Читать книгу The Victim - Thomas Dixon - Страница 21

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The breathless galleries leaned forward to catch the slightest sound from the arena below.

One by one the Senators from the seceding Southern States rose and renounced their allegiance to the United States in obedience to the voice of their people.

With each solemn exit the women of the galleries grew hysterical, waved their perfumed handkerchiefs and shouted their approval with cries of sympathy and admiration.

David Yulee, Stephen K. Mallory and Benjamin Fitzpatrick had each closed his portfolio and with slow measured tread marched down the crowded aisle and out of the Chamber never again to enter its doors.

All eyes were focused now on the brilliant young Senator from Alabama, Clement C. Clay, Jr. It was understood that he had prepared an eloquent defense of his action and would voice the passionate feeling of the masses of the Southern people in this his last utterance in the crumbling temple of the old Republic.

He rose in his place, lifted his strong head with its leonine locks and broad, high forehead, paused a moment and began his speech in the clear steady tones of the trained orator, master of himself, his theme and his audience. The Northern Senators met his gaze with scorn and he answered with a look of bold defiance.

The formal announcement of the secession of his State he made in brief sharp sentences and plunged at once into the reasons for their solemn act.

"Forty-two years ago, Alabama was admitted into the Union," he declared in ringing tones. "She entered it as she goes out, with the Republic convulsed by the hostility of the North to her domestic institutions. Not a decade has passed, not a year has elapsed since her birth as a State that has not been marked by the steady and insolent growth of the mob violence of the North which has demanded the confiscation of her property and the destruction of the foundations of her civilization.

"Who are the leaders of these mobs who seek thus to overthrow the Constitution? Who are these hypocrites who claim the championship of freedom and the moral leadership of the world?

"The men who sold their own slaves to us because they could not use them with profit in a northern climate; the men who built and manned every American slave ship that ever sailed the seas; the sons of old Peter Faneuil of Boston who built Faneuil Hall, their cradle of liberty, out of the profits of slave ships whose trade the Southern people had forbidden by law; the men who have flooded Congress for two generations with petitions to dissolve the Union; the men who threatened to secede with the addition of every foot of territory we have added to our Republic!

"These are the men who have denied to the manhood of the South Christian Communion because they could not endure what they have been pleased to style the moral leprosy of Slavery! These are the men who refuse us permission to sojourn or even pass through the sacred precincts of a Northern State and dare to carry our servants with us. These are the men who deny to the South equal rights in the lands of the West bought by Southern blood and brains and added to our inheritance against their furious protests. These are the men who burn the sacred charters of American Liberty in their public squares, and inscribe on their banners the foul motto:

"'The Constitution is an agreement with Death, a covenant with Hell.'

"These are the men who dare to call us traitors! These are the men who have deliberately passed laws in fourteen Northern States nullifying the provisions of the Constitution of the Union which they have sworn to defend and enforce—"

The speaker paused and lifted high above his head a little morocco bound volume.

"Here in the presence of Almighty God—the God of our fathers, and these witnesses, I read its solemn provisions which the laws of fourteen Northern States have brazenly and openly defied!"

He opened the little book and slowly read:

"'Article 4, Section 2.

"'No person held to service of labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor—but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.'"

He turned suddenly to the Northern Senators:

"Your States have not only repudiated the Constitution you have sworn to uphold, but your emissaries have invaded the peaceful South and sought to lay it waste with fire and sword and servile insurrection. You have murdered Southern men who have dared demand their rights on Northern soil. You have invaded the borders of Southern States, burned their dwellings and murdered their people. You have proclaimed John Brown, the criminal maniac who sought to murder innocent and helpless men, women and children in Virginia, a hero and martyr and then denounced us in your popular meetings, your religious and legislative assemblies as habitual violators of the laws of God and the rights of humanity! You have exerted all the moral and physical agencies that human ingenuity can devise or a devil's malice employ to heap odium and infamy upon us and make the very name of the South a by-word of hissing and of scorn throughout the civilized world—"

He paused overcome with emotion and lifted his hand to stay the burst of applause from the galleries.

"We have borne all this for long years and might have borne it many more under the assurance of our Northern friends that such fanaticism does not represent the true heart of the Northern people. But the fallacy of these promises and the folly of our hopes have been too clearly proven in the late election. The platform of the political party on which you have swept every Northern State and elected a sectional President is a foul libel upon our character and a declaration of open war on the lives and property of the Southern people.

"In defiance of the Constitution which protects our rights your mob has decreed the confiscation of three thousand million dollars' worth of our property. If we claim the protection of our common law, your mob solemnly burns the Constitution in your public squares and denounces it as 'an agreement with Death and covenant with Hell.' We appeal to the Supreme Court of the Republic and when its Judges unanimously sustain our position on every point, your mob cries:

"'Down with the Supreme Court of the United States!'

"You have not only insulted us as unchristian and heathen, you have proclaimed that four million ignorant negroes but yesterday taken from the savagery of cannibal Africa are our equals and entitled to share in the solemn rights of American citizenship. Your declaration is an open summons that they rise in insurrection with the knife in one hand and the torch in the other.

"Your mob has declared the South outlawed, branded with ignominy, consigned to execration and ultimate destruction. Your mob has decreed the death of Slavery and sends the new President to execute their decree.

"All right—kill Slavery and then what? Kill Slavery and what will you do with its corpse? Who shall deliver us from the body of this death? We are not leaving this Hall to fight for the Institution of African Slavery. The grim specter of a degraded and mongrel citizenship which lies back of your mob's programme of confiscation is the force that is driving the Southern people out of the Union to find peace and safety. Whatever may be the sins of Slavery in the South they are as nothing when compared to the degradation of your life which must follow their violent emancipation. The Southern white man is slowly lifting the African out of barbarism into the light of Christian civilization. In our own good time we will emancipate him and start him on a new life beyond the boundaries of our Republic. Whatever may be the differences of opinion in the South on the institution of slavery—there is no difference and there has never been on one point—it was true yesterday—it is true to-day—it will be true to-morrow—Slavery is the only modus viviendi by which two such races as the Negro and the Aryan can live side by side in a free democracy with equality the law of its life—"

Again a burst of tumultuous applause swept the gallery.

"The issue is clear cut and terrible in its simplicity—the South stands on the faith of our fathers who created this Republic. The South stands for Constitutional freedom under the forms of established law. The North has lifted the red flag of revolution and proclaims the irresponsible despotism of an enthroned mob!

"For a generation your school mistresses have been training your boys to hate us and arming them to fight us. Make no mistake about this movement to-day. We who go are but the servants of those who sent us. They now recall their ambassadors, and we obey their sovereign will. Make no mistake about it. They are not a brave and rash people, deluded by bad men, who are attempting in an illegal way to wreck the Union. They seek peace and safety outside driven by the Rebellion against Law and Order within.

"Are we more or less than men? Can we love our enemies and bless them that curse and revile us? Are we devoid of the sensibilities, the sentiments, the passions, the reason, and the instincts of mankind? Have we no pride, no honor, no sense of shame, no reverence for our ancestors, no care for posterity, no love for home, or family or friends? Must we quail before the onion breath of an enthroned mob, confess our baseness, discredit the fame of our sires, degrade our children, abandon our homes, flee from our country and dishonor ourselves—all for the sake of a Union whose Constitution you have publicly burned and whose Supreme Court you have spit upon?

"Shall we consent to live under an administration controlled by those who not only deny us justice and equality and brand us as infamous, but boldly proclaim their purpose to rob us of our property and destroy our civilization?

"The freemen of Alabama have proclaimed to the world they will not. In their sovereign power they have recalled me. As their servant I go!"

With a wave of his hand in an imperious gesture of defiance to the silent Senators of the North, amid a scene of unparalleled passion, the speaker turned to his seat, gathered his books and papers and strode with quick firm step down the aisle.

Jennie had leaped to her feet and stood clapping her hands in a frenzy of excitement, unconscious of the existence of the strangely quiet young man by her side.

He rose and stood smiling into her flushed face as she gasped:

"A wonderful speech—wasn't it?"

"They say the South has never lacked audacity, Miss Barton. I'm wondering if they are really going to make good such words with deeds."

He spoke with a cold detachment that chilled and angered the impulsive girl. A hot answer was on her lips when she remembered suddenly that he was a foreigner.

"Of course, Signor, you can not understand our feelings!"

"On the other hand, I assure you, I do—I'm just wondering in a cold intellectual way whether the oratorical temperament—the temperament of passion, of righteous wrath of the explosive type which we have just witnessed, will win in the trial by fire which war will bring—"

"You doubt our courage?" she interrupted, with a slight curve of the proud little lips.

"Far from it—I assure you! I'm only wondering if it has the sullen, dogged, staying qualities these stolid Northern men down there have exhibited while they listened—"

The girl threw him a quick surprised look and he stopped. His voice had unconsciously taken the tones of a soliloquy.

"I beg your pardon, Miss Barton," he said, with sudden swing to the polite tones of society. "I'm annoying you with my foreign speculations—"

A sudden murmur swept the galleries and all eyes were turned on the tall slender figure of Jefferson Davis as he slowly entered the Senate Chamber.

"Who is it?" Socola asked.

"Senator Davis—you don't know him?"

"I have never seen him before. He has been quite ill I hear."

"Yes. He's been in bed for the past week suffering agonies from neuralgia. He lost the sight of one of his eyes from chronic pain caused by exposure in the service of his country in the northwest."

"Really—I didn't know that."

"He was compelled to remain in a darkened room for months the past year to save the sight of his remaining eye."

"That accounts for my not having seen him before."

Socola followed the straight military figure with painful interest as he slowly moved toward his seat greeting with evident weakness his colleagues as he passed. He was astonished beyond measure at the personality of the famous leader of the "Southern Conspirators" of whom he had heard so much. He was the last man in all the crowd he would have singled out for such a rôle. The face was too refined, too spiritual, too purely intellectual for the man of revolution. His high forehead, straight nose, thin compressed lips and pointed chin belonged to the poet and dreamer rather than the man of action. The hollow cheek bones and deeply furrowed mouth told of suffering so acute the sympathy of every observer was instantly won.

In spite of evident suffering his carriage was erect, dignified, and graceful. The one trait which fastened the attention from the first and held it was the remarkable intensity of expression which clothed his thin muscular face.

"You like him?" Jennie ventured at last.

"I can't say, Miss Barton," was the slowly measured answer. "He is a remarkably interesting man. I'm surprised and puzzled—"

"Surprised and puzzled at what?"

"Well, you see I know his history. The diplomatist makes it his business to know the facts in the lives of the leaders of a nation to whose Government he is accredited. Mr. Davis spent four years at West Point. He gave seven years of his life to the service of the army in the West. He carried your flag to victory in Mexico and hobbled home on crutches. He was one of your greatest Secretaries of War. He sent George B. McClellan and Robert E. Lee to the Crimea to master European warfare, organized and developed your army, changed the model of your arms, introduced the rifled musket and the minie ball. He explored your Western Empire and surveyed the lines of the great continental railways you are going to build to the Pacific Ocean. He planned and built your system of waterworks in the city of Washington and superintends now the extension of the Capitol building which will make it the most imposing public structure in the world. He has never stooped to play the part of a demagogue. He has never sought an office higher than the rôle of Senator which fits his character and temperament. His mind has always been busy dreaming of the imperial future of your widening Republic. His eye has seen the vision of its extension to the Arctic on the north and the jungles of Panama on the south. Why should such a man deliberately come into this chamber to-day before this assembled crowd and commit hari-kari?"

"He's a true son of the South!" Jennie Barton proudly answered.

"Even so, how can he do the astounding thing he proposes to carry out to-day? His record shows that passionate devotion to the Union has been the very breath of his life. I've memorized one of his outbursts as a model of your English language—"

Jennie laughed.

"I never heard of his Union speeches, I'm sure!"

"Strange that your people have forgotten them. Listen: 'From sire to son has descended the love of the Union in our hearts, as in our history are mingled the names of Concord and Camden, of Yorktown and Saratoga, of New Orleans and Bunker Hill. Together they form a monument to the common glory of our common country. Where is the Southern man who would wish that monument less by one Northern name that constitutes the mass? Who, standing on the ground made sacred by the blood of Warren, could allow sectional feeling to curb his enthusiasm as he looks upon that obelisk which rises a monument to freedom's and his country's triumph, and stands a type of the time, the men and the event it commemorates; built of material that mocks the waves of time, without niche or molding for parasite or creeping thing to rest upon, pointing like a finger to the sky to raise man's thoughts to high and noble deeds!'"

Socola paused and turned his dark eyes on Jennie's upturned face.

"How can the man who made that speech in Boston do this mad deed to-day?"

"Senator Clay has given the answer," was the girl's quick reply.

"For Senator Clay, yes—the fiery, impulsive, passionate child of emotion. But this thin hollow-cheeked student, thinker and philosopher, who spoke the thrilling words I quote—he should belong to the order of the Prophet and the Seer—the greatest leaders and teachers of history."

"We believe he does, Signor!" was the quick answer. "Look—he's going to speak—you'll hear him now."

Jennie leaned forward, her thoughtful little chin in both hands, as a silence so intense it was pain fell suddenly on the hushed assembly.

The face of the Southern leader was chalk white in its pallor. His first sentences were weak and scarcely reached beyond the circle of his immediate hearers. His physician had forbidden him to leave his room. The iron will had risen to perform a solemn duty. The Senators leaned forward in their arm-chairs fearful of losing a word.

He paused as if for breath and gazed a moment on the upturned faces with the look of lingering tenderness which the dying cast on those upon whom they gaze for the last time.

His figure suddenly rose to its full height, as if the soul within had thrust the feeble body aside to speak its message. His words, full, clear and musical rang to the furthest listener craning his neck through the jammed doorways of the galleries. Never was the music of the human voice more profoundly appealing. Unshed tears were in its throbbing tones.

There was no straining for effect—no outburst of emotion. The impression which reached the audience was the sense of restraint and the consciousness of his unlimited reserve power. Back of the simple clean-cut words which fell in musical cadence from his white lips was the certainty that he was only speaking a small part of what he felt, saw and knew. He neither stormed nor raved and yet he filled the hearts of his hearers with unspeakable passion.

He turned suddenly and bent his piercing single eye on the Northern Senators:

"I hope none who hear me will confound my position with the advocacy of the right of a State to remain in the Union and disregard its Constitutional obligations by the nullification of the law—"

A sudden cheer swept the tense galleries. The sergeant-at-arms called for order. The cheer rose again. The Vice-President rapped for silence and threatened to close the galleries. The speaker lifted his hand and commanded silence.

"It was because of his deep attachment to the Union—his determination to find some remedy for existing ills short of a severance of the ties which bound South Carolina to the other States—that John C. Calhoun advocated the doctrine of nullification which he proclaimed to be peaceful and within the limits of State power.

"Secession belongs to a different class of remedies. It is to be justified upon the basis that the States are sovereign. There was a time when none denied it. The phrase 'to execute the laws' General Jackson applied to a State refusing to obey the law while yet a member of the Union. You may make war on a foreign state. If it be the purpose of gentlemen—"

He paused and again his eagle eye swept the tiers of Northern Senators.

"You may make war against a State which has withdrawn from the Union; but there are no laws of the United States to be executed within the limits of a seceded State—"

Seward leaned forward in his seat and shook his head in grave dissent. The speaker bent his gaze directly upon his great antagonist and spoke with strange regretful tenderness.

"A State finding herself in a condition in which Mississippi has judged she is—in which her safety requires that she should provide for the maintenance of her rights out of the Union—surrenders all the benefits (and they are known to be many), deprives herself of all the advantages (and they are known to be great), severs all the ties of affections (and they are close and enduring) which have bound her to the Union; and thus divesting herself of every benefit—taking upon herself every burden—she claims to be exempt from any power to execute the laws of the United States within her limits.

"When Massachusetts was arraigned before the bar of the Senate for her refusal to permit the execution of the laws of the United States within her borders, my opinion was the same then as now. Her State is sovereign. She never delegated to the Federal Government the power to drive her by force. And when she chooses to take the last step which separates her from the Union, it is her right to go!—"

Another electric wave swept the crowd that burst into applause. The speaker lifted his long arm with an impatient gesture.

"And I would not vote one dollar nor one man to coerce her back into unwilling submission. I would say to her—'God speed in the memory of the kind associations which once existed between her and her sister States.'

"It has been a conviction of pressing necessity—a belief that we are to be deprived in the Union of the rights which our fathers bequeathed us—which has brought Mississippi to her present decision.

"You have invoked the sacred Declaration of Independence as the basis of an attack upon her social order. The Declaration of Independence is to be construed by the circumstances and purposes for which it was made. It was written by a Southern planter and slave owner. The Colonies were declaring their independence from foreign tyranny—were asserting in the language of Jefferson, 'that no man was born booted and spurred to ride over the rest of mankind; that men were created equal'—meaning the men of their American political community; that there was no divine right to rule; that no man could inherit the right to govern; that there were no classes by which power and place descended from father to son; but that all stations were equally within the grasp of each member of the body politic. These were the principles they announced.

"They had no reference to a slave. The same document denounced George III for the crime of attempting to stir their slaves to insurrection, as John Brown attempted at Harper's Ferry. If their Declaration of Independence announced that negroes were free and the equals of English citizens how could the Prince be arraigned for daring to raise servile insurrection among them? And how should this be named among the high crimes of George III which caused the Colonies to sever their connection with the Mother country?

"If slaves were declared our equals how did it happen that in the organic law of the Union they were given a lower caste and their population allowed (and that only through the dominant race) a basis of three-fifths representation in Congress? So stands the compact of Union which binds us together.

"We stand upon the principles on which our Government was founded!—"

The sentence rang clear and thrilling as the peal of a trumpet. The effect was electric. The galleries leaped to their feet, and cheered.

Jennie turned to the silent diplomat.

"Isn't he glorious!"

"He stirs the hearts of men"—was the even answer.

Around them were unmistakable evidences. Women were weeping hysterically and men embracing one another in silence and tears.

Again the Senator's hand was lifted high in command for silence and again he faced Seward and his Northern colleagues with figure tense, erect.

"When you repudiate these principles, and when you deny to us the right to withdraw from a Government which, thus perverted, threatens to destroy our rights, we but tread the path of our fathers when we proclaim our independence and take the hazard!"

Again a cheer and shout which the Vice-President's gavel could not quell. When the murmur at last died away the speaker's voice had dropped to low appealing tenderness.

"We do this, Senators, not in hostility to others, not to injure any section of our common country, not for our own pecuniary benefit, but from the high and solemn motive of defending and protecting the rights we inherited, which we will transmit unshorn to our children. We seek outside the Union that peace, with dignity and honor, which we can no longer find within.

"I trust I find myself a type of the general feeling of my constituents towards yours. I am sure I feel no hostility toward you, Senators from the North—"

He paused and swept the Northern tiers with a look of tender appeal.

"I am sure there is not one of you, whatever sharp discussion there may have been between us, to whom I can not now say in the presence of my God, I wish you well!"

Seward turned his head from the speaker, his eyes dimmed—the scheming diplomat and unscrupulous politician lost in the heart of the man for the moment.

"Such I am sure is the feeling of the people whom I represent toward those whom you represent. I but express their desire when I say I hope and they hope for peaceful relations with you, though we must part—"

He paused as if to suppress emotions too deep for words while a silence, intense and suffocating, held the crowd in a spell. The speaker's voice dropped to still lower and softer notes of persuasive tenderness as each rounded word of the next sentence fell slowly from the thin lips.

"If war must come, we can only invoke the God of our fathers, who delivered us from the power of the lion, to protect us from the ravages of the bear, and putting our trust in Him and in our firm hearts and strong arms we will vindicate the right as best we may—"

No cheer greeted this solemn utterance. In the pause which followed, the speaker deliberately gazed over the familiar faces of his Northern opponents and continued with a suppressed intensity of feeling that gripped his bitterest foe.

"In the course of my service here, associated at different times with a great variety of Senators, I see now around me some with whom I have served long. There have been points of collision, but, whatever offense there has been to me, I leave here. I carry with me no hostile remembrance. For whatever offense I may have given which has not been redressed, or for which satisfaction has not been demanded, I have, Senators, in this solemn hour of our parting to offer you my apology—"

The low musical voice died softly away in the silence of tears.

A woman sobbed aloud.

Socola bent toward his trembling companion and whispered:

"Who is she?"

Jennie brushed the tears from her brown eyes before replying:

"The Senator's wife. She's heart-broken over it all—didn't sleep a wink all night. I've been looking for her to faint every minute."

The leader closed his portfolio. His hollow cheeks, thin lips and white drawn face were clothed with an expression of sorrow beyond words as he slowly turned and left the scene of his life's triumphs.

The spell of his eloquence at last thrown off the crowd once more dissolved into hostile lowering groups.

Stern old Zack Chandler of Michigan collided with Jennie's father in the cloak room, his eyes red with wrath.

"Well, Barton," he growled, "after the damned insolence of that scene if the North don't fight, I'll be much mistaken—"

"You generally are, sir," Barton retorted.

"If they don't fight, by the living God, I'll leave this country and join another nation—the Comanche Indians preferred to this Government."

Barton glanced at his opponent and his heavy jaw closed with a snap.

"I trust, Senator," he said with deliberate venom, "you will not carry out that resolution—the Comanche Indians have already suffered too much from contact with the whites!"

Dick Welford heard the shot and gripped the fierce old Southerner's hand as Chandler turned on his heel and disappeared with an oath.

"You got him that time, Senator!"

Barton laughed with boyish glee.

"I did, didn't I? Sometimes we can only think of our best things when it's too late. But by Gimminy I got the old rascal this time, didn't I?"

"You certainly plugged him—what did you think of the speeches?"

"Clay said something! Davis is too slow. He's got no blood in his veins. I don't like him. He'll pull us back into the Union yet if we don't watch him. He's a reconstructionist at heart. The State of Mississippi is dragging him out of Washington by the heels. He makes me tired. The time for talk has passed. To your tents now, O Israel!"

Dick hurried to the gallery and watched Socola talking in his graceful Italian way with Jennie. He had hated this elegant foreigner the moment he had laid eyes on him. He made up his mind to declare himself before another sun set.

He ignored the Italian's existence.

"You are ready, Miss Jennie?"

She took Dick's proffered arm in silence and bowed to Socola who watched them go with a peculiar smile playing about his handsome mouth.

Jennie insisted on stopping at Senator Davis' home to tell his wife of the wonderful power with which his speech had swept the galleries.

The house was still, the library door open. The girl paused on the threshold in awe. The Senator's tall figure was lying prostrate across his desk, his thin hands clasped in prayer, his face buried in his arms. His lips were murmuring words too low to be heard until at last they swelled in sorrowful repetition:

"May God have us in his holy keeping and grant that before it is too late peaceful councils may prevail!"

The girl turned softly and left without a word.