Memories of the Ford Administration (35 page)

“I fear, sir,” said the darkly handsome, high-browed Consul (whose diffident manner yet hinted at a certain premature fatigue), “that the question has become a passion, on both sides, which there will be no quenching but with blood. Senator Douglas, in laying the Kansas territory open to squatter sovereignty, has created there a witch’s brew, to which flock fanatics and madmen and all of Missouri’s gun-toting riffraff.”

“And yet, cotton will not grow in Kansas. The Missouri Compromise, I have always stated,” Buchanan affirmed, leaning deeper into the creaking Windsor armchair that amid these worn furnishings did for the seat of honor, “should never have been revoked. Douglas thought to throw a sop to the Southern half of the Democracy and advance his Presidential
prospects for ’56, but in truth he has split the party in two, and in the bargain finished off the Whigs. The Know-Nothings are high in the saddle now, and opposition to Kansas-Nebraska has bred a new national party, I am informed, that calls itself by Jefferson’s old name of Republican. So much for personal ambition, Mr. Hawthorne, when it entwines itself with matters of grand policy. Douglas will never be President now; he has awakened too much hatred.” The old man’s effortful gaze wandered to the top of the Consul’s bookcase, where stood
a fierce and terrible bust of General Jackson, pilloried in a military collar which rose above his ears, and frowning forth immitigably at any Englishman who might happen to cross the threshold
.

The Consul followed his visitor’s eye, gauged its speculative and even alarmed expression, and offered by way of agreement, “Senator Douglas is no Jackson, though he might hope to be. As an idea, squatter sovereignty has a Jacksonian ring.”

“Jackson was a great hater,” Buchanan sighed, amid a fresh effusion of tobacco smoke, “but he had the South with him. The curious condition of our Union is, no election can be won without the South, and none with the South alone. That is the bill, and the nation has few to fill it.”

Hawthorne, though fastidiously aloof from most public enthusiasms, was in his consular capacity politician enough to know that the substantial old gentleman sitting before him was already being spoken of as the only possible candidate for the torn Democracy. [
Retrospect
eds.: the word is used of course in the old sense of the Democratic party. Footnote? Or generally understood among our learned readership?] “It was perhaps a fortunate wind, Mr. Minister,” he rather wickedly
suggested, the tone of address warning his guest of a construable presumption, “which brought you to service in London. Had you been still in the Senate, how would you have voted, sir, on this ill-begotten Kansas-Nebraska Bill?”

Buchanan, with a cool deliberation that the Consul had to admire, levelled his crooked glance upon his questioner, and stated, “Between us—I would have had no choice, but to vote, as would have you if in elected office, with our benefactor and chosen leader, General Pierce, who made support of the bill a point of loyalty to his administration. Nevertheless, the popular-sovereignty provision was a grave and needless mistake, hastily inserted in the late stages of working out the legislation. Douglas wished the territory to organize in the swiftest manner, to keep it from becoming Indian territory and blocking a railroad centered upon Chicago in his own state. In his haste to profit Illinois and himself, he upset three decades of precarious balance. Compared with Jackson, whose personal friendship it was my honor to claim, Douglas is an unprincipled dwarf—pardon my bluntness—who is frequently drunk, most harmfully upon the sound of his own voice.” The old man settled back into the consular office’s audibly protesting guest chair, smiling at his own indiscretion. Yet he judged it time to change the topic. “In art,” he said, “I take it there is never this distinction, to be often found in political service, between formally assenting to a thing, and inwardly assenting to the wisdom of it.”

“In art,” Hawthorne admitted, “we are sometimes invited to trim our texts, for a general good. For instance, my preface to
The Scarlet Letter
, which with great good nature but excessive accuracy sketched my former associates in the Salem customhouse, made such a fierce local stir that I was urged to
withdraw it from subsequent editions; but I resisted those pleas. A compromised work of art becomes on the instant worthless, since we look to art for an otherworldly integrity.”

“If in politics we so severely rejected all compromise, I fear chaos would come to the affairs of men.”

“As it yet may, in spite of much compromise.”

“As it yet may,” the old man agreed, to speed the conversation along, for he had another instance of scandalous muddle to cite. “Less than three months ago, I participated—most unwillingly, mind you—with the Minister to France, Mr. Mason, and the Minister to Spain, Mr. Soulé, in a conference in Ostend and then Aix-la-Chapelle, which had been convened to draft a confidential report to Mr. Marcy and General Pierce upon the matter of purchasing Cuba from a bankrupt Spanish throne.”

“I have read of it in the news,” Hawthorne said quietly. “The British press has been considerably indignant, and those on the continent more so.”

“Oh, and the U. S. Congress, too—we have been mightily flayed,” Buchanan avowed, “and not without justice! The entire business was instigated by two swashbuckling reprobates in our government’s employ, Dan Sickles and Pierre Soulé—both of them hasty in temperament, and quick to take short cuts, whether with diplomatic channels or with other men’s wives. I invited Sickles, at his request, to join the London Mission, thinking as compensation for his willful and pompous moods we would have the company of his charming young wife; but he left her at home in New York and brought along instead a young woman, Miss Fanny White, with whom his only ties appeared to be those of affection! As for Soulé, he has nothing of the temperament of a minister: come to Louisiana from France as a political refugee, having been
jailed for agitation against the Bourbon restoration, he has continued his anti-monarchical activities in Spain, lending the diplomatic pouch to revolutionary letters and further distinguishing himself by shooting the French Minister to Madrid in a dispute over the latter’s wife!” The old man rocked forward in the protesting chair, its legs and rungs and curved stick-back loosened by the squirms of untold unhappy petitioners; he coughed with smoke and laughter and took pause to dab at his eyes with a handkerchief produced from his black sleeve. “Well, these two hotheads, Sickles by going to Washington and stirring up the President with talk of an easy conquest and Soulé by demanding a bullying ultimatum to accompany our offer of a hundred thirty million to the Spanish queen, had put our Mr. Marcy in such a bind that he found himself instructing Soulé to ‘detach that island from the Spanish dominion’—I use his very words. Meanwhile, Dan Sickles had returned to Europe spilling into every receptive ear what he had understood to be General Pierce’s order for drastic action. Naturally, protest though I did, it fell to me and Mason—and Mason took the whole conference as a lark, and contributed scarcely his presence at the table—to frame a formal advisement that would draw the teeth from Soulé’s threats while expressing, in some sort, their gist. Though I cannot claim your own pride of artistic authorship, mine was an ingenious composition, which achieved abeyance enough for Marcy to coax from Soulé his resignation this last December. In the case of Cuba as in many another, the best deed is doing nothing. The Young Americans and their hope of a filibustering expedition have been stymied, and Cuba will fall into our hands when the Spanish rot advances a little farther, as under Providence it is bound to. The public press, which understands nothing but crude sensation, accuses me of proposing
‘sale or seizure,’ when in truth it was I who pulled the administration back from such a disastrous option, which might well have given the European powers an opportunity to come forth and rattle our domestic peace with a Caribbean intervention! Britain is in a fighting mood, as you may sense. It has taken all the friendship I enjoy with Lord Clarendon to curb their reaction to our destruction of Greytown and, worse from the diplomatic point of view, our President’s adamant refusal to disavow Captain Hollins’ rash action! Luckily, not a life was lost in the bombardment, though a mass of mud huts were flattened.”

Hawthorne silently wondered at the old fellow’s ability to delight in the intrigue that the expediencies of power impose. The Minister knew his auditor to be the President’s dear and loyal friend from their college days together at Bowdoin, and while seeming to rattle on freely, yet left to incommunicable implication any low view of Pierce’s ability; neither Pierce, who had defeated him for the 1852 Presidential nomination, nor Marcy, whose stubborn retention of his New York votes helped deny the Pennsylvanian that same nomination, could be counted among Buchanan’s friends, yet here he was (Hawthorne reflected), serving them both in this mostly ceremonial post, bereft of real negotiating authority, making the best of their erratic orders, yet serving with a curious relish. He had become, whatever his initial nature and its potential, a slave of public life, at home only among its formalities and nuances, which, like those of feminine society, seek to regulate with a touch and a word the masculine currents of force that seethe across the planet, and to put an acceptable face on the world’s bloody business of birth and murder. Buchanan and Miss Lane cut considerable figures in high British circles,
and indeed it was not infrequently rumored that the Minister’s niece might soon make a titled marriage. Like all eager talkers, the man had something to sell or conceal. Yet, withal, something rustic and honest—a sunshot innocence aged in the barrel of long experience, an unspoiled aptitude for pleasure foreign to the shadowed psyche of New England—rendered the old functionary companionable, and indeed imparted a sense of his pleading, beneath the
consciousness of high position and importance
, for the less public and more reflective man’s approbation.

The Consul, whose consciousness was divided between the deferences owed by his inferior office and his responsibilities as host, thought it wise, after so long an unburdening by his elderly guest, to introduce a topic where he might bear his share of the discourse. He took up the mention of the English mood, and expanded it to a question of the general English personality, as perceived by his fellow American, and discovered impressions not unlike his own, though on a broader plane. Buchanan felt the British willing to fight for their toehold on the Mosquito Coast, if maladroit and domestically distracted American policy provided an excuse for John Bull to exercise his bully tactics, and Hawthorne found the British personally overbearing and cold.
There are some English whom I like
, we might imagine him saying, in colloquial paraphrase of his words in
Our Old Home—one or two for whom, I might almost say, I have an affection; but still there is not the same union between us, as if they were Americans. A cold, thin medium intervenes betwixt our most intimate approaches. It puts me in mind of Alnaschar, who went to bed with the princess, but placed the cold steel blade of his scimitar between. Perhaps, if I were at home, I might feel differently; but, in this foreign land, I can never forget
the distinction between English and American
. Buchanan nodded in eager agreement; when he did return from his English mission, he proclaimed to a crowd in New York City,
I have been abroad in other lands; I have witnessed arbitrary power; I have contemplated the people of other countries; but there is no country under God’s heavens where a man feels to his fellow-man, except in the United States
. Emboldened by the warmth of his important guest’s agreement, and by the second glass of morning brandy, from the consular cabinet, which the visit entailed, Hawthorne moved on to caricature English women, in implicit contrast to willowy American beauties both he and Buchanan had known.
As a general rule, they are not very desirable objects in youth, and, in many instances, become perfectly grotesque after middle-age—so massive, not seemingly with pure fat, but with solid beef, making an awful ponderosity of frame. You think of them as composed of sirloins, and with broad and thick steaks on their immense rears. They sit down on a great round space of God’s footstool, and look as if nothing could ever move them; and indeed they must have a vast amount of physical strength to be able to move themselves
.

The Minister’s response to this word-picture was so gratifying, forcing the gentleman to squeeze the mirth from his abdomen with several lurches of his large and well-upholstered frame, that Hawthorne added, to modulate the conversation back into sobriety, “They must exist, but I have not happened to see any thin, ladylike old women, such as are so frequent among ourselves.”

His slender Ann would be one such, Buchanan thought, soberingly. A life with her at his side, as time worked its gradual way with their bodies, felt suddenly to have been within reach, and narrowly missed. He found himself, for the moment, unable to speak, to this handsome reserved Yankee with
his deepset, heavy-browed eyes,
the wonderful eyes
, Elizabeth Peabody had once exclaimed,
like mountain lakes seeming to reflect the heavens
.

Hawthorne sensed the snag in the Minister’s social flow, and motionlessly waited. He was not one of those men, those lusty Southerners given easy initiations in slave shacks and river-town brothels, who found Buchanan’s failure to marry comic and odd. He knew from his own experience how easily a man might remain a bachelor, never gathering the energy for the leap, the days and years blending one into another, as they had in the Mannings’ house at 12 Herbert Street, he writing his dim delicate tales in his little room under the eaves, his mother distant and discordant in her antique widow’s weeds, his sister Ebe his only soulmate, little sister Louisa their only emissary to the people of the town, their shopper and gossip, his mother and Ebe and he venturing forth only at dusk for a walk along the wharves, skirting woodland and marshy pastures, strolling sometimes as far as Gallows Hill, where the witches had been hanged and flung into their graves, returning by way of proud streets lined with the redbrick mansions of Salem’s China merchants. But for the energy of another family—the intellectual busybody Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and her two sisters—he might be immured there yet, in a kind of betranced obscure disgrace; Lizzie Peabody called him out into daylight, and little Sophia, the invalid youngest, seized him, no longer young, with the talons of love. That first visit, Sophia later told her husband, Lizzie had rushed upstairs, where her sister was sequestered with one of her migraines, and cried
Oh Sophia, Mr. Hawthorne and his sisters have come, and you never saw anything so splendid—he is handsomer than Lord Byron! You must get up and dress and come down
. Somehow certain of her prey even then, Sophia had
laughed off the command:
I think it would be rather ridiculous to get up. If he has come once he will come again
. And this proved true. Like everyone else—the tale was folklore in political circles—Hawthorne knew that Buchanan’s life had early taken a stain: the lovers’ quarrel, the unexpected and unexplained death, the refused plea to attend the funeral, the grieving family’s curse, and the survivor’s curious escape into public life. No doubt it had been the making of Buchanan as a politician, just as those dozen closeted years had been his own making as an artist.
In this dismal chamber FAME was won
. Fortune warps us to fit its ends.