Seven decades of the Union : the humanities and materialism, illustrated by a memoir of John Tyler, with reminiscences of some of his great contemporaries. The transition state of this nation--its dangers and their remedy

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Dedication

To the rector, board o^ visitors, faculty, alumni, and students of the College of William and Marj, I dedicate this memoir of her late rector and chancellor, John Tyler, the tenth President of the United States of America ; prepared for the ax'chives of his Alma Mater, in obedieuce to her resolves and orders, at intervals snatched from professional business, and from household hindrances and cares, since the meeting of the rector, board, and faculty in the year 1868.

It has been to me a task of tears, dashed with some sacred joy, — a tale of sadness cheered and lightened by some exultant songs of triumphant remmiscence.

Mr. Tyler's life ran through seven decades, from lt90 to 1862 ; it is full of the themes of many and mighty events and thoughts ; it has a divine moral in its teachings, and lessons for the deepest study of mankind.

CHAPTER I. THE FIRST DECADE FROM irOO TO ISOl

The American Revolution — The Effect of the Reformation — The First Admihistration under the Constitution of the United States, during which Mr. Tyler was born — The Second Administration, and its Revolution of Parties in 1801 — Mr. Tyler's Lineage, and the Peninsula on which he was born and raised.

"The dust on antique time would lie unswept, And mountainous error be too highly heap'd For truth to overpeer,"

bad not Heaven's messengers of the Reformation, in the latter end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries, broken its thick crust of ages. The smouldering fires of accumulated wrongs burst forth in Europe with more than volcanic force, shaking and scorching the Absolutism of the Old World, and setting human intellects free.

Wickliffe, Calvin, Luther, Melanchthon, Cromwell were not the only ones thinking and daring and doing, but hosts of mightiest minds, in every department of knowledge and of truth, were scattering lights abroad to illumine the darkness. The closets of the Yatican were thrown open ; the secrets of the Schoolmen were revealed ; the stools of Dogmas and the thrones of Despotism were thrown down. Powers and Principalities were subdued to become the Protestant pupils of a divine faith of "good will to men," and were themselves made to question

12 SEVEX DECADES OF THE UNIOX.

and confront Absolutism defiantly, with the cross of suffering and of martyrdom, for the sake of Truth.

Tliis shock of old things, thought to be firmly established because simply hoary, and having custom without law, had its ample course. Students of the laws of God and of the rights of man were in the laboratories of the great school of the Humanities, and the Humanities were made ready for the occasion of their uses. Earth was crying for them, and they went forth to the call. Philolog-y, Grammar, the Hebrew, Latin, and Greek languages, Logic, Poetry, History, Metaphysics, and the Divine Philosophy of Christianity found the Printing-Press ready to give them the wings of the morning, and Columbus had already sailed over the seas and found a ]^ew World for their theater. Here, in North America, they found a huge, rude, barbaric continent, lying prone in a state of nature, ample for the fires and the blasts of all their mighty furnaces, forges, and foundries.

In the mean time, Bacon had been at his inductions ; Oxford was teaching; the divines were translating and publishing the Bible ; Milton was singing ; and by the time America was ready for her first Revolution Burke had generalized the philosophy of human government ; Bourbons and Stuarts of old dynasties had been beheaded ; Hampdeus and Sydneys had asserted rights and been martyred; the Publicists had codified international law, and the convulsions of England had settled some ideas of Magna Charta for domestic government. The people of England had learned to rehearse the noble Baron's chant of Liberty:

"Let every Briton, as his mind, be free. Ilis person safe, his property secure; His house as sacred as the fane of heaven; Watching unseen, his ever-open door, Watching the realm, the spirit of the laws; His fate determined by the rules of right; His voice enacted in the common voice, , And general suffrage of the assembled realm.

No hand invisible to write bis doom ; No demon starting at the midnight hour,

To draw bis curtain, or to drag hira down To mansions of despair. Wide to the world Disclose the secrets of the prison walls, And bid the groaniugs of the dungeon strike The public ear. Inviolable preserve The sacred shield that covers all the land. The Ileaveu-conferrcd palladium of the Isle, To Britain's sons, the judgment of their peers. On these great pillars, freedom of the Mind, Freedom of Speech, and freedom of the Pen, Forever changing, yet forever sure.

The base of Britain rests!"

These were the mig'hty throes making grand preparation for the working of new ideas.

The American Revolution breaking out in lYGS, and brought to a denouement in '76, germinated thoughts wliich will never cease growing, until thej cover the whole earth with the aegis of laws made for the sake of liberty, not of liberty only to make laivs.

1st. The right of self-government, in all separate communities defined into distinct peoples, requiring separate and difierent laws, and capable of either separate or confederate Jialionality.

2dly. Self-government, guarded in law making and in lawadminstering power by limitations of authority in written constitutions of government.

3dly. IVie demolition of colonial and provincial States dependent on central sovereignties.

4th]y. Freedom, equality, and source of sovereignty in the governed, and responsibility and accountability in the governors of men.

5thly. Sovereignty in the constituency or source, and not in the mere viunicipality of government.

These were the five cardinal points of the North American system of constitutional republicanism.

The forest-born Demosthenes did not catch songs of liberty from the birds of the trees in the wilderness. Old Logan had written his poem, and Runnymede was read in the forests where Henry hunted ; and it was thus that the orator's thunders caught the notes of the poet's soul-music; the one singing, " 'Tis Liberty or Death!" and the other singing, "Give me Liberty or give me Death I"

It was about this period of liberty brooding over States which had just ceased to be colonies of America, and germinating these indestructible thoughts in mighty men, that John Tyler was born. It was the age of heroes and of sages, and of battles, too, — battles of which those of the sword were only heroic, while those of the souls and minds of men were spiritual and immortal. It was the age which gave the world a Washington ; and the shrine of Mount Yernon is sacred to all men, next only to the unapproachable shrine of Mount Nebo. The Moses of the New World inducted these new ideas into the government of men. The novelty of this new government was the least difficulty in the wondrous work of -its establishment. Its magnitude was immense, and yet all its parts were aptly fitted together, and appropriate to all its far-reaching ends. The administration of the Father of his Country gave it at the beginning its true form and expression.

His wisdom settled foreign relations on the surest foundations of peace and justice with all nations, and entangling alliances with none ; he firmly guarded neutrality ; he organized the executive departments.

During his term were founded the judiciary, the land ordinances, the Indian policy, the laws of immigration and naturalization, a navy and military system opposed to standing armies ; and he so ordered the public fisc as to frown down the bad faith of repudiating the public debt, and assumed the States' debts incurred iu the Revolution. He restored the national credit, revived trade, and provided ample revenue; he protected the frontier against Indian depredations. He resisted Jacobinism from abroad, and, above all, taught us the application of the Constitution and laws to cases of rebellion and treason, using the military force as ancillary only to the civil power. In a word, under the auspices of the administration of the first President, grace, dignity, decorum, order, and power were imparted to the government of the United States; and it was made to give assurauce to the hope of permanent and perpetual civil liberty, and commanded the highest respect of the nations of the earth. But there was one canker in its bud which needed to be dreaded, and has since proved to be destructive to its bloom and beauty, — not yet, I hope, to all its fruits. It was the canker of construction.

All then admitted that all the powers granted in the Constitution were guarded by limitations ; but two schools existed as to the extent and application of limitations. Jefferson at the head of one, Hamilton at the head of the other school, both of the first Cabinet, came into serious conflict first upon the construction of the words " necessary and proioer,'''' as to the power of Congress to create a national bank. The strict school contended that the power was not granted, and was, therefore, reserved to the States or the people.

The school of broader construction resorted to the incidental powers.

Mr. Hamilton admitted all the granted powers were strictly limited, and that the granted powers only could be exercised ; but that all powers " necessary and proper" to carry the expressed powers into execution were granted and could be exercised; though he admitted that they were restrained and limited in extent and purpose by their relation to the powers expressed.

Neither contended that either the expressed or the necessary and properly relative or incidental powers were unlimited and unrestrained ; but, as we shall see, this memorable start of construction soon passed beyond all bounds of either expressed or necessary and proper incidental powers.

The history of construction shows that in less than a quarter of a century the incidental powers, restrained at first^by the ends and extent of the expressed powers, were carried far beyond the expressed powers themselves, which limited and restrained them. And here commenced the first struggle between what then began to be called the Federal and Democratic Republican parties.

Well for us all would it be, at this day, if construction had

16 SHVEy DECADES OF THE UNION.

not cari-ied incidental power further than it was carried by Mr. Haiiiiltoj, in his masterly argument, which won the mind of Washington on the Bank question. But the Federal party, under his august influence, succeeded in electing his immediate successor ; and the second administration met the portentous obstacle of a threatened war with France.

The crushing conflicts of England and France for universal supremacy assailed the neutral rights of our country, and a provisional army had to be raised. Genet, the French minister in this country, had outraged our internal sovereignty, and the elder Adams recommended measures which were defended under the pretext of the imminency of war. His party started the doctrine that even thr-eatened war set aside the checks, balances, and limitations of the Constitution, and justified the passage of the acts of the Alien and of the Sedition laws, — the one act to remove aliens suspected of hostility, and the other to punish sedition, in forms violating the freedom of speech and of the press. It was then that the Virginia Legislature resolved: " That the powers not delegated by the Constitution to the United States, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people ; and, therefore, the exercise of the powers not enumerated in the grant by the United States, is an usurpation of the authority of the States or of the people."

This was in turn met by the Federal party assuming that whilst the States and the people of the States were originally the sources of sovereignty, yet they had delegated that sovereignty to the Federal government of the Union, and that the Congress of the United States had, by the Constitution, become invested with the national sovereignty, and might exercise its powers and dominions over any and every subject of the " general welfare."

The Democracy insisted that the national sovereignty could not be delegated, and could not exist in any one or all of the mere municipal departments of government, either executive, judicial, or legislative, — that sovereignty could exist alone in its source, the States, and that the people could act only

THE FIRST DECADE. It

through the organism of the States ; and that its very nature, under our system of republican constitutional freedom, was conventional, and not municipal; that the mere municipal functionaries of the Federal government were but creatures of sovereignty, and its mere trustees, servants, and agents, to do the biddings of the conventional power of the States and the people as expressed and limited by the Constitution ; that the Constitution itself was but the creature of the sovereignty of the States or the people, and was made by it the guide, and standard, and rule of legislative, executive, and judicial authority and functions, and that the Presidency, the Congress, and the Supreme Court each and all were but creatures of the Constitution. They were creatures not in the first, but in the second degree from sovereignty, and could pretend neither to be the sovereignty itself nor to have delegated to them its absolute powers, that the conventional powers of the States or their people alone could exercise absolute and unlimited power, and that all questions of doubtful or disputed power by the mere municipal Federal government, and either or all of its departments, had of right to be referred to the conventional power of the States or of the people, in their separate State organizations. Thus began the discord of State rights and of Federal absolutism. The Alien and Sedition laws were passed, the provisional army was provided, a regular army created, Democratic members of the House of Representatives were insulted in the theater for words spoken against standing armies in the House. Mr. Jefferson, then V^ice-President, had to be guarded by his friends from his presiding chair in the Senate to his boarding-house and back ; the judiciary had, both in the case of Jay and of Marshall, become officially conjoined with the executive, mixing the chief justiceship in the same person with the secretaryship of state and the office of a foreign minister; and some of the inferior Federal judges had played the Jeffriesscenes over again so rampant that the whole judiciary was very much lowered in dignity, and finally Chase was impeached.

The excesses of the second administration became odious to the States and the people, and the Federal party was overthrown iu the memorable political revolution of 1801, when the great apostle of liberty and author of the Declaration of Independence was elected the President. For a study of this era we refer to Wharton's " State Trials," and particularly to his able, philosophical, beautiful, and just preface.

Besides the canker of construction, other causes showed themselves during the first administration which brooded mischief, and from the beginning foreshadowed the danger of dissolution of the Union, by reason of infractions of the Constitution and of infringement of the rights of the States to domestic and internal self-government.

On the 12th February, 1790, the first petition was presented to Congress for the emancipation of slaves. It was signed by Dr. Franklin, President of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery. He was a philosopher " wise as a serpent," but not "as harmless as the dove." He had been chiefly instrumental as a pacificator in the convention which framed the Constitution of the United States on the question of the apportionment of representatives between the free and the slave States ; but it seems that he was wily enough to resort to a more effectual mode of assailing the property in slaves and the power of the States which held them in bondage. Whether he foresaw that the dragon's teeth which he was sowing would sprout armed warriors or not, is not for us to say ; but he was either not wise in not foreseeing the consequences of his movement, or he was fanatically heedless of the consequences themselves which followed. It irritated sectional antagonism, aroused I'eligious antipathies, fomented jealousies and discord, disturbed the legislation of Congress,, and finally caused civil war. So much for the motives and action of the highest human wisdom. He was doubtless a man of peace, but was blind to the mode of preserving it.

The Congress of 1790 was wiser than Franklin, more faithful to the Constitution of the United States, and resolved : " That Congress have no authority to interfere in the emancipation of slaves, or in the treatment of them in any of the States." And the territory south of the Ohio was accepted without excluding slavery. What a contrast this is with the executive and congressional action in 1862, when civil war was made the pretext for violating the Constitution 1

Another cloud, not larger at first than the palm of a man's hand, formed another prognostic of coming wars. The territory ceded by North Carolina, out of which the new State was formed, was what is now included in the State of Tennessee. That territory was ceded by North Carolina in a deed executed by her senators under her laws, in December, 1789, and was accepted by act of Congress passed April 2d, 1790, just fourteen days after the birth of John Tyler. The cession was forced upon North Carolina by the acts of rebels to her jurisdiction, countenanced by Congress. The history of this territory shows the first and only instance of de facto " squatter sovereignty" known in the United States prior to the period of the Mormon monstrosities in Utah, and it was the first instance of nullification.

The settlers in the then State of North Carolina west of the Stone Mountain, complaining that they were not afforded due protection by the parent State, declared their independence, and set up against both State and Federal sovereignty a sovereignty of their own, called " the State of Franklin." They organized a State government, with all the municipal departments. They practically nullified in their limits both the laws of North Carolina and of the Federal government. They established a currency of peltry, and the then governor, General Sevier, complained that he was cheated grievously in the payment of his salary, by having put upon him opossum-skins with raccoon-tails sewed on to them.

They contended that his story was absurd, because if they had the raccoon-tails, they would have the raccoon-skins, too ; but he convicted them of using the same tails for numerous different payments, and of stealing the tails again for the repayments.

The United States, under Washington's administration, did not deem it a duty or a necessity to use force against this grotesque but flagrant rebellion ; but compensated North Carolina and pacified the rebels by admitting the Territory or State of Franklin into the Union as the State of Tennessee. But it must not be forgotten that by rebellion that State gained admission instead of losing its place in the Union ; and secession and nullification were both sanctioned by the then Congress of the United States of America. Such, then, was the jealous regard paid by all to the right of independent self-government. And this, too, was a precedent sanctioned by both State and Federal authority, which fixed a habitude of thought and feejing and action on the very first settlers of this country, engrafting in them a ruling sense of the right of self-government against any power which either oppressed or failed to protect them. If it was not taught them by precedent sanctioned by Congress, its spirit was caught by them, assuredly, from the colonies, especially from Massachusetts and all New England and Virginia.

It was in this decade, beginning with the first under Washington and ending with the second administration, under the elder Adams, that John Tyler's childhood played. He drew his first breath in the atmosphere of the wisdom of "Washington, and his mind was imbued from his cradle with the spirit of the age of reformation, resulting in the men and the events of the American Revolution.

' He was at his grammar-school just at the moment when the doctrines of State and popular sovereignty began to be successfully taught, and became triumphant for half a century of the future from that time. He was taught and trained in the school of strict construction of the Constitution and of the sovereignty of the States or the people, and in the principles of the school of Democracy, — a school which never sought to lower itself in the mud of manners and morals, and to pull all men down to the depth of vulgar mobocracy ; but one which, like a mighty charity, sought to build up a broad platform high as kings' crowns, to reach down the strong arm of popular sovereignty to raise all men, the lea,st and lowest, up to that exalted level ; ay, as high as possible, near to God !

He was thoroughly and fully imbued by birth, by educa-

TEE FIRST DECADE. 21

tion, by the men and events around him, with the spirit and the truths of times resorting to revolution and reform for liberty.

His father's residence at the time was at Greenway, near Charles City Court House. His cradle was rocked there, and all his childhood was nurtured at that locality. For his parentage and family history, we condense a statement prepared by his son, John Tyler, Jr., Esq. He says that he was born at Greenway, on the twenty-ninth day of March, a.d. 1790. In the paternal line he was the fifth in descent from the first in Virginia bearing the same name, who, together with his brother Henry, came at an early period to the colony at Jamestown ; and eventually, in the year 1636, established themselves in the Middle Plantations, intermediate between the settlements at Jamestown and Yorktown, embracing the present city of Williamsburg and its adjacent country. Henry located himself on the spot where Williamsburg was laid out, in 1690 ; and the lands upon which the palace of the royal governor was erected, together with those upon which the college itself was built, were acquired from his estate.

John located himself four miles from the present site of Williamsburg, where the round brick house constructed for his residence still stands, — now called Warburton's, in the county of James City.

These brothers, John and Henry Tyler, were younger members of the ancient Shropshire family, originally from Wales, recently and at present represented in Great Britain, in the elder line, by the late Sir William and the present Sir Charles of the Parliament and the Admiralty. They were of orginal Norman and Welsh extraction.

Who the first John Tyler of Virginia married, is unknown, the records of James City County having been repeatedly destroyed. They were destroyed in Bacon's Rebellion, in 1616. Again when the old capitol was burnt, and again during the late war of secession. What remained at Williamsburg were transferred to Richmond, and they were burnt in the conflagration of that city in 1865 ; and most family records of the peninsula of York and James Rivers were destroyed in the wars of 1776, of 1812, and of 1861.

The son of the first John Tyler was known as John Tyler, Esq. He was a man of note in his day, and married his cousin, Elizabeth Tyler. His son John, the third John Tyler, was, by royal appointment, marshal of the colony. John Tyler, the marshal, married Anne Contesse, the daughter i>f Dr. Lewis Contesse, a French Huguenot of nerve and character.

He left several daughters, and two sons, John and Lewis. John, the elder, and the father of President Tyler, lived to attain high honors. He was a distinguished Revolutionary patriot, and a zealous leader in the cause of the American colonies. He was an eminent jurist, and as judge of admiralty he decided the first prize case which occurred after independence was declared, holding his court under a large golden willow, which stood in the yard at Greeuway. He was the bosom friend of Thomas Jefferson. After independence was achieved, he was speaker of the House of Burgesses, and was a judge of the State District Court ; was governor of the State from 1808 to 1811, and ultimately judge of the United States District Court until he died.

Many rare and rich anecdotes are told of his life. At the christening of his first-born son, when the name of the child was announced, — "Wat Henry Tyler," — Mr. Henry being present and somewhat surprised, nervously asked " why that name was selected." The mother replied, "We have so named him, sir, after the two greatest British rebels, Wat Tyler and Patrick Henry." And the watch-seal which he wore when he died was presented to him by Mr. Jefferson, with the initials " T. J." engraved on its face, reading forward " Thomas Jeifersou," and backward "John Tyler."

In Abell's " Life of President Tyler," we have a sweet story of his saving Patrick Henry from an awful repulse by a hostess, who, when told that they were members of the House of Burgesses flying before Arnold's invasion, was indignant that they were running away when her husband had just left her to meet the invader. He had to vouch for Mr. Henry's being: himself; and when convinced of that fact, such was her confidence in him that if he ran away, all was right; it obtained for them shelter and food for the night.

Another anecdote illustrative of the man, and not yet written, was related by the late General M. Pitts, the father of Judge E. P. Pitts, late of the Norfolk Circuit. He was a student of law in the office of John Wise, on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, and when he was ready to apply for his license, Mr. Wise gave him a letter to Judge Tyler, then of the District Court, residing at Norfolk. He was a young aian of great promise, and afterwards distinguished in his profession, but was exceedingly diffident and awkward. He reached Norfolk, and easily found the judge's office, but the judge was not in. His clerk received young Pitts politely, took his letter of introduction, and invited him to await the judge's return, expected every moment. He sat down, anxiously awaiting the awful appearance of the strange judge. Suddenly a fine horse dashed up to the office door, mounted by a grand-looking, erect rider, venerable and commanding in his mien, with powdered hair neatly queued, wearing the shad-cut coat with long-flap waistcoat, shirt ruffled at bosom and wristbands, with shorts and kneebuckles and white topboots. He dismounted abruptly, stalked in, dashed off his buck-skin gauntlets, threw his whip on the table, and began to walk and talk to himself, violently exclaiming, " Yes 1 I will teach the upstart what the rights of land proprietors are ! He is so little of a gentleman, and so much of an ignoramus, that he has no idea of land-titles or rights, or the laws which protect them !"

The truth was he had had a hot collision with the " supervisor" of the streets, who had encroached, as he thought, on his lot, and he had returned to his office before his passion was cool, and neither his clerk nor Pitts knew what the soliloquy was about. He had entered without noticing young Pitts, and continued soliloquizing aloud as he stalked the room, swearing not a little, and commenting in such a mood that the clerk did not venture to present the letter of young Pitts, who sat trembling with apprehension. " Was ever judge in such a humor wooed for a law license ?"

At last the clerk caught a lull in the storm, and handed him the letter. Pitts timidly rose, and the judge, holding the letter, read it, and exclaimed, " Young gentleman, my friend John Wise, Esq., tells me you wish to be a lawyer."

"Yes, sir," replied Pitts, "if you will be pleased to sign my license ; but — but — I can come at another time, if it please you, sir, better." He hoped to be let off from the hour of wrath and bad omens for lenity in the examination.

The judge exclaimed, " No, young gentleman ; I can tell now by a single question whether you are fit to be a lawyer or not." Then raising his voice to a higher pitch, he asked, " Can you tell me the meaning of the word 'supervisor V "

Pitts was overwhelmed: he thought there was a "catch" in the word ; perplexed, he looked down, tasted his lips for a reply, the judge's eye glaring on him bewildered. At last, hesitatingly and half choked, he muttered, " Judge, I — I hardly — know — any technical — meaning, — but — suppose — its common meaning is — ' super' — ' over' — and * video' to see — the noun — * overseer !' "

Eagerly the judge exclaimed, " Yes, young man, you have hit it exactly. He is on the stilts of ' supervisor,'' ]\xs,i as if he was lord of the manors and of all the owners, and all the time he is nothing but ad — d vulgar 'overseer.'' You know the meaning of words, sir, and interpret truly, and are fit to be a lawyer. Give me your license, and I will sign it with pleasure.'

In a moment he was calm, signed the license, pressed upon young Pitts every kindness, and sent him back home rejoicing !