Now when the General's toast at that banquet in the Indian Queen had gone abroad, it would have the effect of a warning, each man taking it home. A silence fell upon States Rights; the foxes of Nullification found their , and were to be noticed for a sudden absence from one's eye and ear where but the day before with their presence and their yelpings they would fill both.
It will have a strange look, but it was the General, himself, who of all folk fostered a distrust of his course.
It was to Noah and me he one day told this. Noah mentioned the vast silence of a voiceless conservatism which had fallen upon that movement of Secession, late so reboant and .
“And yet,” said the General, “the story of the country will at last show me wrong.”
“Will you say how?” asked Noah. “Surely, you do not doubt the common need of a union between the States, and one strong enough to defy the caprice or the ambition of a ?”
“My sentiment for the union,” said the General, “has suffered no , and it is because I stand for union and would die for union, that I am not sure of the wisdom of that toast of mine. It would have been better to stand , and let Secession go the length of treason. Had I held to such a course, perhaps as many as one hundred might have answered for the crime with their lives. But the question would have been settled; the dispute would have been made res adjudicata and the future forever freed of that struggle. Now the serpent is only , not killed; in years to follow yours and mine it will revive in rebellion and may yet crush the country in its folds.”
“I can not think you are right,” said I, for I was having part in the conversation with the others; “I am no judge, or you have closed the door against this Nullification.”
“Ay!” responded the General, “closed but not locked the door. It should have been barred with a gibbet. Folk are not taught by threats but by example. Had I stayed myself until the leaders for Secession went so far they were hanged for it, that would have meant the end. Now the business is ; the country will yet be forced to fight a civil war and knee-deep in blood to save itself.”
“Is it,” asked Noah, , “is it now you first hold these views?”
“They are not new,” returned the General; “I owned them from the beginning. But I lacked the hardihood to act on them. I grow old; I have been in my hour the instrument by which so much blood has been shed that in my grey age I shrink from more. That toast was devised to save myself from spilling further blood; I was thinking on myself when I framed it and not of those black ones who would do treason. Its great purpose was to save me from becoming their executioner.”
“Now your feeling is mine too,” observed Noah, shaking a thoughtful head. “The seed of the whole trouble is slavery; while that exists, the certain chance of civil war stands open.”
“And how would one be rid of it?” demanded the General, . “Washington was against slavery, Jefferson was against it, Franklin was against it, every great one whose trowel employed itself in laying the foundations of our government was against it, and yet there to-day it lives. They could not cope with slavery; how, then, shall we?”
“It existed in the North,” said Noah, “and it was wiped out.”
“The slaves were few in the North,” responded the General; “as they made but a slim fraction of that region's riches. Moreover, slavery did not pay a Northern profit. It is easy, when there is money loss, to abandon the cause of that loss. But conditions within the present boundaries of slavery show otherwise. The slave's cost of keep is less, his months of more in number, and he is not winter-killed with maladies of the lungs. Moreover, your slave makes a fairer unit of labor in rice savannahs and cotton fields, where a carries thousands of acres, than he did where land was more divided and a farm of a hundred and sixty acres the common holding of a man. In short, the slave spins that money profit for the South which was lacking in the North. That fact of profit—the greed of men—will meet folk who would free the slave and make you a mighty difference.”
“And still,” said Noah, “slavery should be stricken down.”
“To that I agree,” remarked the General, “but again I ask you, How? Certain of our New England , when they shout for , cry 'Down with slavery!' as lightly as one should say: 'Marry! swallow a strawberry.' When a man is in the upper story of a burning house he does not himself from a window, he by the stair. Let us, when now we be over slavery—for it is that, as you say, to lie at the bottom of this whole movement of States Rights—let us grope cautiously until we find the safe stairway of escape.”
“It is not so clear to my mind,” said I, for the spirit to lecture, excited by example, began to move within me, “that slavery is so bad for the blacks. One must have account for a difference of race. You would not insist that a deer tear a with his teeth and howl on some hill of midnight like a wolf. It has been the never-flagging mistake of government to deal with the Indian as though he were white, and enforce pale-face conditions upon him. It would be as of error to proceed with the negro as though he were white or could work out a white man's destiny. Make the black man free, and I tell you he will be as helpless as a ship on the instant.”
“To better the black,” said the General, “is not my argument; I am against slavery to better the white man. When I seek to destroy slavery, it is the master I would free, and not the slave.”
Just what the General would intend by this last I had no opportunity to discover, for the Jim was heard at the door, in our .
“Never mind, Miss Peg,” I could hear Jim say, in a way of patronizing , and evidently in combat of some suggestion of Peg's that she would her appearance among us, “never mind about d'Marse Major an' d'Marse Gen'ral an' that red-head Jew gentleman argufyin'. That don't count for nothin'; they're allers at it, night an' day, argufyin' away like they aint got a minute to live, and nothin' to never come of it. Never mind 'em, Miss Peg; you-all jes' trapse right along in an' declar' your urrent.”
With Peg's coming, Noah made polite expedition to retire; nothing one might do or say would serve to keep him. He who could look a man in the eye and stand knee to knee with him for life or death, feared a woman as though she were a ghost and fled from the sight of her.
“I am somewhat abashed,” said Peg, “to think of the I have caused, and that I drive away your visitor.” This to the General. “Why did you not make him stay? I shall never forget my debt to him; and I'm glad, too, he is so much your favorite.”
“Noah puts us all in his debt,” said the General. “To me he is the man ; fine, high, yet bold and quick, there will be no one to take his place when he is gone.”
Peg's purpose was to tell the General—for he had asked the question in a little note that morning—how she should like the dinner and that East Room dance he offered, on the next evening but one.
“Is not the time too short?” asked the General. “Forty-eight hours would seem no mighty space for folk to make themselves prepared. They may own other engagements.”
“There will be no engagements,” said Peg. “The season is quite at an end; the Redsticks, as you christened them, closed their defeated doors six weeks ago, and for our own side, we only continued our receptions two weeks longer to show how we remained masters of the field. There will stand nothing in the way; and as for space to be ready in, why, then, folk don't need hours, but only minutes, when the invitation is from the White House.”
“Let us say the day following to-morrow, then,” said the General. “It shall be for your victory, child, and to celebrate it. Also, since the losers as well as the victors have proper place in a triumph, and, again, because it will look like the olive branch and an expression of peace, we will bid both friend and to this merrymaking, and mark it with as wide a good feeling as our opponents will accept.”
Peg's dinner, as dinners go, was a creature of magnificence, with Peg, beautiful as a moss-rose, at the General's right, and Dolly Madison's own silver—massy, and, as the women said, “gorgeous,”—to on the white napery. The General's wide-flung invitations were as widely accepted; and not alone the Van Burens and the Krudeners and the Vaughns, but the Calhouns and the Berriens and the Branches, and all of the sept of Nullification, were there, as though to put down any of sulky fear for themselves to be the offshoot of that conflict of the toasts. Even the Pigeon-breast was with us undismayed; he practiced a forbearance Peg, and never once after the first formalities so far forgot his caution as to be near enough to that sparkling lady to court the awful hazard of her glance.
There came but one clash beneath my notice, and that would feed my humor. Houston was just come into town, as rude and a gentleman in every politer technicality as the bears of his native woods. With him for his table-mate he bore away the wife of Ingham of the . Houston guarded his prize to her place with a backwoods vigilance as though it were indeed the enemy's country and they in of some Indian ambuscade with each new room they entered. The lady, with a as crude as Houston's knowledge of the drawing-room, perceiving the savageries of her protector, would be prompt to establish herself as directress' of his manners. Poor Houston suffered more than once the of the lady's counsel, given in a high, obvious voice, and with the manner of one who corrects a dull to the confines of despair.
The befell over fish and when a portion of delicate pompano was placed before the headlong Houston.
“That is not the fish fork,” cautioned the lady in a whisper so loud it bred a smile on thirty faces either side of her; “that is not the fish fork; here, take this.”
“By Satan's , madam!” exclaimed the wrathful Houston, whose long-stifled would now be in the saddle, at the same time the huge trident he had somehow gotten hold on; “by Satan's hoofs! keep your fish forks for whom you will. For myself, I'll eat this with my saber if I have the mind.”
Later I heard the distempered lady to a neighbor how Houston was “an untaught brute,” while that hurt hero told me on his word as a man that for those several hours he was in her company, he had less of ease than at the Horseshoe where he was given four wounds.
The East Room, when ones would dance was brilliant in white and gold and crystal chandeliers, with floor of water-soaked oak so polished it reflected the gay dresses like a looking-glass, and so slippery that clumsy ones, like myself, went gingerly about it in terror for their bones.
Peg was as glorious as a star, and to me never more lovely, albeit my coral on her may have had somewhat to do with that. And to see her so bowed to and flattered was like a perfume; for it looked as though the foe would forego those old-time tactics of distance and gaze, and that a new word was abroad in Peg's behalf. There came no one to more emphasize his courtesy or show more in what might do Peg honor than the Vice-President himself, and with him were the members of that cabinet triumvirate who had cast in their narrow lots with him. Even the stately Mrs. Calhoun would be gracious in a far-off sort, while the ladies Berrien and Branch relaxed from a former , and if not torrid, were at all events of the zone when the of the floor would bring Peg and them in contact. As for the vigorous Madam Ingham, she was so overcome of her in of Houston that following dinner she could do nothing but herself. However, for so much as she remained in the picture, she beamed affably in a fat, vermilion way, and her red face was like the setting sun.
The male Ingham, being in fettle, would fain onto the floor with Peg in his hand for a dance; for Ingham was sensibly of his since Eaton, whom he held in fear, was not present, but off in Baltimore on some long- duty about new rifles—meant, I fear me, for Nullifiers, should their pot of treason over-boil. I will say this of Ingham, however: for all his rotund , he went through that dance without falling down; a no small I should call it, and one to give me relief, since for the while it lasted I was held on tenter-hooks over Peg's safety, and would about ready to rush in and save her should affairs go badly between Ingham and the glass-like floor.
There occurred one incident of harshness I could have wished left out. It was when that Frau Huygens drew up to Peg and would greet her as though............