by Thomas Dixon
CHAPTER IX
THE KING AMUSES HIMSELF
With savage energy the Great Commoner pressed to trial the firstimpeachment of a President of the United States for high crimes andmisdemeanours.
His bill to confiscate the property of the Southern people was alreadypending on the calendar of the House. This bill was the most remarkableever written in the English language or introduced into a legislative bodyof the Aryan race. It provided for the confiscation of ninety per cent. ofthe land of ten great States of the American Union. To each negro in theSouth was allotted forty acres from the estate of his former master, andthe remaining millions of acres were to be divided among the "loyal whohad suffered by reason of the Rebellion."
The execution of this, the most stupendous crime ever conceived by anEnglish lawmaker, involving the exile and ruin of millions of innocentmen, women, and children, could not be intrusted to Andrew Johnson.
No such measure could be enforced so long as any man was President andCommander-in-chief of the Army and Navy who claimed his title under theConstitution. 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 hadboarded her in the storm stress of a civic convulsion, but among themswarmed the pirate captains of the boldest criminals who ever figured inthe story of a nation.
The first great Railroad Lobby, with continental empires at stake,thronged the Capitol with its lawyers, agents, barkers, and hiredcourtesans.
The Cotton Thieves, who operated through a ring of Treasury agents, hadconfiscated unlawfully three million bales of cotton hidden in the Southduring the war and at its close, the last resource of a ruined people. TheTreasury had received a paltry twenty thousand bales for the use of itsname with which to seize alleged "property of the Confederate Government."The value of this cotton, stolen from the widows and orphans, the maimedand crippled, of the South was over $700,000,000 in gold--a capitalsufficient to have started an impoverished people again on the road toprosperity. The agents of this ring surrounded the halls of legislation,guarding their booty from envious eyes, and demanding the enactment ofvaster schemes of legal confiscation.
The Whiskey Ring had just been formed, and began its system of giganticfrauds by which it scuttled the Treasury.
Above them all towered the figure of Oakes Ames, whose master mind hadorganized the _Credit Mobilier_ steal. This vast infamy had already eatenits way into the heart of Congress and dug the graves of many illustriousmen.
So open had become the shame that Stoneman was compelled to increase hiscommittees in the morning, when a corrupt majority had been bought thenight before.
He arose one day, and looking at the distinguished Speaker, who washimself the secret associate of Oakes Ames, said:
"Mr. Speaker: while the House slept, the enemy has sown tares among ourwheat. The corporations of this country, having neither bodies to bekicked nor souls to be lost, have, _perhaps_ by the power of argumentalone, beguiled from the majority of my Committee the member fromConnecticut. The enemy have now a majority of one. I move to increase theCommittee to twelve."
Speaker Colfax, soon to be hurled from the Vice-president's chair for hispart with those thieves, increased his Committee.
Everybody knew that "the power of argument alone" meant ten thousanddollars cash for the gentleman from Connecticut, who did not appear on thefloor for a week, fearing the scorpion tongue of the old Commoner.
A Congress which found it could make and unmake laws in defiance of theExecutive went mad. Taxation soared to undreamed heights, while thecurrency was depreciated and subject to the wildest fluctuations.
The statute books were loaded with laws that shackled chains of monopolyon generations yet unborn. Public lands wide as the reach of empires werevoted as gifts to private corporations, and subsidies of untold millionsfixed as a charge upon the people and their children's children.
The demoralization incident to a great war, the waste of unheard-of sumsof money, the giving of contracts involving millions by which fortuneswere made in a night, the riot of speculation and debauchery by those whotried to get rich suddenly without labour, had created a new Capital ofthe Nation. The vulture army of the base, venal, unpatriotic, and corrupt,which had swept down, a black cloud, in wartime to take advantage of themisfortunes of the Nation, had settled in Washington and gave new tone toits life.
Prior to the Civil War the Capital was ruled, and the standards of itssocial and political life fixed, by an aristocracy founded on brains,culture, and blood. Power was with few exceptions intrusted to anhonourable body of high-spirited public officials. Now a negro electoratecontrolled the city government, and gangs of drunken negroes, itssovereign citizens, paraded the streets at night firing their musketsunchallenged 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-bredways, tastes, and enthusiasms were driven into the hiding-places of a fewfamilies and cherished as relics of the past.
Washington, choked with scrofulous wealth, bowed the knee to the AlmightyDollar. The new altar was covered with a black mould of human blood--butno questions were asked.
A mulatto woman kept the house of the foremost man of the Nation andreceived his guests with condescension.
In this atmosphere of festering vice and gangrene passions, the strugglebetween the Great Commoner and the President on which hung the fate of theSouth approached its climax.
The whole Nation was swept into the whirlpool, and business was paralyzed.Two years after the close of a victorious war the credit of the Republicdropped until its six per cent. bonds sold in the open market forseventy-three cents on the dollar.
The revolutionary junta in control of the Capital was within a single stepof the subversion of the Government and the establishment of a Dictator inthe White House.
A convention was called in Philadelphia to restore fraternal feeling, healthe wounds of war, preserve the Constitution, and restore the Union of thefathers. It was a grand assemblage representing the heart and brain of theNation. Members of Lincoln's first Cabinet, protesting Senators andCongressmen, editors of great Republican and Democratic newspapers, heroesof both armies, long estranged, met for a common purpose. When a group offamous negro worshippers from Boston suddenly entered the hall, arm in armwith ex-slaveholders from South Carolina, the great meeting rose and wallsand roof rang with thunder peals of applause.
Their committee, headed by a famous editor, journeyed to Washington toappeal to the Master at the Capitol. They sought him not in the WhiteHouse, 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 cannot be seen at this hour. It is after nine o'clock. Iwill 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 ofmalice.
"Where is he?"
Her catlike eyes rolled from side to side, and a smile played about herfull lips as she said:
"You will find him at Hall & Pemberton's gambling hell--you've lived inWashington. You know the way."
With a muttered oath the editor turned on his heel and led his twocompanions to the old Commoner's favourite haunt. There could be no bettertime or place to approach him than seated at one of its tables laden withrare wines and savoury dishes.
On reaching the well-known number of Hall & Pemberton's place, the editorentered the unlocked door, passed with his friends along the soft-carpetedhall, and ascended the stairs. Here the door was locked. A sudden pull ofthe bell, and a pair of bright eyes peeped through a small grating in thecentre of the door revealed by the sliding of its panel.
The keen eyes g
lanced at the proffered card, the door flew open, and awell-dressed mulatto invited them with cordial welcome to enter.
Passing along another hall, they were ushered into a palatial suite ofrooms furnished in princely state. The floors were covered with therichest and softest carpets--so soft and yielding that the tramp of athousand feet could not make the faintest echo. The walls and ceilingswere frescoed by the brush of a great master, and hung with works of artworth 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 tremblingcrystals, shimmering and flashing from the ceilings like bouquets ofdiamonds.
Negro servants, faultlessly dressed, attended the slightest want of everyguest with the quiet grace and courtesy of the lost splendours of the oldSouth.
The proprietor, with courtly manners, extended his hand:
"Welcome, gentlemen; you are my guests. The tables and the wines are atyour service without price. Eat, drink, and be merry--play or not, as youplease."
A smile lighted his dark eyes, but faded out near his mouth--cold andrigid.
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 itsrestless eyes, it seemed alive and moving behind invisible bars.
Just under it, gorgeously set in its jewel-studded frame, stood the magicgreen table on which men staked their gold and lost their souls.
The rooms were crowded with Congressmen, Government officials, officers ofthe Army and Navy, clerks, contractors, paymasters, lobbyists, andprofessional gamblers.
The centre of an admiring group was a Congressman who had during the lastsession of the House broken the "bank" in a single night, winning morethan 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 thetotal pay and mileage of nearly every member of the House ofRepresentatives.
Over that table thousands of dollars of the people's money had been stakedand lost during the war by quartermasters, paymasters, and agents incharge of public funds. Many a man had approached that green table with astainless name and left it a perjured thief. Some had been carried out bythose handsomely dressed waiters, and the man with the cold mouth couldpoint out, if he would, more than one stain on the soft carpet whichmarked the end of a tragedy deeper than the pen of romancer has eversounded.
Stoneman at the moment was playing. He was rarely a heavy player, but hehad just staked a twenty-dollar gold piece and won fourteen hundreddollars.
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 winsthis time."
With a doubting glance at Howle, old Stoneman shoved a stack of bluechips, worth fifty dollars, over the ace, playing it to win on Howle'sjudgment and reputation. It lost.
Without the ghost of a smile, the old statesman said: "Howle, you owe mefive cents."
As he turned abruptly on his club foot from the table, he encountered theeditor 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 ofchoice oysters, diamond-back terrapin, canvas-back duck, and champagne.
They presented their plea for a truce in his fight until popular passionhad subsided.
He heard them in silence. His answer was characteristic:
"The will of the people, gentlemen, is supreme," he said with a sneer. "Weare the people. 'The man at the other end of the avenue' has dared to defythe will of Congress. He must go. If the Supreme Court lifts a finger inthis fight, it will reduce that tribunal to one man or increase it totwenty at our pleasure."
"But the Constitution----" broke in the chairman.
"There are higher laws than paper compacts. We are conquerors treadingconquered soil. Our will alone is the source of law. The drunken boor whoclaims to be President is in reality an alien of a conquered province."
"We protest," exclaimed the man of money, "against the use of suchepithets 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 ofinherent power, even if he did learn to read after his marriage. Like manyother Americans, he is a self-made man----"
"Glad to hear it," snapped Stoneman. "It relieves Almighty God of afearful responsibility."
They left him in disgust and dismay.
