cotton, and woollen were fixed at a moderate standard; wool of the cheapest sort was admitted duty free, and the former free list was considerably extended in favor of raw materials. Our customs revenue was growing too great for peace times, and this was the occasion of the act.* Northern manufacturers lobbied considerably in the interest of a new tariff; and with lobby influences hard at work for their interests, for land grants to aid the construction of frontier railways, North and South, and for ocean mail subsidies, an atmosphere of jobbery and corruption was engendered. So determined was the pressure for river improvements in both Houses of this Congress, that the President's strict scruples were brushed aside, and five appropriations of the kind passed at the first session over his veto. The House, to vindicate its integrity, appointed this winter a committee of investigation. Three of its members, who were shown guilty of corrupt practices, resigned their seats before action was taken on their expulsion. Some reporters were expelled for dishonest conduct; and one important witness refusing to answer the questions which the committee put to him, a bill was passed to compel attendance and testimony in such cases. by fine and imprisonment.† 1856, July The final aspect of our foreign relations under President Pierce was neither creditable nor discreditable. That dramatic recognition of Walker's buccaneerDecember. ing government at Nicaragua, which had cost our cabinet so much nervous consultation, did not keep usurpation on its tottering supports. In vain had Walker issued a decree to legalize slavery anew in Central America, and displayed for sale a list of confiscated estates; in vain had Soulè visited him, probably to inspire these decrees and pave the way for a colony of American slaveholders. Father Vijil's mission did nothing for the filibustering cause, and the uneasy envoy soon returned *Act March 3, 1857. † Act Jan. 24, 1857. 1856. DIPLOMACY WITHOUT LAURELS. 365 home. Meanwhile, though supplied with men enlisted in shameful breach of our neutrality laws, Walker lost strength rapidly. Rivas, the native chief, absconding, the usurper caused himself to be chosen President of Nicaragua; but our government refused to receive his new ministers, or to recognize him by this rank. The latest news of this winter showed Walker's forces hemmed in between Lake Nicaragua and the Pacific Ocean by an allied force of hostile natives and Costa Ricans, who had cut off all aid from the Atlantic side. Half-starved and reduced by battle, cholera, and scattering desertion, the expulsion of Walker's band was soon to follow. Nor had the adjustment of Central American settlements fared favorably with England. Buchanan, while at London, had been unable to straighten out the ClaytonBulwer difficulty. Dallas, who succeeded him, arranged a treaty with Great Britain for bringing all controversy to a close; the Senate discussed it through the winter, but did not ratify. John Forsyth the younger, Pierce's minister to Mexico, arranged with that republic, now driven to desperate straits, a compact which promised on its face reciprocity; but its main idea being a money loan upon a mortgage which sooner or later the United States must foreclose, that scheme came also to grief, for our people were repugnant to annexation. In fine, the foreign glories. of this administration were confined chiefly to the diplomatic salaries bill, to Marcy's arrangement of fishing rights and reciprocity with the British provinces, and to the settlement of some international principles with Europe suitable to a state of war. When the treaty of peace was signed abroad, which closed the Russian war, the conference of Euro- 1856. pean powers at Paris proposed four important rules the abolition of privateering; the exemption from seizure of an enemy's goods, excepting contraband of war, under a neutral flag; a like exemption of neutral goods, excepting contraband of war, under an enemy's flag; and that a blockade, in order to be valid, must be effective. The United States was invited to join in establishing such a code, but Marcy, as before, objected to the article which abolished privateering. The other principles, of course, we as neutrals had long contended for. The refusal of the United States may have been on proper reason; but, like most other matters of policy under this administration, the choice enured practically to the South in the event of disunion, and in the end refusal cost our loyal people heavily.* 1857. Throughout the three sessions of this struggling Congress, the courtesies of a deliberative body had been remarkably well preserved, except for the dastardly assault upon Sumner, which was committed while the Senate was not in actual session.† No brutal scene of violence disgraced the floor of either House, though sectional controversy raged angrily. Before a final adjournment, Aiken, of South Carolina, in the Representatives' hall, proposed a vote of thanks to Banks, the retiring Speaker, and the vote passed by a large majority. These retiring courtesies were aided perhaps by a feeling that the pendulum in the late elections had swung back to the side of the Democracy. For all this, however, towards the retiring administration the Republicans had no disposition to reciprocate. Franklin Pierce was a mournful disappointment to all who had hoped for a golden era of peace and harmony, and to the New England that bore and reared him. Popular, and overwhelmingly so, when swept into the Presidency by a great concourse of fraternizing elements, falsely im Marcy's refusal was based upon the supposed need of privateering as an American weapon in case of a future war with Great Britain. This code of Paris bound only the nations to one another which assented to it, and it could be assented to only as a collective whole. In the Southern rebellion of 1861, President Lincoln offered to accede to this code, but permission was refused. By that time England and France viewed the question of privateering in a different light. †The death of Preston L. Brooks, the assailant of the Massachusetts Senator, occurred suddenly in the course of this latest session, and his funeral ceremonies at the capitol were attended by the President in person, together with his cabinet, and by the President-elect besides. 1857. A DISAPPOINTING ADMINISTRATION. 367 agined strong and trustworthy because his private life was pure, he disgusted and lost strength in the free States so rapidly, year by year of his administration, that those who had bent him to their wishes dared not risk a second national canvass under him. In New York State alone, where more than a quarter-million of voters supported him when he took the oath of office, his constituency was reduced in a single year to 190,000, and in 1855 to less than 150,000. And the cause of all this the policy he pursued was to his lasting reproach. Beginning as a conciliator of sections, as one who promised to discourage all agitation, he stirred sectional strife as no President had ever done before, to prove himself the abject devotee of the slaveholders. The North had not furnished a President before so entirely recreant, so barren in other ideas. An amiable man, not without the misgivings natural to his bringing-up, Pierce showed himself, particularly in foreign policy, less puissant than pusillanimous. He applauded vagabond invaders, and left them to fail; he beat at the closed door of annexation, and then retreated at the sound he made. Our only naval exploit under him was to bombard a little Central American town of halfbreeds, and our army accomplished nothing nobler than to disperse the freemen's legislature of Kansas territory. To delight the South he posed as the strict constructionist, and went beyond the majority of his own party in vetoing bills for improving Northern rivers and harbors, at the same time that he built costly forts for the South, and asked extravagant military appropriations tending to the increase of irresponsible power. Wide tracts were opened under him for the desolating march of slavery, and for dog's-eared codes by which dunces tried to blot out civilization as a crime. With a mean, bigoted policy within and without, this administration had not even that miserly merit of frugality which bigots may sometimes vaunt; for though the revenue flowed in freely enough to maintain a surplus, the ordinary public expenditures under no administration had ever been so costly. We shall not deny to him a personal integrity; for Pierce was neither base nor venal, and no personal scandals attached to him. He wavered as one of good feeling might do, who had attached himself to a bad cause. But the only real product of all Pierce's fair intentions was that deadly nightshade, the Kansas-Nebraska act. Its repeal of plighted faith the President surely did not originate, but he set it afloat with his indorsement, made the bill a law, and turned the option conferred upon popular sovereignty, so far as he dared, to give slavery the advantage. Instead of reconciling, he took sides. Facile, docile, not without amiable qualities, faithful to his taskmasters, and of generous impulses which kept him true to his chosen course, Pierce sought a renomination from the set he so constantly served, and they gave him instead the passport to their home society. Remote, melancholy, shrouded in domestic sorrow, so tenderly was this genial and chivalric ex-President regarded by Southern gentlemen upon his retirement, that the rumor was widely credited that he had received the present of a plantation, and meant to settle down among them for the rest of his life. But, after much foreign travel, he returned finally to his town in the Granite State and built himself a fine house; a handsome recluse in the prime of life, among neighbors whose affinities had changed, and pointed out with the finger of curiosity as the man who had once been President. As a final misfortune it proved impossible to allay Pierce's obloquy, for the administration which followed carried his obsequious policy to a worse fruition. The cabinet of this administration was a mosaic work, made up to please all factions of the Democratic party; but Jefferson Davis, who has commented upon its continuance without a single change, attributes that felicitous harmony to the remarkable power exerted by the chief, who was generous. frank, and, in Southern estimation at least, true to his friends and his faith.* No private correspondence of this administration has seen the light; yet there can be little doubt that contemporary opinion was * Jefferson Davis's Confederacy, 25. |