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graphical parties to which it has given birth, so much dreaded by the father of his country, will speedily become extinct? Most happy will it be for the country when the public mind shall be diverted from this question to others of more pressing and practical importance." *

These were soothing words, surely, and courtesy and good feeling went out from all true lovers of the Union to the man who uttered them. Now, as under each new President in turn, the great mass of the people appeared responsive; for they wearied of this moral agitation and wished to change the subject. Our sequel will show whether this non-intervention extinguisher was put over the flames so considerately; whether, in point of fact, the will of the majority was allowed its tranquil operation.

The cast of the new cabinet was not decided without painful delay and tribulation. The Senate met and adjourned on the 5th of March, without receiving a nomination of any kind. But on the 6th the list of chief advisers was sent in, and immediately confirmed. It comprised Lewis Cass, of Michigan, as Secretary of State; Howell Cobb, of Georgia, Secretary of the Treasury; John B. Floyd, of Virginia, Secretary of War; Isaac Toucey, of Connecticut, Secretary of the Navy; Jacob Thompson, of Mississippi, Secretary of the Interior; Aaron V. Brown, of Tennessee, Postmaster-General; and Jeremiah S. Black, of Pennsylvania, Attorney-General. Such a cabinet might seem at first sight fairly representative of the whole Union, in a geographical sense; but in reality it was a South-side cabinet, more literally so than that of Franklin Pierce. Not only did slaveholding Democrats outnumber those from free States by four to three, but two at least of the latter were tremulous exponents of Northern sentiment. Cass, by this time the most venerable office-holder in America, added to the easy indolence which had always been characteristic of him, the growing torpor of old age. Experienced, and not without sound talent for discussion,

* Inaugural address, March 4, 1857 2 Curtis's Buchanan, c. 9.

1857.

SELECTION OF A CABINET.

375

he had followed all his long life rather than led, striving for many a long mile to keep up eagerly where at heart he was reluctant. Buchanan's selection of his premier was an act of personal friendship, and secured, too, for his cabinet a respectable figure-head of solid timber; and Cass's genial traits of character, besides, had gained him a wide popularity, regardless of his politics, which it was well known should be taken with a strong pinch of salt. For convenience, then, and pliable counsel, as one who would make no trouble, was the Secretary of State selected; and the President soon found as a penalty that he would have to carry most of the burden of foreign correspondence upon his own shoulders.* Toucey, again, the discarded Senator of a State now Republican, whose popular will he had opposed while he had opportunity, possessed neither the tenets nor the talents to control a New-England constituency. Black, the last of the Northern trio, brought to his post a good professional reputation, and in fact well fitted. it, but he was new to the nation and to national politics.

Of Southern men in the cabinet, Floyd was a Virginian, and the son of a Virginian, and his service had been to his State. Thompson, though formerly in Congress, owed his conspicuousness to the espousal of "Southern State rights" in 1850; while Brown, a faithful and industrious Democratic leader in Tennessee, had served lately as governor of that State. Of the new cabinet and administration, Howell Cobb was by all odds the one whom expectation prefigured as the master spirit. Strong, coarse, and undaunted in his aspirations, he was intensely pro-slavery in his views, and yet had hitherto shown something of a magnanimous national spirit. A constitutional Unionist in 1850, he was one of those who had defined allegiance to the old flag as conditional upon compromises. Still in the prime of life, and combining boldness with energy, this

See 2 Curtis's Buchanan, 399, which relates that Cass, even while in Jackson's cabinet and in the full vigor of his faculties, used to worry his chieftain greatly by bringing him matters to decide which he ought to have decided for himself.

son of Georgia kept full command of his resources, and yet it was felt that he had never quite come up to the full grade of statesman. His gifts, so far as tested, were for political leadership; and as to finance, which he now took for his special department, his competency was already doubtful. To one who has not patient industry and a firm grasp of numerical tables and economics, the arithmetic. of public operations, which consists in making close and intelligent estimates and then working them out in full practice, must be a hidden science.

To turn once more to the plausible appeal of Buchanan's inaugural address, for what end was this "happy conception," whereby Congress was to practise self-abnegation and self-denial, and see what might come of the exercise of a local option between slavery and freedom? And leaving that will of a local majority to operate in the national territory, what assurance was given that rebellious dismemberment from the Union might not be the logical outcome, rather than the loyal submission of a Constitution republican in its form to the approval of Congress? Between that earliest territorial organization and settlement, moreover, and the final admission as a State with institutions beyond the reach of all external interference, was an admitted hiatus; for when, or how frequently or changeably, might these settlers, by virtue of "popular sovereignty," decide for themselves as between free and slave institutions? "This," said the new President in substance, by way of reply, "is a judicial question; the Supreme Court of the United States, before whom it is pending, will speedily settle it, and to their decision, in common with all good citizens, I shall cheerfully submit." The clause which contained this significant reference, we are told, was inserted, after Buchanan's arrival at Washington, in an address which had been carefully composed at home, copied and recopied.* Its insertion served an important purpose; and it would be very

#2 Curtis's Buchanan, 187.

1857.

THE DRED SCOTT DECISION.

377

strange if, when the new President read that passage, with the judges gathered in their robes about him, he did not know, as they did, the purport of the coming decision.* Ominous of evil was it, at all events, that on great moral and political issues, such as divided the whole people, Buchanan should have hailed the arbitrament of a court in which Democrats and slaveholders were strongly uppermost, as the end of strife. Panegyrics upon the will of the majority with such an application were like coaxing the flock into new pastures, to find the key of the paddock turned upon them.

March 6.

The Dred Scott decision was pronounced on the 6th of March. The spectacle already prepared for the north basement room in the rear of the inauguration staircase was postponed over a day, and then the silken dignitaries assembled before a legal audience with opinions ready and their parts all cast. Dred Scott was a negro slave of Missouri, who about 1834 was taken by his master, a surgeon of the regular army, in the course of his own military detail, first to a military post in the State of Illinois, and afterward to Fort Snelling, on the west bank of the Mississippi, near what is now the city of St. Paul, a territorial region from which slavery had been expressly excluded under the Missouri compromise act of 1820. From this latter place, where he married, with the surgeon's consent, one of his own race and condition, Scott was brought back to Missouri in 1838, and, with wife and children, was sold and made over to another master. Alleging upon this state of facts that he and his whole family were rightfully free, the negro sued for trespass in a St. Louis court, and the case was decided in his favor. But the Supreme Court of Missouri reversed the judgment, after which the case was carried into the Fed

It is not to be supposed, as Republican leaders have sometimes charged, that any secret understanding existed between the Executive and judiciary as to the actual judgment. Buchanan has spoken indig nantly of the "infamous and unfounded assertion " that Chief Justice Taney told him what the decision would be. 2 Curtis's Buchanan, 207. And see Tyler's Life of Taney, c. 5.

eral circuit. Whatever motives may have set the original process running, politicians snuffed by 1854 the opportunity to use this poor hare of a client in a grand chase after constitutional principles; or, in other words, so as to elicit from the Supreme Court of the United States a decision upon the validity of the Missouri compromise and those. other matters which the Kansas-Nebraska act had forced into national controversy. The defendant slave holder pleaded to the circuit jurisdiction that Dred Scott was not in any case "a citizen entitled to sue," because a negro of African descent; that plea the court overruled, and, in May, 1854, sent the case to a jury, in accordance with whose verdict judgment was rendered that the plaintiff was still properly a slave; and then the whole record went on final appeal to the tribunal in Washington. Not referees, to be sure, at their own instance, the nine silk gowns, all Democrats but one, and five of them from the States where color presumed servitude, listened patiently to the arguments of counsel favorable to one political aspect of the case or another. Argued at the winter term which preceded this last Presidential canvass, reargued at the next term following the election, this case was not decided till the churn of legislation overhead had ceased and the President-elect was inducted into office; after which, the oracle which Southern statesmen behind the scenes had been trying for many weeks to pry open was gravely unsealed.*

It was an extraordinary decision, certainly, for the third quarter of the nineteenth century, and extraordinary in more senses than one. Lucky for Buchanan, said one of his friends in comment, that the case was not decided a year earlier; for, had it been, "in my belief nothing on earth could have prevented Fremont's election." To the majority opinion of the court five out of the nine judges

*See Johnston's A. H. Stephens, 316, etc. Stephens writes that he has been trying hard to get the Supreme Court to decide, adding that he has reason to think the justices will decide that the Missouri restriction is unconstitutional.

↑ George T. Curtis, in 2 Coleman's Crittenden, 137.

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