CHAPTER XL

VALEDICTORY

TO AN unusual degree, perhaps, David Wilmot's personality is self-explanatory and by its own record forestalls the labors of the interpreter. The story of his life, he said in one of his earliest speeches, would be brief. That story was certainly direct; but it was interwoven with too vast a background to be short. Subjectively, it was simple; objectively, it became vastly complex. The story of David Wilmot, in fact, involves that of the wide and immensely significant reactions which his acts excited in the men of his time and the history of the nation. It needs more than a few pages to write the full measure of one who was "the leader of the free-soil democrats in a crusade against slavery which created the republican party, brought on the war, named the government, destroyed the doctrine of States' rights, and 'nationalized the Union.'"1

He began with a single-minded burning devotion to the democratic party, founded on the belief that that party stood for great ideals; but the devotion to principle and the maintenance of the courage of his convictions (which Colonel McClure emphasizes as Wilmot's strongest trait), and his consequent repudiation of platforms of expediency, carried him across and beyond party lines-it seemed for a time into the loneliness of a political desert; and there, with the rallying power of a prophet, he gathered to his preaching a new party, which grew until it swept the older organization out of control, and in large part out of existence. He was to the North what Calhoun was to the South-the embodiment of a vision that saw the true issue, inescapable and uncompromisable; the

1 "F. A. B." in the Philadelphia Press, Sept. 23, 1881. 2 Recollections of Half a Century, pp. 237, 238.

embodiment of a dynamic force that energized the masses of his section and fused them into a unit for the decisive struggle. And, as already pointed out, he was fighting on the side of Fate, while Calhoun was fighting against it.

And yet, while he believed firmly in the party system and in the molding of public policies, through the ballot box and the mechanism of representative government, he occupied a peculiar place among the public men of his day. It was well defined by his intimate colleague and best qualified critic, E. O. Goodrich :

It may seem paradoxical to say that Mr. Wilmot was not a politician in the ordinary and vulgar acceptation of the term. We know that such is not the general reputation he bore, but those who knew him intimately will bear us witness when we say that of all the ordinary intrigues of party leaders and the movements of party machinery, he had a great contempt and was profoundly ignorant. In the principles underlying political organizations, he was greatly interested, but the details even of his own campaigns his friends were accustomed to manage and control. He despised the tricks of crafty political schemers, and instead of forming combinations, he relied on the honesty and intelligence of the people. This was really the secret of his great power with the people. Honest and sincere himself, he believed the masses were equally so, and when attacked, he went boldly and confidently to the people, in schoolhouses and churches, and plead his own cause and the cause of equal rights. His trust in the voters was repaid by the confidence and regard they had for him, as evidenced by many a hard-fought battle. No man was ever so firmly intrenched in the hearts of the people as David Wilmot.3

This confidence in the people, and the complementary ability to win and hold them to the support of his doctrines, was the wellspring of his power and the most striking feature of his character and his career. When the National Congress at Washington and the State legislature at Harrisburg turned from his pleading or against his candidacy, he took his case

Bradford Reporter, March 26, 1868.

not only to Tremont Temple, Faneuil Hall, Cooper Institute or the Tabernacle, but to "Asylum and Terrytown, Herrickville and Horseheads and the Forks of Loyalsock"; and there he roused the sentiment that seated in the place of power, not always himself, but his principles.

If he brought purpose and stimulus to the people of his district, he received by reflex and by subconscious suggestion new energy and stimulation himself. One is tempted to employ the well-worn figure of Antæus drawing strength from contact with the earth. It is quite possible, too, that the antithesis would have been true, and that if lifted into high and remote positions he might have lost, or have been unable to use, his characteristic force. It is quite possible his declination of Lincoln's offer of a Cabinet post-his reluctance to undertake large administrative duties-was based upon a sound estimate of his own strength and weakness. It is doubtful if he would have been successful in an exacting executive office. A different and larger genius was needed to carry the work through.

Wilmot's was perhaps the rarer talent. It was much easier to find men who could head the republican columns in 1860, when victory was clearly foreseen, or even men able to help in administering the victory when it was won, than it was to find a man who, in the spirit of self-sacrifice that the party might live, would take the brunt of certain defeat in 1857. Some factor missing from his make-up, however, coupled with his aversion to the practical strategy of the game and his scorn of self-seeking, made it easy for the hostile partisan factions and politicians of his day to hamper his political career and to push his personality into the background. But nothing dimmed his vison nor daunted his mission to go forth and preach his gospel, even though it were as one crying in the wilderness; and his plea for "free soil for free men," for "no more slave States, no more slave territories," and for "no surrender and no compromise," turned and fixed forever the course and destiny of the Union.

It does not make the least difference who originally phrased the Proviso. It was the elevation of the Jeffersonian formula to the position of a leading article in the national faith that gave Wilmot his place in history. His mission was to lift the restrictive declaration from limited and temporary application-from special use as an instrument in fleeting party strategy, to be laid aside in exchange for some concession in another direction-and to make it part of the American creed. There were plenty of thin-soiled minds in which the seed of this gospel sprang up quickly, to die as quickly in the political heat of the following day. Even "great parties indorsed his views, put them in their platforms, stood by them for a time, and then faltered and fell. Great leaders adopted and advocated his views for a time, and sank into oblivion only when they forsook them." 4 The difference in Wilmot's relations to the Proviso and theirs was that nothing in the way of political preferment could induce him to abandon its advocacy or compromise its proposals.

It would not be important even if, in spite of the overwhelming evidence pointing to Wilmot's initiative, it should be true that some one else suggested the offer of the Proviso as an amendment to the $2,000,000 bill. The crux of the matter was in what followed-in the vision and spirit with which the ideal was carried forward. The history of the free-soil movement focuses upon Wilmot as foremost in materializing the imagination of the North against slavery extension; not as the greatest, perhaps not even as a great, organizer of the party; but as the personification of the concept which fixed the scope and meaning of the Proviso for all time.

It would have meant little as a feint, a gesture of expediency, or the mere phraseology of one unready to father it and fight for it to the end, come what might. As the essence of a national faith for which its sponsor was ready to live or to die, as Wilmot was, it was epoch-making. It is in this larger and

4 Wellsboro Agitator, Nov. 11, 1860. Editorial on Wilmot's candidacy for the Senate.

permanent aspect that Schouler (History of the United States, Vol. V, p. 66) calls it "the one great plan which fitted the political situation, that which gave the whole humane North and all opposers of this war, common ground to unite upon, against the greed of slavery extension in which the war originated. . . . This Wilmot Proviso was the one glorious idea engendered of the Twenty-ninth Congress."

There is no disposition in this biography to overdraw Wilmot's part in the free-soil movement. The record speaks for itself. The testimony of official documents, of contemporary history, of the utterances and writings of the men of his time, fix his place. He was by no means the greatest practical agent in the final victory; but he was the outstanding personification of the spirit that inspired the movement from its forlorn hope, in 1846, to the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, in 1865. And so the sufficient epitaph on the simple headstone in Riverside cemetery in his home town of Towanda, is: