WITH savage energy the Great Commoner pressed to trial the first impeachment of a President of the United States for high crimes and misdemeanours.
His bill to confiscate the property of the Southern people was already pending on the calendar of the House. This bill was the most remarkable ever written in the English language or introduced into a legislative body of the Aryan race. It provided for the confiscation of ninety percent. of the land of ten great states of the American Union. To each negro in the South was allotted forty acres from the estate of his former master, and the remaining millions of acres were to be divided among the "loyal who had suffered by reason of the Rebellion."
The execution of this, the most stupendous crime ever conceived by an English law-maker, involving the exile and ruin of millions of innocent men, women, and children, could not be intrusted to Andrew Johnson.
No such measure could be enforced so long as any man was President and Commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy who claimed his title under the Constitution. Hence the absolute necessity of his removal.
The conditions of society were ripe for this daring enterprise.
Not only was the Ship of State in the hands of revolutionists who had boarded her in the storm stress of a civic convulsion, but among them swarmed the pirate captains of the boldest criminals who ever figured in the story of a nation.
The first great Railroad Lobby, with continental empires at stake, thronged the Capitol with its lawyers, agents, barkers, and hired courtesans.
The Cotton Thieves, who operated through a ring of Treasury agents, had confiscated unlawfully three million bales of cotton hidden in the South during the war and at its close, the last resource of a ruined people. The Treasury had received a paltry twenty thousand bales for the use of its name with which to seize alleged "property of the Confederate Government." The value of this cotton, stolen from the widows and orphans, the maimed and crippled, of the South was over $700,000,000 in gold—a capital sufficient to have started an impoverished people again on the road to prosperity. The agents of this ring surrounded the halls of legislation, guarding their booty from envious eyes, and demanding the enactment of vaster schemes of legal confiscation.
The Whiskey Ring had just been formed, and began its system of gigantic frauds by which it scuttled the Treasury.
Above the mall towered the figure of Oakes Ames, whose master mind had organised the Crédit Mobilier steal. This vast infamy had already eaten its way into the heart of Congress and dug the graves of many illustrious men.
So open had become the shame that Stoneman was compelled to increase his committees in the morning, when a corrupt majority had been bought the night before.
He arose one day, and, looking at the distinguished Speaker, who was himself the secret associate of Oakes Ames, said:
"Mr. Speaker: While the House slept, the enemy has sown tares among our wheat. The corporations of this country, having neither bodies to be kicked nor souls to be lost, have, perhaps by the power of argument alone, beguiled from the majority of my Committee the member from Connecticut. The enemy have now a majority of one. I move to increase the Committee to twelve."
Speaker Colfax, soon to be hurled from the Vice-president's chair for his part with those thieves, increased his Committee.
Everybody knew that "the power of argument alone" meant ten thousand dollars cash for the gentleman from Connecticut, who did not appear on the floor for a week, fearing the scorpion tongue of the old Commoner.
A Congress which found it could make and unmake laws in defiance of the Executive went mad. Taxation soared to undreamed heights, while the currency was depreciated and subject to the wildest fluctuations.
The statute-books were loaded with laws that shackled chains of monopoly on generations yet unborn. Public lands wide as the reach of empires were voted as gifts to private corporations, and subsidies of untold millions fixed as a charge upon the people and their children's children.
The demoralisation incident to a great war, the waste of unheard-of sums of money, the giving of contracts involving millions by which fortunes were made in a night, the riot of speculation and debauchery by those who tried to get rich suddenly without labour, had created a new Capital of the Nation. The vulture army of the base, venal, unpatriotic, and corrupt, which had swept down, a black cloud, in war-time to take advantage of the misfortunes of the Nation, had settled in Washington and gave new tone to its life.
Prior to the Civil War the Capital was ruled, and the standards of its social and political life fixed, by an aristocracy founded on brains, culture, and blood. Power was with few exceptions intrusted to an honourable body of high-spirited public officials. Now a Negro electorate controlled the city government, and gangs of drunken negroes, its sovereign citizens, paraded the streets at night firing their muskets unchallenged and unmolested.
A new mob of onion-laden breath, mixed with perspiring African odour, became the symbol of American Democracy.
A new order of society sprouted in this corruption. The old high-bred ways, tastes, and enthusiasms were driven into the hiding-places of a few families and cherished as relics of the past.
Washington, choked with scrofulous wealth, bowed the knee to the Almighty Dollar. The new altar was covered with a black mould of human blood—but no questions were asked.
A mulatto woman kept the house of the foremost man of the Nation and received his guests with condescension.
In this atmosphere of festering vice and gangrene passions, the struggle between the Great Commoner and the President on which hung the fate of the South approached its climax.
The whole Nation was swept into the whirlpool, and business was paralysed. Two years after the close of a victorious war, the credit of the Republic dropped until its six per cent. bonds sold in the open market for seventy-three cents on the dollar.
The revolutionary junta in control of the Capital was within a single step of the subversion of the Government and the establishment of a Dictator in the White House.
A convention was called in Philadelphia to restore fraternal feeling, heal the wounds of war, preserve the Constitution, and restore the Union of the fathers. It was a grand assemblage representing the heart and brain of the Nation. Members of Lincoln's first Cabinet, protesting Senators and Congressmen, editors of great Republican and Democratic newspapers, heroes of both armies, long estranged, met for a common purpose. When a group of famous Negro worshippers from Boston suddenly entered the hall, arm in arm with ex-slaveholders from South Carolina, the great meeting rose and walls and roof rang with thunder peals of applause.
Their committee, headed by a famous editor, journeyed to Washington to appeal to the Master at the Capitol. They sought him not in the White House, but in the little Black House in an obscure street on the hill.
The brown woman received them with haughty dignity, and said:
"Mr. Stoneman can not be seen at this hour. It is after nine o'clock. I will submit to him your request for an audience to-morrow morning."
"We must see him to-night," replied the editor, with rising anger.
"The king is amusing himself," said the yellow woman, with a touch of malice.
"Where is he?"
Her cat-like eyes rolled from side to side, and a smile played about her full lips as she said:
"You will find him at Hall & Pemberton's gambling hell—you've lived in Washington. You know the way."
With a muttered oath the editor turned on his heel and led his two companions to the old Commoner's favourite haunt. There could be no better time or place to approach him than seated at one of its tables laden with rare wines and savoury dishes.
On reaching the well-known number of Hall & Pemberton's place, the editor entered the unlocked door, passed with his friends along the soft-carpeted hall, and ascended the stairs. Here the door was locked. A sudden pull of the bell, and a pair of bright eyes peeped through a small grating in the centre of the door revealed by the sliding of its panel.
The keen eyes glanced at the proffered card, the door flew open, and a well-dressed mulatto invited them with cordial welcome to enter.
Passing along another hall, they were ushered into a palatial suite of rooms furnished in princely state. The floors were covered with the richest and softest carpets—so soft and yielding that the tramp of a thousand feet could not make the faintest echo. The walls and ceilings were frescoed by the brush of a great master, and hung with works of art worth a king's ransom. Heavy curtains, in colours of exquisite taste, masked each window, excluding all sound from within or without.
The rooms blazed with light from gorgeous chandeliers of trembling crystals, shimmering and flashing from the ceilings like bouquets of diamonds.
Negro servants, faultlessly dressed, attended the slightest want of every guest with the quiet grace and courtesy of the lost splendours of the old South.
The proprietor, with courtly manners, extended his hand:
"Welcome, gentlemen; you are my guests. The tables and the wines are at your service without price. Eat, drink, and be merry—play or not, as you please."
A smile lighted his dark eyes, but faded out near his mouth, cold and rigid.
At the farther end of the last room hung the huge painting of a leopard, so vivid and real its black and tawny colours, so furtive and wild its restless eyes, it seemed alive and moving behind invisible bars.
Just under it, gorgeously set in its jewel-studded frame, stood the magic green table on which men staked their gold and lost their souls.
The rooms were crowded with Congressmen, government officials, officers of the Army and Navy, clerks, contractors, paymasters, lobbyists, and professional gamblers.
The centre of an admiring group was a Congressman who had during the last session of the House broken the "bank" in a single night, winning more than a hundred thousand dollars. He had lost it all and more in two weeks, and the courteous proprietor now held orders for the lion's share of the total pay and mileage of nearly every member of the House of Representatives.
Over that table thousands of dollars of the people's money had been staked and lost during the war, by quartermasters, paymasters, and agents in charge of public funds. Many a man had approached that green table with a stainless name and left it a perjured thief. Some had been carried out by those handsomely dressed waiters, and the man with the cold mouth could point out, if he would, more than one stain on the soft carpet which marked the end of a tragedy deeper than the pen of romancer has ever sounded.
Stoneman at the moment was playing. He was rarely a heavy player, but he had just staked a twenty-dollar gold-piece and won fourteen hundred dollars.
Howle, always at his elbow, ready for a "sleeper" or a stake, said:
"Put a stack on the ace."
He did so, lost, and repeated it twice.
"Do it again," urged Howle. "I'll stake my reputation that the ace wins this time."
With a doubting glance at Howle, old Stoneman shoved a stack of blue chips, worth fifty dollars, over the ace, playing it to win on Howle's judgment and reputation. It lost.
Without the ghost of a smile, the old statesman said:
"Howle, you owe me five cents."
As he turned abruptly on his club-foot from the table, he encountered the editor and his friends, a Western manufacturer and a Wall Street banker. They were soon seated at a table in a private room, over a dinner of choice oysters, diamond-back terrapin, canvas-back duck, and champagne.
They presented their plea for a truce in his fight until popular passion had subsided.
He heard them in silence. His answer was characteristic:
"The will of the people, gentlemen, is supreme," he said, with a sneer. "We are the people. 'The man at the other end of the Avenue' has dared to defy the will of Congress. He must go. If the Supreme Court lifts a finger in this fight, we will reduce that tribunal to one man or increase it to twenty at our pleasure."
"But the Constitution" broke in the chairman.
"There are higher laws than paper compacts. We are conquerors treading conquered soil. Our will alone is the source of law. The drunken boor who claims to be President is in reality an alien of a conquered province."
"We protest," exclaimed the man of money, "against the use of such epithets in referring to the Chief Magistrate of the Republic!"
"And why, pray?" sneered the Commoner.
"In the name of common decency, law, and order. The President is a man of inherent power, even if he did learn to read after his marriage. Like many other Americans, he is a self-made man"
"Glad to hear it," snapped Stoneman. "It relieves Almighty God of a fearful responsibility."
They left him in disgust and dismay.