PAST PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATIONS.

PART III.

PERHAPS no election ever disappointed so many people, and satisfied so few, as that which resulted in the elevation of Taylor and Fillmore. How hard for the old friends of Henry Clay to give up again the idolized chief who had been their standardbearer in so many hard-fought contests! The heart of Massachusetts, too, was set upon seeing Daniel Webster raised, at length, to the chief magistracy of a nation of which they believed him to be the noblest ornament. The Whig Convention of 1848 consisted of two hundred and eighty members, one hundred and forty-two of whom constituted a majority. The first ballot, though not decisive, plainly foretold the result. Taylor received one hundred and eleven votes; Clay, ninety-seven; Scott, forty-three; Webster, twenty-two; scattering, six. The successful soldier gained at every ballot, and, on the fourth, secured a majority. Some of the discontents, headed by Henry Wilson, of Massachusetts, left the convention, joined the Free-Soilers, and thus contributed their part to the election of General Taylor, who was, perhaps, of all the men who have filled the presidential chair by the choice the people, the one least competent to perform its duties. His administration leaves few traces upon the history of the country, and those few are not favorable to the system of rewarding military services by civil honors.

Calhoun, soured by his miserable failures, but not instructed by them, continued to play his sorry game. "The last days of Mr. Polk's administration," says Colonel Benton, "were witness to an ominous movement-nothing less than nightly meetings of large numbers of members from the slave States to consider the state of things between the North and the South; to show the aggressions and encroachments (as they were called) of the former upon the latter; to show the incompatibility of their union; and to devise measures for the defense and protection of the South. Mr. Calhoun was at the bottom of this movement, which was conducted with extraordinary precautions to avoid publicity. None but slave State members were admitted. No reporters were permitted to be present; nor any spectators or auditors. As many as seventy or eighty were assembled; but about one half of this number were inimical to the meeting, and

only attended to prevent mischief to the Union, and mostly fell off from their attendance before the work was concluded. At the first meeting a grand committee of fifteen (Mr. Calhoun one) were appointed to consider of resolutions: when they met, a sub-committee of five (Mr. Calhoun at their head) was carved out of the fifteen to report an address to the slave States; and when they met, Mr. Calhoun produced the address ready written. So that the whole contrivance of the grand and petty committees was a piece of machinery to get Mr. Calhoun's own manifesto before the public with the sanction of a meeting."

This manifesto was equally preposterous and wicked. It declared that the North was resolved upon the forcible abolition of slavery in the Southern States, and drew an awful picture of the fell consequences of such an event, which was well calculated to alarm the ignorant masses whose votes Mr. Calhoun sought. We need not, however, dwell upon the vagaries of this false, ambitious man; because, although they have since kindled the flame of civil war and filled the land with mourning, they had little to do directly with the nomination of candidates for the presidency. There never was a moment, after the attempted nullification of 1832, when there was the remotest possibility of a national party putting Mr. Calhoun in nomination for any office whatever. The Nullifiers themselves never contemplated it; for their object was never the elevation of an individual, but always the promotion of an interest. At all times they preferred to pull the chestnuts out of the fire by a Northern cat's-paw. A new character appeared upon the scene. The recent struggles for power had been between the aged politicians who derived most of their importance from the favor of General Jackson, and it seemed as though no new man could entertain hopes until their ambition had been satisfied. But an individual now loomed up, who represented the young men of the Democratic party, who was not disposed to yield the precedence to the gray-haired sires of the last generation. This was Stephen A. Douglas, of Illinois. Of the subsequent history of the Democratic party this bold, able, and impatient man was at once the central figure and the impelling force.

How interesting, and how instructive also, the story of this man's life! In the autumn of 1833, at a frontier town of Illinois, there was a great auction-sale which drew to the place a concourse from the surrounding country. When the sale was about

to begin, the auctioneer looked about in the crowd for a person to perform the office of clerk. He fixed his eyes upon a young man, short, pale, sickly-looking, apparently about nineteen, with his coat upon his arm, who looked as though he might be able to write well enough for the purpose. The auctioneer called to the youth, and offered him the vacant place, which was promptly and gladly accepted. This young man was indeed in most pressing need of employment. He had made his way from his native Vermont, and had walked into the town that morning with sixteen cents in his pocket, all his worldly effects upon his person, and had not a friend within a thousand miles. As the sale went on, he exhibited a remarkable aptitude for the work he had undertaken, and, in his intercourse with the crowd, he displayed that nice turn of urbanity and familiarity which is so captivating to frontiersmen. His repartees, though somewhat rough, were always ready, and, by the time the three days' sale had ended, he was master of six dollars, and of the good will of the people Such was the first popular triumph of the "Little Giant," the wandering son of a Yankee doctor. From teaching school to managing petty cases before justices of the peace, from that to the regular practice of the law, from the law to the legislature and to State offices, were transitions so easily and rapidly made as to justify his expectation of a success equally brilliant in national politics.

Douglas had the "smartness of a Yankee" without his conscience; and his whole career as a national politician seems to show that he had no conception of politics except as a means of personal advancement. Coming to Washington, after a singularly successful career in Illinois, he distinguished himself immediately by the promptitude and skill with which he availed himself of the readiest means of securing personal prominence. Too young to aspire to the highest honors of the party, he perceived that the leading politicians around him owed their importance to their connection with Andrew Jackson, and he proceeded forthwith to connect his own name with that of the dying chieftain of Tennessee. In the debates upon repaying the fine imposed upon General Jackson at New-Orleans for contempt of court, Douglas went beyond all other men in justifying Jackson's conduct, and denouncing that of the court which had condemned him. He made a pilgrimage to the IIermitage, where he received the warmest acknowledgments from General Jackson, and such

an indorsement from him as gave him at once a certain standing in the Democratic party.

Upon national topics he always took the popular side, and always went to an extreme. In the debates upon the Oregon question, for example, he was the most strenuous and audacious of the fifty-four-forty men. "Up to that line," said he, “the title of the United States is clear and unquestionable; never would I, now or hereafter, yield one inch of Oregon, either to Great Britain or any other government." Nay, more, he went so far as to propose "an immediate military occupation" of the territory in dispute; he recommended an instantaneous preparation for war, and declared that, if war resulted from these measures, we ought to drive "Great Britain, and the last vestiges of royal authority, from the continent of North-America, and make the United States an ocean-bound republic." Here was evidently a man who knew the importance of the Irish vote, and of whose future much might be predicted.

Nor was he slow to discover' what was in reality the ruling power in the Democratic party, and what were the means by which alone that power could be conciliated. He resolved to pay the price. There was no measure favored by the Southern oligarchy, or likely to be favored by them, of which he was not, for several years, the ablest and extreme supporter. The whole of his policy as a seeker of the presidency consisted in one idea: to extend the area of slavery by making that extension the act of the settlers in the territories. In other words, his aim was to do the work of the Southern leaders effectually, without incurring a personal responsibility for it. He made the most prodigious and obvious bids for the support of the planting interest, with which he was allied by marriage. As chairman of the Territorial Committee, he uniformly maintained the principle that Congress had no power to interfere, in any way whatever, with the question of slavery in the territories, but that the people resident in them should be left absolutely free to establish or exclude it. As far back as 1848, he began to tamper with the Missouri Compromise itself, by proposing to extend the line established in 1820 across the continent to the Pacific Ocean-a measure which he thought would quiet the North by prohibiting slavery above that line, and satisfy the South by recognizing its existence south of it.

This adroit proposition was accepted by Southern politicians

as giving its author a claim to their support. In the convention of 1852 he was the favorite candidate of the Southern leaders. The choice on that occasion lay between the aged Cass and the "Little Giant" of the West, both of whom had surpassed all living men in assiduous and unscrupulous subserviency to the reigning power. Neither of them, however, was strong enough in the convention to supplant the other. The struggle was severe and protracted. The ballotings continued for five days, and the vote was taken forty-nine times. It being then evident that neither of them could obtain the nomination, the Southern leaders resorted to the device which had succeeded so well in 1844, when Polk was sprung upon an astonished country, and elected to the presidency over Henry Clay. The person chosen in 1852 was Franklin Pierce, of New-Hampshire, a gentleman of excellent temper and highly agreeable manners, against whom personally not a word can be said. Having associated chiefly in Congress and in the army with Southern men, he was not only captivated by their frank and easy demeanor, but he sincerely believed that, in the great controversy which appeared to be rending the Union asunder, the North was wrong and the South right. He thought that the Southern people had a natural and a constitutional right to take their slaves into the new territories, and to be protected in so doing by the law. The device, as we all know, succeeded once more. Franklin Pierce was elected, and the whole moral power of his administration was given in support of the measures ultimately designed to make slavery national and universal. Jefferson Davis was a member of his cabinet, and distinguished himself by the vigor of his administration and the malignant obstinacy of his temper.

There is no example, we believe, in our politics of a man who has proposed to himself to become a tenant of the presidential mansion, who has voluntarily given up the pursuit of his object. It rages in a man's blood like a mania, and blinds his eyes not only to all considerations of the public good, but to the facts of his own position. There are men now seeking the presidency, spending money for it, performing continual labors in the expectation of gaining it, who have little more chance of being president than one of the Japanese jugglers. Two or three of them have been employed in this business for twenty years or more, and at every convention they succeed in getting a few delegates to vote for them. And still they pursue this will-o'