingham and Benedict. 
 As the Marlboro' tradition runs, Dr. Beanes and 
 his friends were elated by the idea that the re- 
 tirement of the English meant their rout by the 
 Americans, and the speed of the march served to 
 strengthen the agreeable but delusive opinion. 
 While Beanes and his neighbors were celebrat- 
 ing the imaginary triumph of our arms over a 
 bowl of punch, two or three British stragglers 
 came to the Doctor's spring to slake their thirst. 
 The jubilant Americans bantered the invaders in 
 a pleasant but lively vein over the alleged repulse 
 of the redoubtable Cockburn by the Washington 
 invincibles. The stragglers retorted, and, it 
 must be admitted, had the best of the little joke, 
 and the laugh veered over to the other side. 
 Nettled by the bad news, and perhaps a trifle in- 
 flamed by the punch, Dr. Beanes and his friends 
 patriotically refused to believe a word of the 
 American defeat at Bladensburg, or of the burn- 
 ing of the Capitol and public buildings at Wash- 
 ington by the British. From hot words they fell 
 to blows, and the stragglers were soon reduced 
 to submission and locked up in the court-house of 
 the village. On the appearance of the British
 
 222 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 cavalry they were released and carried off by 
 their deliverers. It was in consequence of this 
 chance-medley that the buccaneer of the Chesa- 
 peake sent back his troopers at the dead of night, 
 and carried away Dr. Beanes into captivity. 
 Key's mission followed, Beanes was restored to 
 his family, and American lyric poetry was en- 
 riched by a splendid national ballad. 
 
 The author of the Star Spangled Banner was 
 the son of an opulent Maryland planter, John 
 Ross Key, who was an officer in the army of the 
 revolution. His only children were Francis 
 Scott Key and Anne Phebe Charlton Key. 
 Roger Brooke Taney married this young lady, 
 and was thus the brother-in-law of the poet.' 
 Born at Frederick, Maryland, August i, 1779, 
 educated at St. John's College, Annapolis, a law- 
 yer at Frederick and Georgetown, and District 
 Attorney of Washington, Francis Scott Key was 
 distinguished in his profession, and greatly be- 
 loved in the social circles of Maryland and the 
 District of Columbia. John Randolph of Roan- 
 oke held him in the warmest affection. Although 
 a good scholar, a brilliant wit, and a man of 
 poetic genius, it is yet true that a comparatively 
 trifling circumstance, his presence at the bom- 
 bardment of Fort McHenry, afforded the single 
 opportunity of his life to render his name famous 
 for all time. A volume of his poems was pub- 
 lished at Baltimore about thirty-five years ago,
 
 ORIGIN OF THK STAR SPANGLED BANNER. 223 
 
 and some mention of him is to be found in Mc- 
 Carty's " National Songs" and in more recent 
 publications. But his one great song overshad- 
 owed all else in his career. 
 
 The most popular ballad writer in America 
 before Key was Joseph Hopkinson, who wrote 
 "Hail Columbia" in 1798, at a time of high 
 party excitement. John Adams was then Pres- 
 ident, and 5000 Philadelphians, wearing the 
 black cockades of the revolution, marched in 
 procession to the President's house and sang 
 Hopkinson 's lively ballad. But a greater than 
 Hopkinson had appeared, and the author of 
 " Hail Columbia" now beheld a new rival for the 
 throne in the brilliant Georgetown barrister. 
 
 The Francis Scott Key Monument Association 
 started to build a monument at Baltimore some 
 years ago, but are getting along slowly with it, 
 while the munificent Mr. Lick in San Francisco 
 erected to the memory of Key one of the most 
 magnificent monuments in the United States, if 
 not the noblest one of them all, at a cost of 
 150,000. Something has been done, too, at his 
 grave in Frederick, Maryland, in marmorial rev- 
 erence for the author of our national anthem. 
 
 Notwithstanding the bitter opposition of many 
 Maryland federalists to the war of 1 8 1 2 , it was 
 Key, a Federalist, who swept a chord worth at 
 least 10,000 soldiers to the Madison or war party. 
 But Key, Taney, Harper, and Carroll of Carroll-
 
 224 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 ton, and other leading Federalists, parted com- 
 pany with John Hanson Thomas and the extreme 
 wing of that party in Maryland after the declara- 
 tion of war, and ranged themselves with the de- 
 fenders of their country's cause when the armies 
 of George the Third once more invaded these 
 shores. That Key was always more of a bard 
 than politician, the Star Spangled Banner is all 
 sufficient testimony. In selecting the soul-swell- 
 ing melody, "To Anacreon in Heaven," as the 
 air for his song, he evinced not only an exquisite 
 ear for music, but taste and judgment in adapta- 
 tion that would not have discredited Mozart. 
 
 His journey to rescue his friend from captiv- 
 ity was the prelude to his poem, and hence its 
 details have been dwelt upon in these pages. 
 
 John S. Skinner, agent for the exchange of 
 prisoners, was directed by the President to place 
 his cartel at Key's service, and to accompany 
 him on the trip, as Mr. Skinner was well known 
 to the British. They came up with the enemy's 
 fleet at the mouth of the Potomac, and were 
 politely received by Admiral Cochrane. But 
 Key was rudely repulsed by Cockburn on dis- 
 closing the purpose of his visit; the buccaneer 
 of the Chesapeake, as tradition says, being in 
 favor of hanging Dr. Beanes from the yard-arm 
 of his ship. Appealing next to General Ross, 
 Key handed him letters from wounded British 
 prisoners left behind at Bladensburg, who bore
 
 ORIGIN OF THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER. 22$ 
 
 grateful testimony to the kindness of the Ameri- 
 cans in ministering to their wants and alleviating 
 their sufferings. This touched Ross, who is rep- 
 resented to have been a humane man, and Key 
 improved the opportunity by again appealing for 
 Dr. Beanes's release. This time he was success- 
 ful ; Ross consented to the prisoner's release, but 
 owing to the impending battle the Americans 
 were detained as temporary prisoners until the 
 fight was over. Key and Skinner were trans- 
 ferred to the frigate Surprise, but Beanes was 
 still held in duress among the rough sailors and 
 soldiers on the flagship, no officer speaking to 
 him, not even allowed to change his clothing, 
 and regarded rather as a culprit than a prisoner 
 of war. 
 
 The events which now took place are written 
 in the full light of history, and form one of the 
 brightest chapters in our military and naval 
 annals. The enemy advanced for a combined 
 attack by land and water on the Americans, and 
 the battle of North Point and bombardment of 
 Fort McHenry followed. Fresh from the de- 
 struction of Washington, Ross disembarked and 
 led his army to the sack of Baltimore. Admiral 
 Cochrane moved his fleet up the Patapsco, trans- 
 ferred his flag to the Surprise, of lighter draught 
 than the flagship, and at 7 o'clock on the morn- 
 ing of the 1 3th of September, 1814, having com- 
 pleted his line of battle, he opened with all his
 
 226 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 guns on the devoted fort; while the roar of 
 artillery from the shore told that the armies of 
 the United States and England were once more 
 locked in the tug of war. 
 
 In the mean time, Key, Skinner, and Beanes 
 had been put on their own vessel, under guard 
 of British sailors to prevent their escape during 
 the conflict. The position of the American ves- 
 sel afforded them a distinct view of the works 
 and flag of Fort McHenry. The bombardment 
 continued throughout the day without intermis- 
 sion. Night fell, and the darkness was lit up by 
 the glare of shot and shell playing with unabated 
 fury on the Fort. With beating hearts Key and 
 his two friends kept vigil on the deck of their 
 vessel throughout that perilous night, anxiously 
 gazing- in the direction of the American works, 
 over which the enemy's rockets and shells 
 whizzed and exploded. But the fort had not 
 fallen, for the fire never slacked, and the Eng- 
 lish sea-dogs continued to bark unceasingly with 
 all their brazen throats. Suddenly about two or 
 three hours before dawn the firing ceased, but it 
 was too dark to see, and the impatient American 
 prisoners, distracted by hopes and fears, knew 
 not on which side victory had descended. Key 
 often afterwards spoke of those hours of sus- 
 pense, with black night wrapping all objects in 
 impenetrable gloom, and the fate of the city in 
 doubt equally dark, as the most trying ordeal of
 
 ORIGIN OF THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER. 22/ 
 
 his life. Again and again he looked at his watch, 
 and at length found relief in counting the mo- 
 ments before dawn. Presently a gray twilight 
 spread over the face of the deep, and the watcher 
 intently gazed through the morning mists for 
 the beloved Stars and Stripes, dreading lest the 
 enemy's colors had already replaced them over 
 the beleaguered fort. Rejoicing light came at 
 last, and he saw that our flag was still there ! 
 
 As the poet beheld the flag of his country 
 streaming above the frowning battlements, his 
 pent-up feelings found expression in the first 
 and second stanzas of the Star Spangled Banner, 
 and the full heart overflowed in the second 
 chorus : 
 
 " What is that which the breeze o'er the towering steep 
 As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses? 
 Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam, 
 In full glory reflected now shines on the stream. 
 'Tis the Star Spangled Banner, O long may it wave, 
 O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave." 
 
 He had not long to wait before he beheld the 
 British army in full retreat to their ships, and 
 the body of an officer of distinction, either 
 wounded or dead, borne on board one of the 
 vessels. It was General Ross, leader of the ex- 
 pedition, who had been killed in battle by 
 an American sharpshooter. Bladensburg was 
 avenged, and the Cossack irruption at Wash- 
 ington had met bloody reprisal at North Point.
 
 228 HOUR CLASS SERIES. 
 
 Defeated by land and water the enemy shortly 
 set sail from the scene of their humiliation, and 
 Key and his friends returned on their vessel to 
 Baltimore. 
 
 In the immediate presence of victory, with the 
 dismantled enemy in retreat, the poet began in 
 the fervor of the moment to indite his immortal 
 song. How the famous poem was written will 
 always be an interesting inquiry; when and 
 where this modern Tyrtseus caught the inspira- 
 tion which has charmed a world, and the sacred 
 flame melted and transfused itself into words 
 that burn and thoughts that will live for ages, are 
 no less interesting questions to every American. 
 For the saying of Sir Philip Sydney in like cases 
 is ever true : " I never heard the old song of 
 Percie and Douglas, that I found not my heart 
 moved more than with a trumpet." The creation 
 of the Star Spangled Banner, conception and pro- 
 duction, was almost a single act. The muse, 
 disdainful of difficulties, overleaped them all, and 
 there on the deck of the vessel the inspiration 
 came that will outlast the story of the battle that 
 caused it, and the stanzas in the absence of writ- 
 ing materials were committed to the back of a 
 letter too scant to hold each word, but sufficient 
 to preserve in the author's memory, by means of 
 this rough draft, and notes and abbreviations, 
 the spirit and substantial form of the complete 
 song.
 
 ORIGIN OF THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER. 22Q 
 
 Mr. Key told Chief Justice Taney that on 
 landing at Baltimore he went immediately to a 
 hotel and wrote out the Star Spangled Banner 
 as it now stands, from the draft made on the 
 back of the letter before he reached the shore. 
 Next morning his brother-in-law, Judge Nichol- 
 son, to whom he handed the ballad, evinced his 
 admiration by forthwith taking it to a printer to 
 have some copies struck off in small broadside 
 form for distribution among the citizens. In 
 this way, the modest author withholding his 
 name, it was first circulated anonymously. Mr. 
 Key had written in a metre adaptable to the air 
 of an old song known as " To Anacreon in 
 Heaven," and words to that effect by his direc- 
 tion were printed at the top of the ballad. 
 
 As the present writer would incur the just dis- 
 pleasure of antiquaries by here omitting the minor 
 details and accessories of the first appearance of 
 the Star Spangled Banner, he may add that the 
 printer was Captain Benjamin Edes of the Twen- 
 ty-seventh Baltimore regiment, and his printing- 
 office, where the song was first issued, stood at 
 the corner of Baltimore and Gay streets. The 
 captain seized a copy fresh from the press, and 
 hastened to the famous old hostelry known as 
 Widow Berling's Tavern, then kept by a Colonel 
 McConkey, next door to the Holiday Street 
 Theatre, to read it to the populace. The de- 
 fenders of the Monumental City were in the
 
 230 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 habit of assembling each morning for regular 
 drills in Gay Street. Here, too, players and 
 green-room loungers had their haunts, -and came 
 with the people generally to see the parade and 
 cheer the defenders. Major Frailey and Cap- 
 tains Warner and Long were present on this par- 
 ticular occasion, and went with the crowd to hear 
 Captain Edes read the new song just struck off 
 at his office* There in the quaint old one- 
 story tavern, on the morning of the i5th of 
 September, 1814, in the midst of a concourse 
 merry over the news of victory, Captain Edes 
 read the song hot from the press, and that it 
 went with electric effect straight to the popular 
 heart was no longer a question of doubt. But 
 who shall sing the song? Among the citizen 
 soldiers was Ferdinand Durang, a singer of local 
 celebrity, who had come with the rest of the 
 young defenders to take part in the morning 
 drill. " Ferdinand Durang will please sing the 
 song,'' cried one, " Ferdinand Durang!" shouted 
 a hundred. The vocalist, evidently familiar 
 with the air, took the broadside, conned it over 
 for a few moments, and becoming stirred by the 
 splendid harmony between the words and the 
 music, mounted an old-fashioned rush-bottom 
 chair and sang the Star Spangled Banner for the 
 first time in the United States, the whole com- 
 pany joining in the chorus. The scene was in- 
 describable. Eyes streamed with tears, and a
 
 ORK11N OF THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER. 23! 
 
 transport of joy followed. Old Milton was right 
 when he told us that 
 
 " Eloquence the soul, song charms the sense." 
 Within an hour the whole city was chanting- the 
 battle-hymn which the whole American people 
 have been chanting ever since. 
 
 There was a sprightly actor named Paddy Mc- 
 Farland playing at the Holiday Street Theatre. 
 Warren and Wood, the managers, advertised 
 that McFarland and the entire company would 
 sing the Star Spangled Banner every night after 
 the play, and the theatre was not large enough 
 to hold the crowds that came. Such is a brief 
 but detailed sketch of the origin of the Star 
 Spangled Banner. 
 
 In a paper on "Three Historic Flags," read in 
 1863 before the New England Historical and 
 Genealogical Society by Rear Admiral Preble, 
 that gentleman says, on the subject in question, 
 that " the song was first published in the Balti- 
 more American of September 21, 1814, the week 
 after the battle." The admiral of course is in 
 error. Captain Edes, as we have seen, printed it 
 in handbill form on the 1 5th of September, six 
 days before it was printed in the Baltimore 
 American. Taney makes this perfectly plain in 
 his letter to Howard. " In less than an hour 
 after it was placed in the hands of the printer," 
 says the Chief- Justice, "it was all over town, and 
 hailed with enthusiasm." In another interesting
 
 232 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 paper on "The Star Spangled Banner and Na- 
 tional Airs," read before the American Anti- 
 quarian Society by Mr. Stephen Salisbury in 
 1872, the lecturer makes the mistake of locating 
 the poet on an English ship when he began to 
 write his ballad. "It is well known," he says, 
 " that it was written by Francis Scott Key, a 
 young lawyer of Baltimore" (his home was at 
 Georgetown, D. C.), "in September, 1814, and 
 that it was begun on board of a ship of the Brit- 
 ish fleet lying near Fort McHenry." The poem 
 was begun and finished on board of the Ameri- 
 can vessel used as a cartel. The same blunder 
 here pointed out has been made by several other 
 writers. 
 
 There is some confusion in relation to the 
 printer that first put the song in type. The his- 
 torian Lossing says : " The Judge [Nicholson] 
 was so pleased with it that he took it to the 
 printing office of Captain Benjamin Edes and 
 directed copies of it to be struck off in small 
 broadside form. Edes was then on duty with 
 the gallant Twenty-seventh Regiment, of which 
 Captain Lester was a member, and his apprentice 
 Samuel Sands, who was living in Baltimore a 
 few years ago, set up the song in type, printed 
 it, and distributed it among the citizens." * But 
 Admiral Preble states in his paper already men- 
 tioned, that " Samuel Sands, the printer boy who 
 
 * Hist. Record, January, 1873.
 
 ORIGIN OF THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER. 233 
 
 put the song in type in the office of the American, 
 still lives (1873), and is the well-known and re- 
 spected editor of the American Farmer." 1 If this 
 be correct, and it probably is, Dr. Lossing was in 
 error when he states that Sands was an appren- 
 tice of Captain Edes, unless indeed the latter 
 was proprietor of the American* 
 
 The author of the music of the Star Spangled 
 Banner is as great a mystery as the author of 
 the Letters of Junius. Curiosity to know or find 
 out its origin has led to some investigation and 
 unsatisfying discussion, but very little light 
 has been thrown on the subject, either in Eng- 
 land or the United States. We all know that 
 Francis Scott Key wrote the ballad, but who can 
 name the composer of the music which, with the 
 possible exception of the Marseillaise, is un- 
 doubtedly the noblest martial anthem of modern 
 times? Since the glorious lyric bursts of the 
 Iliad electrified the old Greek heart, nothing has 
 been sung in martial music more soul-swelling 
 than the Star Spangled Banner. But the history 
 of ballad poetry, the great originals of the most 
 popular national songs, it is always most difficult 
 to trace. Sir Walter Scott bent all the energies 
 of his tireless genius to the task of rescuing frorn 
 among the moss-troopers of Liddesdale the frag- 
 ments of border minstrelsy, just as Bishop Percy 
 
 * Samuel Sands died in Baltimore about the end of July, 1891. at the 
 great age of ninety-two, while these pages are going through the press.
 
 234 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 before him gathered up the scattered remains of 
 ancient English ballads, which were buried away 
 beneath the moth and rust of centuries; but 
 they both have confessed that many a noble 
 song, as fine as any they have restored, has been 
 lost through the neglect and indifference of 
 scholars, and now lies buried in oblivion forever. 
 The causes of this decay are not far to seek. 
 Ballad poetry, as Macaulay tells us, is unlike 
 everything else in a nation's literature; native 
 where nearly all else is imported, and imagina- 
 tive where the rest is chiefly borrowed. To-day 
 it- flourishes ; to-morrow it is neglected ; the third 
 day it is forgotten. The advance of letters brings 
 in refinement and classical models from abroad. 
 The homely literature of the fireside, that which 
 our grandfathers loved so well, and especially 
 the primitive songs of the people, with their 
 quaint phrases, irregular verses and rustic vocab- 
 ulary, are ostracised by the learned and polite, 
 and finally, after lingering for a time in the 
 memory of the people, become obsolete and lost 
 in dim tradition. The grand strain of the Ni- 
 belungs, and the poem of the Cid, have been 
 saved to the world, but the minds that produced 
 them must have produced others like them, and 
 those other "gems of purest ray serene," de- 
 spised by polite and fastidious scholars, have 
 been allowed to glide down the stream neglected 
 and forgotten.
 
 ORIGIN OF THE STAR SPANGLED 1JANNER. 235 
 
 A writer in London " Notes and Queries "* re- 
 marks as follows : " The air of the Star Spangled 
 Banner, which our cousins with their customary 
 impudence of assertion claim as their own, is 
 almost note for note that of the fine old Eng- 
 lish song, 'When Vulcan ^ forged the bolts of 
 Jove.'' Not quite. Competent musical critics 
 have examined this claim and rejected it. The 
 metre of Thomas Dibdin's " fine old English song" 
 in question could not by the most indulgent pro- 
 crustean method be made to harmonize with the 
 music of the Star Spangled Banner. Its priority 
 even over Key's song is not settled, both having 
 been written about the same time. " Notes and 
 Queries" might find nearer home, if disposed to 
 look for it, some of that " impudence " which it 
 imputes to its American cousins, in asserting 
 claims to the property of others. Did not our 
 English cousins appropriate without acknowledg- 
 ment the music of an old French anthem, change 
 somewhat the movement chosen by its Catholic 
 composer, in order to make it consonant with their 
 Protestant taste, and adapt to it the words of the 
 famous "Old Hundred," thus linking in happy 
 marriage, but without proclaiming the bans, the 
 poesy and song of two religions? 
 
 But perpend. Who knows that the air "To 
 Anacreon in Heaven " was not itself borrowed or 
 stolen? Trace its genesis back to the first re- 
 
 * Second Series, VI., 429.
 
 236 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 corded evidence of the existence of the song, and 
 what do we find ? That it is perhaps not English 
 at all, but American. The words of the ballad 
 show it was written for a Bacchanalian club, but 
 where the club flourished or when it was estab- 
 lished, are questions which have never been 
 answered. 
 
 Its first lines are : 
 
 To Anacreon in heaven, where he sat in full glee, 
 A few sons of harmony send their petition ; 
 
 The last line and chorus are, 
 
 May our club flourish happy, united and free ; 
 And long may the sons of Anacreon entwine 
 The Myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's Vine. 
 
 In the "Vocal Companion," published at Phila- 
 delphia in 1796 by Matthew Carey, the words 
 and music of the song were first printed. The 
 name of the author was not given. No musical 
 critic or antiquarian in the field of ballads, son- 
 nets, and madrigals has been able to discover 
 this song, or to point it out in any earlier publi- 
 cation, either at home or abroad, though several 
 have essayed the task. True, the Historical Maga- 
 zine* asserts that the music was originally set 
 to "Anacreon in Heaven" by Dr. Samuel Ar- 
 nold ; but assertion is not proof. Dr. Arnold, who 
 was born in 1739 an( ^ died in 1802, was an accom- 
 plished musical composer, but Mr. Salisbury has 
 * in., 23.
 
 ORIGIN OF THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER. 237 
 
 examined all the lists of his works, and has failed 
 to find anything to support the assertion. The 
 next time the song appeared in print, after its 
 publication by Matthew Carey, was in a volume 
 issued at Boston in 1804, called "The Nightin- 
 gale" ; no author's name was given, only the 
 music and words. Richard Grant White, in a 
 volume entitled "National Hymns," says, "The 
 Star Spangled Banner is an old French air long 
 known in England as 'Anacreon in Heaven,' "* 
 but he does not vouchsafe to inform the 
 world where he acquired so much knowledge. 
 His book is written in a tone of satirical levity 
 and priggishness, too often mistaken for superior 
 wisdom. Mr. J. P. McCaskey, in his volume 
 issued in 1881, called "Song Collection," follows 
 White in ascribing the music of the Star Spangled 
 Banner to an old French air. He may be right, 
 but he cites no authority whereby we might settle 
 the vexed question. 
 
 "The Universal Songster," published at Lon- 
 don from 1825 to 1834, printed the song "To 
 Anacreon in Heaven," more than a quarter of a 
 century after it had been published in the United 
 States, and gives the name of Ralph Tomlinson 
 as author. But the indefatigable critic, Mr. 
 Salisbury, went to work with an exhaustive 
 search for Ralph Tomlinson, without discovering 
 the slightest clue to that individual. " Multiplied 
 
 * P. 22
 
 238 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 inquiries and research, " he mournfully exclaims, 
 "in all biographies and indexes that I can con- 
 sult, have not discovered the name."* Who then 
 was Ralph Tomlinson? Is he like that elusive 
 gentleman the Wandering Jew, or Sairey Gamp's 
 friend Mrs. Harris, a myth, or like the con- 
 spirator Catiline, of whom Tully says, a.b>il, 
 cxccssit, cvasit, erupit? The song was a fine 
 one. Its classical figures and sparkling wit 
 would not discredit Ralph Tomlinson, nay, 
 rather it would add considerable lustre to his 
 or any other ordinary name. We fear his failure 
 to materialize argues strongly against this puta- 
 tive father of the song. 
 
 Two odes set to the same music appeared in 
 the United States before the Star Spangled 
 Banner. The first was written by Robert Treat 
 Paine, Jr., and was sung at Boston at the anni- 
 versary meeting of the Massachusetts Charitable 
 Fire Society, June i, 1/98. It was entitled 
 "Adams and Liberty," and is quite a spirited 
 song. The other was an ode written by Alex- 
 ander H. Everett, elder brother of Edward Ever- 
 ett, and was sung at the Russian Festival, held 
 in Boston March 25, 1813. It has been sug- 
 gested that this ode of Everett was in Key's 
 mind when he selected the same popular air for 
 the Star Spangled Banner. 
 
 Like all great poems the anthem of Mr. Key 
 
 * Am. Hist. Rec., I., 351.
 
 ORIGIN OF THE STAR Sl'ANdLKI) BANNER. 239 
 
 has had many imitators. Parodies and sectional 
 travesties, especially during the civil war, 
 were poured forth from the press. Some of 
 this patchwork has been printed as additional 
 stanzas to the Star Spangled Banner, and re- 
 spectable writers, carried away by the bitter 
 feelings engendered during the war, fell into 
 this species of literary profanity. Even Oliver 
 Wendell Holmes bonus dormitat Homerus was 
 beguiled into writing one of these tasteless 
 additaments, beginning: 
 
 " When our land is illumined with liberty's smile, 
 If a foe from within strikes a blow at her glory, 
 Down, down with the traitor that dares to defile 
 The flag of her stars, and the page of her story ; " and 
 so forth. 
 
 But the intense nationality of that majestic 
 poem wedded to immortal song, and free from a 
 single throb of sectionalism or brotherly hate, is 
 no longer disfigured by these excrescences of an 
 evil day. Francis Scott Key knew no North, no 
 South, no East, no West, but he wrote the Star 
 Spangled Banner for the whole American people, 
 and the priceless legacy belongs to us all for- 
 evermore. 
 
 Charles Sumner in the Senate, and Robert E. 
 Lee in his college home uttered wise words of 
 warning against the perpetuation of memorials 
 of sectional hate and fraternal war. Massachu-
 
 240 HOUR GLASS SERIES. 
 
 setts at first censured, but afterwards indorsed 
 her patriotic Senator. General Lee said : " I 
 think it wiser, moreover, not to keep open the 
 sores of war, but to follow the example of those 
 nations which endeavored to obliterate the marks 
 of civil strife, and to commit to oblivion the feel- 
 ings it engendered."* 
 
 When the baptism of fire poured over the flag 
 of Fort McHenry, the poet hailed the ensign of 
 the Republic by a new title. Pleased with the 
 name the people caught it up with joyous voice, 
 and History inscribed it on her scroll. One of 
 the philosophers tells us God alone invents 
 names; man accepts them. Even so, the in- 
 spired herald appeared and consecrated the 
 happy name in song. Article of constitution 
 there was none, act of Congress there was none, 
 official wax and parchment, there was none of 
 all these things to add public sanction to the 
 name; but the oracle, like messenger of Jove, 
 called the flag the Star Spangled Banner, and so 
 it will be known forever. It is the nation's 
 hymn. Its music now frets like a guitar, now* 
 rolls like an organ, now clangs as a cymbal, now 
 peals as a trumpet, and now swells and bursts 
 like the combined instruments of a martial band. 
 
 J. F. McL. 
 
 * The Southern Metropolis, Baltimore, September 4, 1869.
 
 ORIGIN OF THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER. 24! 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 A short time before his death Mr. Key, at the request of friends, made 
 three autograph copies of the song. The first bears date " Washing- 
 ton, October 2140," and was published in fac-simile in the American 
 Historical and Literary Curiosities (plate Iv.) by John Jay Smith, 
 who stated that the original was in the possession of Louis J. Cist. 
 The second copy was written out by the author and presented to Gen- 
 eral George Keim of Reading, Pennsylvania. The third copy was pre- 
 sented by the author to James Maher, a well known and popular gar- 
 dener in General Jackson's time at the Executive Mansion, commonly 
 called " Jimmie," who afterwards kept the Indian Queen Hotel on 
 Pennsylvania Avenue. This autograph bears date June 7, 1842. Mr. 
 Maher's copy was on exhibition in 1843, after Mr. Key's death, in the 
 window of a bookstore on Pennsylvania A venue at Washington. A cer- 
 tificate to the handwriting of the poet, signed by Peter Force, Judge 
 Dunlap and other intimate friends of Mr. Key, accompanied Jt This 
 version of the song was printed in The National Intelligencer. 
 
 The author at various times made minor verbal alterations in the 
 poem. The third line of the Keim version reads " through the clouds of 
 the fight." In other versions followed by Griswold, Dana, Salisbury, 
 Boys' Banner Book, and Berg's illustrated by Darley, the same line 
 reads " through the perilous fight." The twelfth line of the Keim ver- 
 sion reads: " half conceals, half discloses." In the version followed by 
 Dana, Salisbury, and Key's Poems, the same line reads; ' now conceals, 
 now discloses." The fourteenth line in Keim reads- " Now shines in the 
 stream." The same line in the Baltimore American, 1814, also reads, 
 "in"; other versions have "o'er." Maher's, Darley's and Salisbury's 
 versions have " on " 
 
 The seventeenth line in Keim's reads, 'the foes that." In the Bal- 
 timore American, 1814, Griswold, Dana, Banner Book, Darley, and Sal- 
 isbury it reads, "band who." The i8th line in Keim's reads, "That 
 the havoc." The Baltimore American, 1814, Darley and Salisbury have 
 the same version. Griswold and Dana's versions have "mid." The 
 igth line in Keim's reads " Should," as does the same line in Baltimore 
 American, 1814, Darley, Salisbury and common versions. In Griswold's 
 version it reads: "they'd." The 2oth line in Keim's reads, "Their 
 blood has wash'd out their foul footsteps pollution." James Maher's 
 version reads, "This blood has wash'd out his foul footsteps pollu- 
 tion." The National Intelligencer, which followed this version, had this 
 note: " He heard the vaunting boast of British officers that the fort 
 would be reduced in a brief period after the attack, and that circum- 
 stance explains the use of the pronouns in the singular number." But 
 Admiral Preble, who gives the text of Keim's copy, and whose careful 
 annotations the present writer has in the main here followed, remarks 
 on this explanation of the Intelligencer: " All the other versions I have 
 seen have it 'Their,' as in the text above."
 
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