CHAPTER XXIX.

THE EQUIVOCAL PERIOD AND ITS MEN.

"A people either elated by pride or soured by discontent, are seldom qualified to form a just estimate of the situation."-Gibbon.

THE use and abuse of parties has been fully, perhaps overfully, discussed in these pages; and the blame, for their erection in the Government of the United States, has been ascribed to the defective (really senseless) transfer of British political habits to our politics. We have also seen how these first parties were dying out; the one in consequence of the death of Hamilton, the other because Jefferson and Madison, as well as Monroe, were at heart ashamed of the partisan spirit, whose leaders they were. Jefferson had, in fact, given the watchword for allaying it by his remark: "We are all republicans; we are all federalists;" to which a wit had replied, that it would have been truer to have said: "None of us are really republicans or federalists." Be this as it may, one thing was certain, that party divisions had become almost obliterated by 1820, and that they would have disappeared by 1824, if the people had been up to the situation, and had understood and carried out the main duty of popular rule, that of neither tempting nor suppressing, but curbing personal ambition.

Whether pride or discontent made the people put a false estimate on the actual situation, we need not stop to inquire; we may assume, that both distempers prevailed, and both without real cause-pride, however, most. The financial and moneyed disorders consequent on the wrong fiscal conduct of the war of 1812, were by that time more than overbalanced by the general prosperity enjoyed by society. It was much beyond the industry, skill, and economy of the population. This prosperity made the people unduly proud, though the pecuniary difficulties did not justify the discontent that existed; for they could easily have been rectified. Under these circumstances there were all kinds of temptations for the small

politicians to raise fictitious issues, and to agitate them; if only for popular pastime, or to constitute the people into a debating society.

The great men (the little ones' names are happily forgotten) who were to play the leading parts, in this pantomime, were: Adams, Crawford, Clay, Jackson, Calhoun, and Clinton. They yielded to this frivolous tendency reluctantly; for their inner sense told them, that their real function and use was to carry out the actual necessities of society; but it was otherwise with the little men, the demagogues. Their instincts told them, that the readiest road to their success, and to the spoils, was through issues easily invented and handy for plausible arguments. And the fact, that the lower spoilsmen and second-rate politicians got the reins of politics, from that time forward, more and more into their hands, and that they really run the higher characters, constitutes the guilt of the then existing equivocal attitude of parties and their leaders.

It was a political chase in which the dogs commanded the hunters; and they were continually misled by the false scents of both the pointers and setters. Positive issues and concrete questions were tabooed, and plausible negatives substituted for them; such, for instance, as: No President shall be taken from the supreme bench! Congress shall not nominate the candidates! The President shall not indicate his successor! Nor shall there be any other similar, so-called, "safe precedents"! No man under forty-five shall be President! These negatives cut off all but Jackson. For him a further negative was loudly proclaimed; to wit: no military chieftain shall be President. Such negative politics are very convenient to demagogues; each of them can have his own popgun, and for answer, to every affirmative proposition, he fires off his negative sophistry. They served, however, for the gathering of coteries, preparatory to the formation of standing parties out of them, or, if the reader prefers the metaphor, we may say: they were the recruiting bureaus for the bigger political armies hereafter.

To us, all these negative politics amount to nothing but. proof: how completely false public opinion then was as to its duty towards its great men. We have read a large mass of the periodical literature of the day, and can truly say, that we never met with a single statement of the true positive qualifications necessary for President.

At fault as to qualifications, the demagogues suggested that the candidates should be interrogated as to their opinions on this or that point; the object being to uptrip the candidate

addressed. The game failed in its principal object to make Jackson impossible-because he answered (Scripture fashion) that if he thought his right hand knew his purposes, he would cut it off and throw it into the fire, because he believed, that true statesmen did not let their left hand know, what their right hand doeth. The country may be glad, that, by this reply, much nonsense in the heads of candidates, as well as in the minds of the smaller demagogues, remained unwritten.

Measures, not men," was the phrase that tickled then, and since, the popular ear. But (suggested experience): Who is to initiate, draft, advocate, and perfect the measures? Does it not require men, either singly or on commissions, to do that? Would not, without them, the popular mind be a perpetual vacuum and action, or at best a fishing in turgid waters?

Nonplussed by these suggestions, the public mind was adroitly directed back to the fiction, on which the campaign of 1800 was fought-that there were two innate dispositions in men; one for the equal rights of the people, the other for privileged aristocracies; and that, on the Biblical idea of a division of the sheep and the goats, there should be a party that would gather the friends of popular institutions together against the others.

The personal qualifications of men for this or that public position sunk into insignificance under this new dispensation; but their opinions and inclinations became of transcendent importance. We know now, that all this was tomfoolery, and that it set aside the main question, viz: the personal integrity of the public man about to be put into power. It was, however, successfully used to keep the people from seeing, that all the men named were qualified, and that there was really no cause for the bitter strife, which designing men were so anxious to get up and to fan into a conflagration. The masses were so tempered, that they must have idols for adoration on the one side, and objects of hate on the other, so as to animate them. And two opposing parties answered this purpose best in America.

Crawford's nomination, in 1824, by Congress, was irregular by the standard of previous party usage, because, though adopted by the House of Representatives, he had not been indicated by the President in the usual way, by making him Secretary of State, and lacked therefore one, and certainly the higher element of the party's collective or conjunctive public will. The "safe precedent" inaugurated by Jefferson and followed by Madison, was therefore really and, let us add, fatally set aside. Soon, after the canvass opened, this inherent difficulty became apparent to all; for Adams, Jackson, and Clay remained candi

dates, whilst Clinton and Calhoun expressed their willingness to be content with the Vice-Presidency. Crawford's illness tended also to disorganize his supporters, and to keep the others in the field.

Neither candidate received a majority of the electoral votes, and the election went to the House, where Adams was elected by the assistance of Henry Clay, who was afterwards appointed Secretary of State by Adams, which gave rise to all kinds of surmises. The charge of "bargain and sale," "corruption," "the union of the blackleg and the puritan," "concealed fede ralism," &c., &c., resounded over hill and dale. Some even spoke of Adams as "Prince." All these war-cries had received double force by Henry Clay's indiscreet (to say no more) remark against Jackson: "Rather war, famine, and pestilence, than a military chieftain!" This, thrown into the face of men like Benton, Felix Grundy, Martin Van Buren, Silas Wright, Blair, and Amos Kendall, stimulated them to unwonted exertions for the next election, and in 1828 Jackson triumphed by a large majority. He was re-elected in 1832, and was followed by

Van Buren in 1836.

Nobody proposed, after the election of 1824, to return to congressional nominations. Jackson was elected as a partyfree candidate. But he was no sooner elected, than the succession became the point of rivalry, which shows, that there was still a latent and tacit recognition of the wisdom of perhaps the oldest political rule, that "chief Executives are the best judges of the capacities necessary for their successors."

Calhoun and Van Buren were the rivals for Jackson's favor, and when the national Jackson Convention of 1832 nominated Van Buren for Vice-President, it was understood to be a ratification of the President's preference, and a rebuke of Calhoun. This and the events, that followed, led to the first triumvirate in America that of Clay, Webster, and Calhoun. But-mark it!— it was not, as in Rome, a merger of great men, for rendering the respective factions impotent; but an alliance for the formation of an opposition party similar to those frequently arranged in England for the overthrow of a ministry. It made the struggle of the superior men of the country against those of a lower order, a fight within each party, which was sure to go against the first named, because it divided those, who should have united for the common good; and abandoned them to the necessarily mean elements of each party.

Jackson saw early that his administration would be overwhelmed, unless he concentrated in aid of it some strong element; and it could be no other than the aspirants for office.

So he put down an anchor to the windward, and wrote: "The patronage of the federal government has come in conflict with elections, and the due course of appointments has been disturbed. Office has been continued in unfaithful and incompetent hands." He suggested, that there should be "rotation in office;" which his followers at once understood to mean, that Jackson's opponents should be turned out, and his friends put into their places; and the "Hickory Broom" became now, as a matter of course, the emblem of the party.

Jackson followed his policy up by saying: "No one man has any more intrinsic right to official station than another. No individual wrong is done by removal, since neither appointment to, nor continuance in office is a matter of right. When rotation shall be the leading principle in the republican creed, it will give healthful action to the system." Thomas Ewing, a prominent Whig, declared in reply to this: "The true question is the restriction or extension of executive power; its encroachments, open and covert, are of the most alarming nature, and if not resisted must end in the subversion of all that is valued in the republican principles of our government; and a gorgeous monarchy in effect, if not in name, must rise upon its ruins." Were either of these statements true? We think not! Jackson's rule was incorrect, because the man who qualifies himself for an office is entitled to it in preference to him, who does not. And a man appointed, for qualification, has, cæteris paribus, a better right to continue in it, than any new aspirant. As to Ewing's monarchical scarecrow, it was simply laughable. And as to ruins in America, it reminds us of the caricatures, in which grandmothers are represented as doling out pompous warnings to children against their seducing each other in their social intercourse. Jackson hoped for "healthful action" from that, which proved in the end the country's disease, and Ewing feared tyranny from that (a vigorous Executive), which of all things should be really free.

The bane of Jackson's "rotation" hobby was not, what Ewing represented it, a tendency to monarchy; for on that point Jackson was in the right, since he was for securing to the Executive department its proper position in the United States Government; whilst Ewing and the Whigs were for an imitation of an omnipotent legislature after the model of Great Britain. The mischief of rotation was, that it increased the momentum of the mere technical, indeed we might say: the mechanical part of government, the public service, towards false partisan practices. The number of those who took an interest in politics for personal pecuniary interests was already great, and rotation, by