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Children of the Market Place, a novel by Edgar Lee Masters |
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Chapter 59 |
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_ CHAPTER LIX I was now more lonely than I had ever been in my life, more lonely than I was on the farm. Then I had youth and expectation of wonderful things. I had ebullient spirits which were excited by simple things, the new country, the prospect of growing rich. Now my spirits were on the level of the prairie itself and I could look over the whole of life. I had nothing in particular with which to employ my energies except taking care of the riches that I had acquired. Riches had no meaning to me now. They brought nothing that moderate means would not buy. What I needed was some one in my life. I had lost Dorothy. My boy was away at school. Isabel was denied me. If she had only rejected me so that my will had been raised against her. Then I should have had passion for my thought and action. But it was with gentleness and understanding that she bade me adieu. Douglas was left to me, but what could he do for me or I for him? He had been my friend with that loyalty which characterized him from the time that he had taken me from the clutches of the law for killing Lamborn. We had seen much of each other along the way. Did loneliness ever come over him? He had married again, but was he happy? He was living a life of much social brilliancy with the new Mrs. Douglas in Washington. But was he happy? Or was he drowning disappointment, the tragic sense of life's inadequacy, in abandoned diversions? Like myself, he had wished for riches and attained them. He had lost his riches. I still possessed mine. But I was no happier for that. He had married a woman who was a slave owner. On my part, I had been made kindred to the slave blood by the marriage of my father. He wished for land, for wealth, and had taken a purse to marry an octoroon. Douglas had wished for land for his country and had paralleled the course of the slavocracy to get it. I had killed a man because of Zoe; then Zoe had disappeared and a part of the accursed land which had come to me through my father had passed to the unknown Fortescue, who had appeared and disappeared from my life like a thief. I had married Dorothy because my will drove me to it in overcoming her opposition to the fact of Zoe. I had loved Isabel and lost her. Douglas had loved the North and the Great West. Was he to lose them? Thus Douglas and I seemed to have arrived at the same place in life. He was broken in fortune and without a party. I was burdened with what more and more seemed to me a tainted fortune. And I was as isolated as he was. I could not help but think of him constantly, of his long years of labor, his great struggles, his heroic fight, his undaunted courage. Could anything lift him out of his complication to honor and freedom? He was the most talked of man for the Presidency. If he could only win that now and stand as a master man for nationalism, union, progress, peace, popular sovereignty, all the great liberties for which he had battled. He had already failed twice to be nominated. If now he could not win the prize, what would be his future as against the growing power of the Republican party? As my heart was set upon Douglas' ambition I set off for Charleston, South Carolina, in April. Anything to alleviate my regret over Isabel. When I arrived there I sought Douglas and found him deep in consultation with his advisers. He was unmistakably confronted with the severest contest of his life. He was delighted to see me and got me admission to the convention hall. I had tried to come as a delegate; but Illinois had split in a fight over her own son, and there were two delegations, one for and one against Douglas. And I could be on neither. Douglas' birthday, April the 23d, saw the opening of the fateful deliberations. He was destined to have no peace and no rest. Others might find shelter from the storm. He was compelled after his great labors in the years before to walk through the lightning and have it gather about his head. His doctrines on slavery had alienated the whole South from him. But he had the West, save California and Oregon, which acted with the South. Yet he was their son too. He had strength all through the North, because of the West. That West which he had done so much to create, which he had prophesied would stand as a balance between the North and the South, was for its son and its prophet--save California and Oregon. But of the whole thirty-three states, seventeen were against him. The West fought the South and fought for Douglas. The South made a common cause of opposition to the North and the West. But the new Giant put through the Douglas principles in the platform. Then Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Florida, Texas, and Arkansas seceded from the convention. The West had won but it had lost the South. And now in the balloting Douglas could not be nominated. He needed 202 votes, he could only poll 152-1/2. The heat grew intense. The delegates, trying to accommodate their interests, wandered about the old city talking seriously and not excitedly. There was little drinking. The local clergy offered up prayers for the success of the convention, for peaceful solutions. Balloting and balloting! No choice! The twenty-third of May arrived and the convention, exhausted and half disgusted, adjourned to meet in Baltimore, June 18th. Douglas had not been nominated. His party had split just as the Republicans had anticipated when they were congratulating themselves on Douglas' success in the Senatorial contest with Lincoln. Meantime, the seceders went to another hall, adopted a platform that suited them on the slavery matter, and nominated John C. Breckenridge. I did not go up to Baltimore to see the end of this melancholy business. I followed the proceedings in the press. Delegates from the state delegations which had seceded appeared there on the scene to gain admission. They were admitted where pledged to Douglas; upon this decision a second secession took place. Then they nominated Douglas; but he was now like a runner who has been tripped along the way, and who stumbles spent and breathless over the goal. He had conjured the West. It was strong enough to adopt his principles, but it could not prevent the convention from dividing. It could nominate him, but could not hold to him the states he needed in this, his greatest trial. And among his bitterest enemies was that Jefferson Davis whom I had seen in the Mexican War and who was now Senator from Mississippi. My hatred of the South nearly reached self-contempt for the way in which my life had been united to its feeling. All my thinking of the country and the terrible events which followed the monumental folly of not giving Douglas a united nomination dates from these days. On my way west I read in the press of the verbal clash between this Jefferson Davis and Douglas in the Senate. With an insulting inflection Davis had said: "I have a declining respect for platforms. I would sooner have an honest man on any sort of a rickety platform you could construct than to have a man I did not trust, on the best platform which could be made." Douglas had retorted with telling effect: "If the platform is not a matter of much consequence, why press that question to the disruption of the party?" Why? But the South had done it. And Davis had done it. _ |
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