He bent his steps to Ohio, then the most inviting of the young fields of the West. It was fruitful of soil, and likely, therefore, to be fruitful of suits; the latest Hesperia of migration, which is ever finding some fresh "Terra antiqua, potens armis utque ubere gleba," where it may build new seats. As to the potens armis," its Turnus, Tecumseh, had now been subdued; in the “ubere gleba," the future staples of corn and pork, blessings that Eneas had never heard of, and which she of wheaten cake, Ceres, never knew, were now bursting into cessful pursuit of his life; besides that, hister, were bespoke for combatants more capacity and his inclination ran in another tried; and our youthful acolyte of pleas direction. His head seemed to have stolen was fain, like other maiden knights of old, the vigor from his arms; that was as in- to issue abroad in quest of an attorney's defatigable as these were weak. Excel- adventures. lence in all that was to be learnt in the common school, an early love of study, marked him out for something more than what Bloomfield has, in his sheepish strain, celebrated" the farmer's boy." Nature had evidently designed him for effort of the mind, not the body; for a professional and public career, not the obscure if useful avocations of the husbandman. And if the condition of his father, straitened as it was by the incumbrance of a large family, forbade the expenses of a higher education, our hero had the New England boy's resource-himself. He could teach what he knew, in order to find the means of learning what he did not know. At sixteen, then, probably with his father's assistance in the outset, he entered Williams College, (Massachusetts,) and during the next six years, literally worked his to graduation by at intervals keeping school. It is happy (is it not?) thus to see a man forging, out of the ignorance of others, arms with which to vanquish his This manly process, however, is quite common in New England, and, indeed, not unknown in Old, though taking in the latter a more humiliating form; for sizers (as they are called) are admitted into the universities, who are released from all further fees by the rather unscholarly service of waiting upon the other students own. at their commons. way up His degree thus obtained, our youth, upon the same "self-sustaining principle," proceeded to the study of the profession which he had meantime chosen, that of the law. For this purpose he entered, upon the usual terms, the office of a distinguished pleader of Connecticut, Stephen Titus Hosmer, afterwards Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of that State. Two years after, that is to say, in 1816, he was admitted to the Connecticut bar, an errant knight, armed cap-à-pie with the law, and ready, being first well-paid, to do battle (further fees being in prospect) for innocence-or, indeed, guilt-in distress. Meantime, however, all the giants and dragons in Connecticut, whom a young champion would have burned to encoun abundance. As to law, earlier settlement takes, no doubt, little of that along with it; the van-guard of marching mind is brutal enough-the front of civilization quite as savage as the barbarism which it chases; but this sort of civilization had now pushed on further, and milder things, cultivation and civility, were rapidly following. New England, who, with the better conquests of industry and order, brings up the rear of frontier exploit and violence, was pouring thither the teeming growth of her active population, diverted, by a more congenial sky, from its preceding course upon the South; and was sending thither, not individual adventu rers, but A multitude like which the populous North To be plain, our young "limb of the law" made his way to the rising town of Gallipolis, which we might have called simple Frenchtown, but that among our backwoodsmen, who christen cities for us, there has always raged a fury for polysyllabic, and especially for Greek names. At Gallipolis, then, and not Frenchtown, our hero fixed himself, unconnected and uncommended, to try unassisted his professional fortunes. Excellently prepared for his pursuit, he must have been, in addition to possessing | held the seat in Congress for that district, the other has since been the Governor of the State. Mr. Vinton, however, bore off the election from both; and for fourteen years, by a merited confidence from the in an unusual degree the personal qualities which at once attract confidence; for we find that his first efforts at the bar drew public attention, and that the end of his first year of practice saw him in the enjoy-constituency, continued to be returned with ment of a large and prosperous business. To it alone, then, and to the assiduous study which it demanded, he gave himself up for the next six years of his life. It had almost at once accomplished for him success, reputation, friends, the command of a good income-all that hopes the most sanguine could have promised him; and so much had all this outgone, in its rapidity, whatever a modest mind could shape to itself of ambition, that he seems thus far never to have had any thought, any aspiration, but of the pursuit in which he was so fortunate. For what we call public life in particular, that is, party politics, he had not the smallest inclination. He had not, to be sure, forbidden to himself (no good citizen can well do it in a republic) all concern in public affairs, but he had taken, and desired to take, little personal share in them; none with a view to his own advancement. increasing majorities, which at last rose to between three and four thousand, until, in 1836, he voluntarily withdrew from public life, firmly determined not again to engage in its arduous but then apparently fruitless struggles, which seemed capable, at the sacrifice of private, of accomplishing so little public happiness. During this long interval, he took a part equally useful and active in nearly all the great questions which, following each other in a quick succession of new and violent measures, agitated and corrupted the country from soon after 1823, when Heroism first began, down to 1837, when it merged into the after-reign of its sycophancy; that dynasty during which Gen. Jackson seemed almost to have verified the threat of Charles XII. to Sweden, and to have sent his jackboots to govern us. From the first, that power of labor, and that prompt instinct of the useful, of the It was, then, with more of surprise than substance of things, which had so quickly pleasure that, in the year 1822, he sud-made Mr. Vinton a leading lawyer, rendenly found himself, without any agency or wish of his own, nominated for a seat in Congress by a large meeting of the people of his electoral district. The distinction was every way such as could not well be resisted. It was a voluntary token of the popular esteem; and it then no more implied solicitation after, than intrigue before it. Men had not then, to gain a place in the national counsels, to stoop low just in proportion as they meant to rise high. It was their previous lives that canvassed for them, not base compliances to the lowest of the mob, nor the calumniating of an adversary. In short, if it was not quite the golden age of virtue and of Washington, it was still the silver century of our politics, the time of Monroe; the iron era of Jacksonism had not yet fallen upon us. Party scarcely existed out of Virginia, to whom we owe that happy and wise Jeffersonian invention banished under the healing administration of the second President after him. In the contest, friendly and fair, which ensued, our young nominee had two formidable competitors; the one then dered him an efficient representative. He applied to each question, as it arose, his strong powers of investigation; and as he was never the man to waste his time or that of the House on attempts at display or efforts to shine, the plague of our councils, he soon mastered the main business of legislation, contributed to perfecting it where the young member can best serve as he learns, in committees, and early began to make himself felt in the origination of substantive measures of importance. VOL. II. NO. III. NEW SERIES. 20 The first of these was in the year 1826, when he brought forward and carried through the House of Representatives a modification of the Land Laws as to whatever, by the original ordinance of 20th May, 1785, was set apart in order to found, in all the future States to be formed out of the national domain, a great system of popular instruction. By this ordinance,* was reserved from sale, in each township, for purposes of public education, one section of land, (640 acres ;) that is, one thir * See Laws of the U. States, Vol. I. p. 565. But ty-sixth part of the whole surface. this endowment and its beneficent purposes was proving-like so many other fair conceptions among us-a sad failure, the waste of local mismanagement, or the spoil of local combinations. A wretched system of leases and tenantry had, in particular, arisen under it, and would long have defeated, if it did not destroy, the wide social benefits which were destined to flow from this noble appropriation. The corrective which Mr. Vinton brought about began, prudently, with an experimental change in his own State; his law empowered the legislature of Ohio to sell the school-lands within her borders, and to invest the proceeds in some permanent productive fund, the income to be forever applied to the support of schools, within the township for whose use the land was originally reserved. Becoming at first the law of Ohio only, the benefits of this bill have been extended in succession to the rest of the new States, and have thus resoued this great humanizing interest, this great patrimony of Knowledge, from the dilapidation and spoliation which have flung away so large a part of the general public domain. Few of our legislators have had the good fortune to achieve a public service greater than this, or which will more be felt by posterity in that which will forever make its dearest part its moral and intellectual being.* Mr. Vinton's next great public service consisted in not an enactment brought about, but a cunningly-devised scheme of legislation foiled and defeated. During the latter term of Mr. Monroe's Presidency, it will be remembered that the restless genius in whose head so much mischief has hatched (Nullification, Annexation, and of late a Southern Convention) presided over the War Office; to the administration of which he is reputed (we know not how justly) to have first given order and efficiency. To that department (we need hardly say) is attached the bureau of Indian affairs—the government of our Indian tribes. Well: during this his Secretaryship, Mr. Calhoun had conceived a scheme of very specious-looking humanity; * For the debate on this Bill, Gales and Seaton's Register may be consulted, Vol. II., part I., page 839, 1st Session of 19th Congress. a plan for preserving and civilizing the Indian races then remaining within any of the States, by eliminating them into a common territory, which was to be guarantied them forever, and where, under a special government established for them, they were by association to unlearn all their mutual feuds, by association to contract new affinities; and, in short, under the white man's guidance rather than compulsion, by not constraint, but a sort of moral insinuation, they were to rise, before very long, into a very pretty red man's Utopia. This project was set forth,* in a somewhat elaborate paper from the War Office, dated January 24th, 1825. It displays the numbers of the aboriginal tribes within the States and Territories-collectively about 97,000, without including those in the west of Michigan and north of Illinois; the lands which they occupy, amounting to a surface of about 77,000,000 of acres; and the general condition of these septs, which, though already enjoying, through the efforts of missionaries and the contributions of benevolent societies, something of education and a tinge of civilized arts, could never become incorporated with the whites nor form an independent social advancement for themselves; they were continually swept back from their seats, by the pressure of a stronger population, with which the denial of civil equality did not permit them to fuse; and permanence of habitation being thus impossible to them, progressive improvement-which can only grow out of permanence of habitationcould never be brought about for them. All this was, as we have said, pressed upon the attention of Congress; an appropriation of $125,000 for the objects recommended was asked, and, meantime, treaties and such other preparatory arrangements as are in the power of the Government, were concluded or set on foot. A great political scheme was thus organized, under the mask of humanity towards the savage. To help it on its way, a passion more active and practical than benevolence interest-was appealed to: the boon of the Indian lands within the States was held out, to render the plan popular; and *See Document 64, 2d Session of 18th Congress, H. of R. the ultimate, the sectional aim, was carefully kept out of view; so that it remained undetected during the remainder of that Administration. Congress failed, however, through other causes, to act upon the project. The ensuing administration of the War Department under Gov. Barbour, found this policy actively organized, and in the process of silent and sure execution: it seems, therefore, to have regarded it as a settled one; and it adoped and urged the scheme, in a project for "the preservation and civilization of the Indians," communicated on the 3d of February, 1826, to the Hon. John Cocke, chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs, in answer to a request to that effect.* In this paper, the considerations that favored this great, and as yet ill-understood measure, are developed still more earnestly and seductively than before; no doubt with much conviction on the part of Secretary Barbour-a man really full of the warmest humanity and purest good faith. More fully to explain the details of the plan, was, however, to enable far-sighted men to detect the consequences, for the bringing about of which it was originally devised. Mr. Vinton soon penetrated them, and was able finally to defeat them, by making them apparent to others. It was, it seems, intended that, under the plea of the impossibility of carrying out this great work of benevolence otherwise than by uniting the Indians in a single region, that region was to be drawn on the west and north of the line of the Missouri Compromise, so as to cut off the formation of any further free States in that direction; while the tribes of the South, translated almost entirely north of the parallel of 36° 30', should leave the slave States an open frontier, across which to extend themselves indefinitely west. This astute plan would, one may now easily see, if executed, have secured to the South that permanent political ascendency, of late attempted afresh, to be compassed, by the same subtle contriver, through a bloodier method, at the expense of another unhappy race, the Mexican. 'See Doc. 102, House of Rep., 1st Session, 19th Congress. Settled in 1820, four years before the avowal of this Calhoun scheme for avoiding it. Except in that part of Michigan (then a territory) which lies within the peninsula of the Lakes, no free State could ever have been formed in the West on this side of the Rocky Mountains. Thus the growth of the free and great West would have been annihilated, its weight as a section of the Confederacy destroyed, and the entire adjustment under the Missouri Compromise reduced for them to nought. As we have said, active and sure steps had been silently taken to carry to its consummation, unperceived, this gigantic project. The public, suspecting nothing, accustomed to look without interest upon Indian affairs, and averse to the trouble of understanding them, took no alarm. Even in Congress, few had the inclination. or the time to labor through the mass of War Office papers, and sift out from them a distinct comprehension of what was going on in the Indian Department, beyond the ways and almost the care of civilization. At last only were documents drawn out by call from the archives, which gave to view the project and its progress. Mr. Vinton's attention became directed thither, and he discovered the reach of the scheme, as well as its bearing upon the interests and power of the West. He determined, at once, to apply himself to its defeat. The Committee of Indian Affairs had, for two or three successive sessions, reported bills for carrying this policy into effect; but those bills had, through the press of business, either never reached, or not been acted on by the House. In this state of things, at the first session of the 20th Congress, (in the year 1827-8,) Mr. McDuffie-then Chairman of the Committee of Ways and Means-moved, as an amendment to the Indian Appropriation Bill, the appropriation of the sum of 50,000 dollars towards removing beyond the Mississippi the Cherokees and such other Indians as might consent to migrate. The real object of the measure was not the appropriation itself, but something more important, to commit the country and draw it into this policy. To counteract and expose the movement, Mr. Vinton offered an amendment to Mr. McDuffie's proposition, attaching to it the following conditions: That no Indian or Indians living north of latitude 36 degrees 30 minutes shall be aided in removing south of that line, nor any living south of it to be aided in removing north of it. Upon this amendment Mr. Vinton made a speech, in which he examined and developed the whole plan, its effects upon the Western States, and its relation to the balance of political power, as between the slaveholding and non-slaveholding States. His discourse, full of weight and sense, but marked with the firmness and moderation which have always distinguished him, told at once upon the public attention; and although his amendment was voted down, yet the debate and the subsequent opposition which it formed to the scheme of transferring the Southern Indians north, under such territorial guaranties, ultimately compelled the abandonment of the plan; and, ever after, the aborigines, of whatever latitude, when removed west, have been carried forward (as Mr. V. proposed) upon the parallels to which they belonged. To him, then, the West owes the subsequent admission into the Union of both Wisconsin and Iowa, and will owe that of the two or three more free States that must, at no distant day, spring up north and west of them. In his efforts for these purposes, Mr. V. was zealously seconded by Mr. John Woods, then a member of the House from Ohio, and now its State Auditor. In 1833, when that session's celebrated Tariff bill-made so by the Nullification | movement out of which it grew-was under discussion, Mr. Vinton took a prominent part in that debate. In his chief speech on the question, he examined how far there was any justice in the complaint of the South, that the commercial policy of the country imposed upon that region more than its due share of the burthen of taxation. He also discussed, in the same discourse, the self-sustaining power of the Union, the subversion of which was then threatened by the Nullifiers. His main adversary was here again Mr. McDuffie-formerly a special contemner of all these ultra sovereign State Rights, which, passing to *See it reported at large, in Gales & Seaton's Register of Debates, Vol. IV, part II., p. 1568. Reported in the Register as above, Vol. IX., part 1, 1273. He had published, about 1821, under the signature of "One of the People," a series of essays, asserting, in their strongest form, the doctrines of what is called Consolidation-the antithesis of the State Rights theories. the opposite extreme, he now vindicated as supreme against the federal legislation. To this mutable statesman, this politician of paradoxes, the economist of the "Fortybale theory," the most violent of all the enemies of Annexation, and afterwards as fiercely its friend--an orator always vehement, but most vehement of all where he argued for all that he had once denounced —there could not well be opposed a better contrast of argument or of public character than Mr. Vinton; a man of no political conceits, or sophims, or vagaries, or violences; the friend of eminent leaders that were as deserving as eminent, but the slave of nobody's solecisms, the pack-horse of no one's errors; as calm as the other was heady, as logical as the other hypothetic, as sagacious as the other fanciful, as practical as the other wild or dangerous. The one was a man to confound every legislative discussion and turn what should be deliberation into fury; the other calm, collected, candid, conciliatory, always the master of his own reason, and never to be moved except by that of others. During the same session, Mr. Vinton made leading speeches on other topics; two on the cotton duties proposed in the Tariff bill already mentioned, and one on the Indian Appropriation bill.* Upon one great branch of legislation, the care and disposal of the public lands, Mr. Vinton has long made himself to be looked to as the leader in the House of Representatives, we might safely add, in Congress, of the party who have watched over their right administration, or averted their waste. During all the period over which we have thus far proceeded, and especially after the accession of Gen. Jackson, unceasing efforts were made-now by speculators, now by demagogues, next by a natural coalition of the two, and lastly by the auxiliary influence of the Administration itself, which was largely made up of both speculators and demagogues-to incorporate into the Public Lands system such changes as would, without any compensating increase of our population, have ruined that branch of the national revenue, and broken up entire the great machinery of which that system is composed. The *See Register of Debates, Vol. IX, part ii., p. 1732; idem, p. 1749; idem, Vol. X., part iii., p. 2808. |