University of Virginia Library

36. CHAPTER XXXVI.
THE OCCUPANT OF THE WHITE HOUSE.

IN one of the smaller parlors of the White House in Washington
sat two men of rather marked appearance. One of
them sat leaning back in his tipped chair, with his thumbs in
the arm-holes of his vest, and his right ancle resting on his
left knee. His figure, though now flaccid and relaxed, would
evidently be a tall one if pulled out like the sliding joints of
a spy-glass; but gaunt, lean, and ungainly, with harsh angles
and stooping shoulders. He was dressed in a suit of black,
with a black satin vest, and round his neck a black silk kerchief
tied carelessly in a knot, and passing under a shirt-collar
turned down and revealing a neck brawny, sinewy, and tanned.

The face that belonged to this figure was in keeping with it,
and yet attractive from a certain charm of expression. Nose
prominent and assertive; cheek-bones rather obtrusive, and
under them the flesh sallow and browned, though partially covered
by thick bristling black whiskers; eyes dark and deeply
set; mouth and lips large; and crowning all these features a
shock of stiff profuse black hair carelessly put aside from his
irregularly developed forehead, as if by no other comb than
that which he could make of his long lank fingers.

This man was not only the foremost citizen of the Republic,
officially considered, but he had a reputation, exaggerated beyond
his deserts, for homeliness. By the Rebel press he was
frequently spoken of as “the ape” or the “gorilla.” From

the rowdy George Sanderson to the stiff, if not stately Jefferson
Davis (himself far from being an Adonis), the pro-slavery
champions took a harmless satisfaction, in their public addresses,
in alluding, in some contemptuous epithet, to the man's personal
shortcomings. So far from being disturbed, the object of all
these revilings would himself sometimes playfully refer to his
personal attractions, unconscious how much there was in that
face to redeem it from being truly characterized either as ugly
or commonplace.

As he sat now, with eyes bent on vacancy, and his mind
revolving the arguments or facts which had been presented by
his visitor, his countenance assumed an expression which was
pathetic in its indication of sincere and patient effort to grasp
the truth and see clearly the way before him. The expression
redeemed the whole countenance, for it was almost tender in
its anxious yet resigned thoughtfulness; in its profound sense
of the enormous and unparalleled responsibilities resting on
that one brain, perplexing it in the extreme.

The other party to the interview was a man whose personal
appearance was in marked contrast. Although he had numbered
in his life nearly as many years as the President, he
looked some ten years younger. His figure was strikingly
handsome, compact, and graceful; and his clothes were nicely
adapted to it, both in color and cut. Every feature of his face
was finely outlined and proportioned; and the whole expression
indicated at once refinement and energy, habits of intellectual
culture and of robust physical exercise and endurance.
This man was he who has passed so long in this story under
the adopted name of Vance.

There had been silence between the two for nearly a minute.
Suddenly the President turned his mild dark eyes on his visitor,
and said: “Well, sir, what would you have me do?”

“I would have you lead public opinion, Mr. President, instead
of waiting for public opinion to lead you.”

“Make this allowance for me, Mr. Vance: I have many
conflicting interests to reconcile; many conflicting facts and
assertions to sift and weigh. Remember I am bound to listen,
not merely to the men of New England, but to those of Kentucky,
Maryland, and Eastern Tennessee.”

“Mr. President, you are bound to listen to no man who is
not ready to say, Down with slavery if it stands in the way of
the Republic! You should at once infuse into every branch
of the public service this determination to tear up the bitter
root of all our woes. Why not give me the necessary authority
to raise a black regiment?”

“Impossible! The public are not ripe for any such extreme
measure.”

“There it is! You mean that the public shall be the
responsible President instead of Abraham Lincoln. O, sir,
knowing you are on the side of right, have faith in your own
power to mould and quicken public opinion. When last August
in Missouri, Fremont declared the slaves of Rebels free,
one word of approval from you would have won the assent of
every loyal man. But, instead of believing in the inherent
force of a great idea to work its own way, you were biased by
the semi-loyal men who were lobbying for slavery, and you
countermanded the righteous order, thus throwing us back a
whole year. Do I give offence?”

“No, sir, speak your mind freely. I love sincerity.”

“We know very well, Mr. President, that you will do what
is right eventually. But O, why not do it at once, and forestall
the issue? We know that you will one of these days
remove Buell and other generals, the singleness of whose devotion
to the Union as against slavery is at least questionable.
We know that you will put an end to the atrocious pro-slavery
favoritism of many of our officers. We know you will issue a
proclamation of emancipation.”

“I think not, Mr. Vance.”

“Pardon me, you will do it before next October. You will
do it because the pressure of an advanced public opinion will
force you to do it, and because God Almighty will interpose
checks and defeats to our arms in order that we of the North
may, in the fermentation of ideas, throw off this foul scum,
redolent of the bottomless pit, which apathy or sympathy in
regard to slavery engenders. Yes, you will give us an emancipation
proclamation, and then you will give us permission to
raise black regiments, and then, after being pricked, and urged,
and pricked again, by public opinion, you will offset the Rebel

threats of massacre by issuing a war bulletin declaring that
the United States will protect her fighting men of whatever
color, and that there must be life for life for every black soldier
killed in violation of the laws of war.”

“But are you a prophet, Mr. Vance?”

“It requires no gift of prophecy, Mr. President, to foretell
these things. It needs but full faith in the operation of Divine
laws to anticipate all that I have prefigured. You refuse now
to let me raise a black regiment. In less than ten months you
will give me a carte blanche to enlist as many negroes as I can
for the war.”

“Perhaps, — but I don't see my way clear to do it yet.”

“A great man,” said Vance, “ought to lead and fashion
public opinion in stupendous emergencies like this, — ought to
throw himself boldly on some great principle having its root in
eternal justice, — ought to grapple it, cling to it, stake everything
upon it, and make everything give way to it.”

“But I am not a great man, Mr. Vance,” said the President,
with unaffected naïveté.

“I believe your intentions are good and great, Mr. President,”
was the reply; “for what you supremely desire is, to do
your duty.”

“Yes, I claim that much. Thank you.”

“Well, your duty is to take the most energetic measures for
conquering a peace. Under the Constitution, the war power is
committed to your hands. That power is not defined by the
Constitution, for it is imprescriptible; regulated by international
usage. That usage authorizes you to free the slaves of
an enemy. Why not do it?”

“Would not a proclamation of emancipation from Abraham
Lincoln be much like the Pope's bull against the comet?”

“There is this difference: in the latter case, the fulmination
is against what we have no reason to suppose is an evil; in the
former case, you would attack with moral weapons what you
know to be a wrong and an injustice immediately under your
eyes and within your reach. If it could be proved that the
comet is an evil, the Pope's bull would not seem to me an absurdity;
for I have faith in the operation of ideas, and in the
triumph of truth and good throughout the universe. But the

emancipation proclamation would not be futile; for it would
give body and impulse to an idea, and that idea one friendly
to right and to progress.”

The President rose, and, walking to the window, drummed a
moment with his fingers abstractedly on the glass, then, returning
to his chair, reseated himself and said: “As Chief Magistrate
of the Republic, my first duty is to save it. If I can best
do that by tolerating slavery, slavery shall be tolerated. If I
can best do it by abolishing slavery, you may be sure I will try
to abolish it. But I must n't be biased by my feelings or my
sentiments.”

“Why not?” asked Vance. “Do not all great moral truths
originate in the feelings and the sentiments? The heart's
policy is often the safest. Is not cruelty wrong because the
heart proclaims it? Is not despotism to be opposed because
the heart detests it?”

“Mr. Vance, you eager philanthropists little know how hard
it often is for less impulsive and more conservative men to
withstand the urgency of those feelings that you give way to
at once. But you have read history to little purpose if you do
not know that the best cause may be jeoparded by the premature
and too radical movements of its friends. I have been
blamed for listening to the counsels of Kentucky politicians
and Missouri conservatives; and yet if we had not held back
Kentucky from the secession madness, she might have contributed
the straw that would have broken the camel's back.”

“O Kentucky!” exclaimed Vance, “I know thy works,
that thou art neither cold nor hot. I would thou wert cold or
hot. So then, because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor
hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth! Mr. President, the
ruling powers in Kentucky would hand her over bound to Jeff
Davis to-morrow, if they dared; but they dare not do it. In
the first place, they fear Uncle Sam and his gunboats; in the
next place, they fear Kentuckians, of whom, thank God! there
are enough who do not believe in slavery; and, lastly, they fear
the nineteenth century and the spirit of the age. Better take
counsel from the Rhetts and Spratts of South Carolina than
from the selfish politicians of Kentucky! They will moor you
to the platform of a false conservatism till the golden opportu

nity slips by, and new thousands must be slaughtered before it
can be recovered.”

“Well, what would be your programme?”

“This, Mr. President: accept it as a foregone conclusion
that slavery must be exterminated; and then bend all your energies
on accelerating its extermination. We sometimes hear
it said, `What! do you expect such a vast system — so inter-woven
with the institutions of the South — to be uprooted and
overthrown all at once?' To which I reply, `Yes! The price
paid has been already proportionate to the magnitude of the
overthrow.' Before the war is over, upwards of a million of
men will have lost their lives in order that Slavery might try
its experiment of establishing an independent slave empire. A
million of men! And there are not four millions of slaves in
the country! We will not take into account the treasure expended,
— the lands desolated, — the taxes heaped upon the
people, — the ruin and anguish inflicted. It strikes me the
price we have paid is big enough to offset the vastness of the
social change. And, after all, it is not such a formidable job
when you consider that there are not forty thousand men in the
whole country who severally own as many as ten slaves.
Why, in a single campaign we lose more soldiers than there
are slaveholders having any considerable stake in the institution.
Experience has proved that there could be universal
emancipation to-morrow without bad results to either master or
slave, — with advantage, on the contrary, to both.”[1]

“Well, Mr. Vance, we will suppose the Mississippi opened;
New Orleans, Mobile, Charleston, and Richmond captured, —
the Rebellion on its last legs; — what then?”

“With the capture of New Orleans and Vicksburg, and the
opening of the Mississippi, you have Secessia on the hip, and
her utter subjugation is merely a question of time. When she
cries peccavi, and offers to give in, I would say to the people of
the Rebel States: `First, Slavery, the cause of this war, must
be surrendered, to be disposed of at the discretion of the victors.
Secondly, you must so modify your constitutions that
Slavery can never be re-established among you. Thirdly,

every anti-republican feature in your State governments must
be abandoned. Fourthly, every loyal man must be restored
to the property and the rights you may have robbed him of.
Fifthly, no man offensively implicated in the Rebellion must
represent any State in Congress. Sixthly, no man must be
taxed against his will for any debt incurred through rebellion
against the United States. Under these easy and honorable
terms, I would readmit the seceded States to the Union; and
if these terms are refused, I would occupy and hold the States
as conquered territory.”

“And could we reconcile such a course with a due regard to
law?”

“Surely yes; for the people in rebellion are at once subjects
and belligerents. They are public enemies, and as such are
entitled only to such privileges as we may choose to concede.
They are subjects, and as such must fulfil their obligations to
the Republic.”

“But you say nothing of confiscation,” Mr. Vance.

“I would be as generous as possible in this respect, Mr.
President. Loyal men who have been robbed by the secession
fury must of course be reimbursed, and the families of
those who have been hung for their loyalty must be provided
for. I see no fairer way of doing this than by making the
robbers give up their plunder, and by compelling the murderers
to contribute to the wants of those they have orphaned. But
beyond this I would be governed by circumstances as they
might develop themselves. I would practice all the clemency
and forbearance consistent with justice. Those landholders
who should lend themselves fairly and earnestly to the work
of substituting a system of paid labor for slavery should be
entitled to the most generous consideration and encouragement,
whatever their antecedents might have been. I would
do nothing for vengeance and humiliation; everything for the
benefit of the Southern people themselves and their posterity.
Questions of indemnification should not stand in the way of a
restored Union.”

“Undoubtedly, Mr. Vance, the interests of the masses, North
and South, are identical.”

“That is true, Mr. President, but it is what the Rebel leaders

try to conceal from their dupes. The most damnable effect of
slavery has been the engendering at the South of that large
class of mean whites, proud, ignorant, lazy, squalid, and brutally
degraded, who yet feel that they are a sort of aristocracy
because they are not niggers. Having produced this class,
Slavery now sees it must rob them of all political rights.
Hence the avowed plan of the Secession leaders to have either
a close oligarchical or a monarchical government. The thick
skulls of these mean whites (or if not of them, of their children)
we must reach by help of the schoolmaster, and let them
see that their interests lie in the elevation of labor and in opposition
to the theories of the shallow dilettanti of the South,
who, claiming to be great political thinkers and philosophers,
maintain that capital ought to own labor, and that there must
be a hereditary servile race, if not black, then white, in whom
all mental aspiration and development shall be discouraged and
kept down, in order that they may be content to be hewers of
wood and drawers of water. As if God's world-process were
kept up in order that a few Epicurean gentlemen may have a
good time of it, and send their sons to Paris to eat sumptuous
dinners and attend model-artist entertainments, while thousands
are toiling to supply the means for their base pleasures. As
if a Frederick Douglas must be brutified into a slave in order
that a Slidell may give Sybarite banquets and drive his neat
span through the Champs Elysées!”

“What should we do with the blacks after we had freed
them?”

“Let them alone! Let them do for themselves. The difficulties
in the way are all those of the imagination.”

“I like the moderation of your views as to confiscation.”

“When the mass of the people at the South,” continued
Vance, “come to see, as they will eventually, that we have
been fighting the great battle of humanity and of freedom, for
the South even more than for the North, for the white man
even more than for the black, there will be such a reaction as
will obliterate every trace of rancor that internecine war has
begotten. But I have talked too much. I have occupied too
much of your time.”

“O no! I delight to meet with men who come to me,

thinking how they may benefit, not themselves, but their country.
The steam-tugs you gave us off the mouths of the Mississippi
we would gladly have paid thirty thousand dollars for.
I wish I could meet your views in regard to the enlistment of
black troops; but — but — that pear is n't yet ripe. Failing
that, you shall have any place you want in the Butler and
Farragut expedition against New Orleans. As for your young
friends, — what did you say their names are?”

“Robert Onslow and Charles Kenrick.”

“O yes! Onslow, you say, has been a captain in the Rebel
service. Both the young men shall be honorably placed where
they can distinguish themselves. I 'll speak to Stanton about
them this very day. Let me make a note of it.”

The President drew from his pocket a memorandum-book
and hastily wrote a line or two. Vance rose to take his leave.

“Mr. President,” said he, “I thank you for this interview
But there 's one thing in which you 've disappointed me.”

“Ah! you think me rather a slow coach, eh?”

“Yes; but that was n't what I alluded to.”

“What then?”

“From what I 've read about you in the newspapers, I
expected to have to hear one of your stories.”

A smile full of sweetness and bonhommie broke over the
President's care-worn face as he replied: “Really! Is it possible?
Have you been here all this time without my telling
you a story? Sit down, Mr. Vance, and let me make up for
my remissness.”

Vance resumed his seat.

The President ran his fingers through his long, carelessly
disposed hair, pushing it aside from his forehead, and said:
“Once on a time the king of beasts, the lion, took it into his
head he would travel into foreign parts. But before leaving
his kingdom he installed an old 'coon as viceroy. The lion
was absent just four months to a day; and on his return he
called all the principal beasts to hear their reports as to the
way in which affairs had been managed in his absence. Said
the fox, `You left an old imbecile to rule us, sire. No sooner
were you gone than a rebellion broke out, and he appointed
for our leader a low-born mule, whose cardinal maxim in military

matters was to put off till to-morrow whatever could be
just as well done to-day; whose policy was a masterly inactivity
instead of a straightforward movement on the enemy's
works.' Said the sheep, `The 'coon could have had peace if
he had listened to me and others who wanted to draw it mild
and to compromise. Such a bloodthirsty wretch as the 'coon
ought to be expelled from civilized society.' Said the horse,
`He is too slow.' Said the ox, `He is too fast.' Said the
jackass, `He does n't know how to bray; he can't utter an
inspiring note.' Said the pig, `He is too full of his jokes and
stories.' Said the magpie, `He is a liar and a thief.' Said
the owl, `He is no diplomatist.' Said the tiger, `He is too
conservative.' Said the beaver, `He is too radical.' `Stop!'
roared the king, — `shut up, every beast of you!' At once
there was silence in the assembly. Then, turning to his viceroy,
the lion said, `Old 'coon, I wish no better proof that you
have been faithful than all this abuse from opposite parties.
You have done so well, that you shall be reinstalled for
another term of four months!'”

“And what did the old 'coon say to that?” asked Vance.

“The old 'coon begged to be excused, protesting that he had
experienced quite enough of the charms of office.”

The President held out his hand. Vance pressed it with a
respectful cordiality, and withdrew from the White House.