University of Virginia Library

3. CHAPTER III.

Holding, as I do, our democratic leader, the honorable
Middleton Flam, in the most deservedly profound respect,
and knowing him to be, if I may be allowed the expression,
a bright exemplar of democracy, and containing in himself,
metaphorically speaking, the epitome of all sound opinions,
I am fully authorised by the common usage regarding public
characters to bring him and his affairs conspicuously into
the view of the world, not for censure, neither for praise,
although no man is better entitled to the latter, but for instruction.
Such is the destiny of distinguished men, that
their lives are common property for the teaching of their
generation. Duly acknowledging the weight of this maxim,
I shall venture in the present chapter to give my reader
a still closer insight into the private concerns of our representative;
for which task I feel myself somewhat specially
qualified, through the bountiful hospitality of that excellent
gentleman who has not only welcomed me to his board

often on week days, and always on Sundays, but who has
even flattered me, more than once, by the remark that he
would not take umbrage at such impartial development of
his life and opinions as he knew I, better than any other of
his friends, (truly herein his kindness has overrated my
worthiness,) had it in my power to make.

The old family seat of the Flams is about two miles from
Quodlibet. It is upon the Bickerbray road; and, taking in
all the grounds belonging to the domicil, the tract is somewhere
about eight hundred acres; by far the greater portion
of which is a flat range of woodland and field, watered by
Grasshopper Run which falls into the Rumblebottom. The
tract used to be called, in Judge Flam's time, “The Poplar
Flats,” and the house, at that day, went by the name of
“Quality Hall:” but ever since Mr. Middleton has had it,
which, as may be gathered from what I have imparted in
the last chapter, has been from the time that the old Black
Cockades began to think of turning democrats; ever since
that day the spelling has been gradually changing, and the
house now goes by the settled name of “Equality Hall,”
and the tract is always written by our people “The Popular
Flats.” Mr. Middleton greatly approves of this change,
for two reasons which he has had occasion to take into his
serious reflections:—First; “Because,” he says, “in the
Quodlibetarian Democratic system, as now understood,
words are things.” “Not only things, Sir,” said he, in a
discourse one day, at his own table, “but important and
valuable things: I have observed,” he continued, “in our
country, especially amongst the unflinching, uncompromising
democrats, that a name is always half the battle. For
instance, sir, We wish to destroy the Bank; we have only
to call it a Monster: We desire to put down an opposition
ticket, and keep the offices amongst ourselves; all that we
have to do is to set up a cry of Aristocracy. If we want to

stop a canal, we clamor against Consolidation:—if we wish
it to go on, it is only to change the word—Develope the Resources.
When it was thought worth our while to frighten
Calhoun with the notion that we were going to hang him,
we hurraed for the Proclamation; and after that, when we
wanted to gain over his best friends to our side—State Rights
was the word. Depend upon it, gentlemen, with the true
Quodlibetarian Democracy, Names are Things: that is the
grand secret of the `New Light system.' ”

Mr. Flam's second reason for approving the change in
the spelling of Poplar Flats and Quality Hall, did not depend
upon such a philosophical subtlety as the first; it was
simply because he had very nigh lost his first election to
Congress from inattention to this material point of orthography.
Quality Hall, some of the Democrats of our region
were unreasonable and headstrong enough to say, was not
so democratic a name as their candidate ought to have for
his place of residence; and if it had not been that our representative
discovered this in time to convince them that it
was an old-fashioned way of spelling Equality Hall, I believe,
in my conscience, he would have made out very
badly: but luckily for this district, and I may say, for the
nation, this error in spelling was corrected in time to set all
straight; and Mr. Flam, from that day, not only put the E
before the Q, bnt, in token of that incident, and by way of
a remembrancer, always spoke of Equality Hall as built
upon Popular Flats, which sounded very well in the ears
of the New Lights, and no doubt went a great way to keep
him in Congress ever after. Therefore, I repeat after my
patron and friend, Words are Things;—and, democratically
speaking, in the sense of a New Light, I might even
say better than Things.

Equality Hall is a building which looks larger than it is,
from the circumstance that it was originally a one-storied,

irregular cottage of brick, but in the Judge's time a second
story was put to it; and, almost immediately after, Mr.
Middleton came to be the owner, he enlarged the eastern
gable by widening it to nearly forty feet, and building it up
considerably above the roof, and then adding to it a grand
Grecian Temple porch with niches for statues, and with
fluted Doric columns of wood, which thus constituted, what
Mr. Middleton calls his facade and principal front to the
building. The effect of this piece of magnificence was to
screen the old cottage from view, and to impress the beholder
with the idea of a grand building peeping out upon
the Bickerbray road between the foliage of two weeping
willows, which the old Judge put there before Mr. Jefferson's
election.

I have heard some fastidious, not to say malevolent
critics, find fault with this new addition to the building,
upon the score that it had too much pretence about it;
and that one was always disappointed upon finding all
this grandeur of outside was but a mere piece of theatrical
show, without having any thing to correspond to it
within. Mr. Flam has heard the same objection, but he
has always treated it with the contempt it deserved. “It
was intended for show,” he observed one day addressing
the people from the hustings, when he had occasion to
notice a remark of one of these cavilling gentlemen, who
had said something about having walked behind the portico
to find the house,—and I shall never forget how his eye
kindled and his form dilated as he spoke—“show, sir! of
course, it was put there for show. What else could it be
put for? What is any portico put up for? It faces toward
the road, sir,—it was designed to face toward the road.
When I built that portico, I wished the people, sir, to see
it; the best I have shall always be shown to the people. I
trust, sir, that my respect for the people shall never so far

abate, as to induce me to neglect them. My house, sir,
intrinsically is that of an humble citizen; there are a dozen
equal to it in this county; but that part of it which is
intended to gratify the people is unsurpassed here or any
where else. I have laid out, sir, a small fortune on that
portico to gratify the people: all that I have comes from
them—all that I ever expect to be, I hope to derive from
them: who has so good a right as they to require me to put
my best foot foremost, when they are the spectators? On
the same principle, sir, when I appear in public, I dress in
the most expensive attire, I drive the best horses, and procure
the finest coach. My turnout is altogether elaborate,
studiously particular—simply because I hold the people in
too much esteem, to shab them off with any thing of a
secondary quality, whilst Providence has blessed me with
the means of providing them the best. That, sir, is what
I call a keystone principle in the arch of democratic government:
that is the sentiment, and that alone, which is to
give perpetuity to this—”

“Fair fabric of freedom,” said Theodore Fog, who was
amongst the auditory, and perceived that Mr. Flam hesitated
for a word to convey his idea.

“Thank you, my friend,” courteously replied Mr. Flam,
“I am indebted to you for the word—fair fabric of freedom.”

Coming back from this digression, which I have the
rather indulged because of the eloquence, as well as the
just democratic sentiment it breathes, I proceed with my
sketch of the homestead of our distinguished leader of the
politics of Quodlibet.

If I were asked what constituted the most striking feature
in the arrangements of this very admirable establishment, I
should say it was the judicious admixture of a laudable
economy, with the greatest possible effect in the way of

outward exhibition. For instance; the grounds were embellished
with sundry structures, apparently at great cost,
and producing a most satisfactory impression on the eye,
but which when examined would be found to be, for the
most part, painted imitations of a very cheap kind. Thus
there was to be seen from the portico, peering above a
thicket on the Grasshopper run, an old castle with ivy-crowned
battlements, greatly enriching the view; at the end
of the long walk in the garden, a magnificent obelisk rose
forty feet above a bed of asparagus; the entrance to the
stable yard, was through the gothic archway of an old
chapel, exceeding pleasant to behold; and the ice pond was
guarded by a palisade composed of muskets, lances, swords,
shields and cannon, flanked at each end by a pile of drums
and colors. All these several embellishments a nice observation
would determine to be executed in oil painting, upon
wooden screens sawed into the requisite figures. But even
this expense would, perhaps, have been avoided, had it not
been that Quipes, our artist, owed Mr. Flam twenty-five
dollars on account of a debt which Mr. Flam had to pay for
him, to get him out of gaol, for the sake of his vote, when we
first elected our public spirited representative to Congress.
Owing to this circumstance, connected with the fact that
Sam Hardesty, the joiner, became insolvent on his contract
for building the big portico, whereby Mr. Flam was obliged
to advance money to him in order to get it finished, our
member conceived that it would be a good plan to work
these debts out of his two friends, by setting them about
the decorations I have described. Besides, he reasoned
with himself that it was always well to give employment to
the working people about him, with a view to encourage
industry and afford a practical illustration of the benignant
influence of the great democratic principle upon society—a
consideration, which Mr. Flam on no occasion ever permitted
himself to lose sight of. By this judicious management
he accomplished a fourfold purpose—namely: the beautifying
of Popular Flats; the execution of these rich specimens
of art, at less than half their value; the employment of two
very meritorious fragments of the people; and, above all, a
most satisfactory development of the excellence and usefulness
of the great New Light democratic principle.

Mr. Flam never was what you might call a monied man.
For although his farms were very productive, and he had a
considerable income from stock in the United States Bank;
and although the expenses of his family were very far short
of what the world might, from the show he made, suppose
them to be; yet he was in the habit of parting with his
money as fast as it came to hand. There were a great
number of deserving but needy persons who were often at
the Popular Flats, and who did not hesitate to borrow all
the funds Mr. Flam could spare; (if he had a fault it was
the generosity of his lendings,) and in this way to keep him,
as he has often told me himself, very bare. To make sure
against loss he had the prudence never to lend without bond
and mortgage, with a power of attorney to confess judgment;
and as he ever avowed what he called his most irrevocable
opinion, that the interest law was exceedingly
oppressive upon the industry of the country, he invariably
made his own bargain on that point—sagaciously remarking,
as I once heard him to Nicholas Hardup, the cattle dealer,
who was under execution upon a judgment, and came to
borrow the amount from Mr. Flam, “Money, sir, is a
commodity like wheat or cattle; its value is regulated by
the relations of supply and demand. Society will never
prosper till that principle is universally recognised. We
go for it, Mr. Hardup, as cardinal in the democratic creed.
Labor, to be free, requires that the money contract also
should be free. Why should the poor man pay six per

cent. when money is worth but five? Why should he be
prevented paying seven, eight, or nine, even, if he finds it
his interest to give it—or cannot do without it? No sir—
Equal Rights, Liberty of Conscience and Unrestricted Freedom
of Contract—there is the buttress of Democratic Government!”

It often happened, as such things will happen, that Mr.
Flam became the loser by his generosity; and as it was a
maxim with him to inculcate the most rigid punctuality in
all engagements, he has never felt himself at liberty to relax
what he regarded this salutary rule; so that, on many occasions,
he has been compelled to submit to the unpleasant
and expensive operation of closing his accounts on the bond
and mortgage, by taking possession of the mortgaged property;
and in this way, as he sometimes feelingly complains
to his friends, he has become encumbered with more
land than he knows what to do with. He has, however,
gradually got through a great deal of this trouble by renting
out his farms; a course which he intends to persevere in
until his children are able to take the management of them.

Mr. Handy has several times endeavored to persuade him
to make his improvements rather more permanent, and to
take down these embellishments I have been describing;
rather rashly as I thought, calling them, to Mr. Flam's face,
pasteboard scenery, gingerbread nonsense, and twopenny
gimcracks:—and he insinuated that if our worthy representative
would lay out some of his “accommodation” in a
more solid manner upon Popular Flats, it would tell hereafter
to his advantage. But Mr. Flam turns a deaf ear to
all Nicodemus's preaching. He says that the accommodation
is better laid out in the Chickasaw Reserve, where he
and Amos Kendall mean to realise a large fortune; and
as to what Mr. Handy is pleased to call gimcracks and
gingerbread, that, in fact, is the only kind of decoration

in which a man, who respects the simplicity and purity of
democratic government, ought to indulge his taste. “If,”
said he, “my old castle, my obelisk or my gothic gateway
were built of stone instead of white pine, a fair inference
might be made against me of a lurking wish to restore the
exploded aristocratic system of primogeniture and entails.
It would be said I was building for my son and his eldest
born. Thank God, no such treasonable design can be inferred
from this gimcrack and gingerbread, as you wittily
term it. When I go, sir, my estate is to be cut up as our
democratic republican laws ordain; and my gimcrack and
gingerbread can be ploughed in as easily as the dockweed.
Strange as it may sound to the ears of some, Gimcrack and
Gingerbread are the elements of our new Democratic Theory.
Sir, our government should glory in it:—it does glory in it.
There is no reproach in the fact that we neither build, legislate,
think nor determine for the next generation. We
attend to ourselves—that is genuine New Light democracy.
We oppose Vested Rights, we oppose Chartered Privileges,
we oppose Pledges to bind future legislatures, we oppose
Tariffs, Internal Improvements, Colleges and Universities,
on the broad democratic ground, that we have nothing to do
with Posterity. Posterity will be as free as we are. Let
it take care of itself. I glory, sir, in saying New Light
democracy riots in Gimcrack and Gingerbread.”

This eloquent outburst of sentiment effectually silenced
Mr. Handy and brought him thoroughly into Mr. Flam's
opinion. I rejoice that my intimacy with this able statesman
should have afforded me this opportunity to show the
brilliancy with which his mind sparkles in the demonstration
of political truth, and the wonderful power with which
it converts apparently trivial thoughts into golden illustrations
of the Democratic Theory as lately discovered and
practised.