The Constitutional [Alexandria, LA], December 15, 1860
From the Cincinnati Enquirer.
It seems but recently since we were in the midst of the political campaign of 1840, yet twenty years have flown since that year of humbug, log cabins, hard cider and gold spoons. Twenty years is a great period in the life of man, and a whole generation have grown up who have no recollection of the days of “Tippecanoe and Tyler too.” It is difficult to realize the fact that 1840, with all its memories, has faded back so far into the history of the past, and that we now stand as far from that era as we did in 1840 from the date of the Missouri Compromise of 1820; yet, when we look around us we see the indications of the tremendous ravages which time has made and the momentous changes he has wrought.
Nearly all the statesmen of 1840—those who were connected with the administration at that time—are in their graves, or have long ceased participating in public affairs. Of Mr. Van Buren’s cabinet of 1840, John Forsyth, Secretary of State, Levi Woodbury, Secretary of the Treasury, Mahlon Dickinson, Secretary of the Navy, John M. Miles, Post-master General, Benjamin F. Butler, Attorney General, Joel R. Poinsett, Secretary of War, are all dead save Butler. There is not a man in the United States Senate who was there in 1840. Nearly all of the prominent Senators are dead, such as Clay, Calhoun, Webster, Silas Wright, Col. Benton, Berrien, Preston, Poindexter and Choate.
In the House of Representatives, save Thos. Corwin, we look in vain for any of the members of 1840. General Jackson and John Quincy Adams, venerable ex-Presidents, were then on the stage of action and exercising a great influence on public affairs. Two of the chiefs of political strife in 1840, Mr. Van Buren and John Tyler, still alive, in extreme old age, but long ago ceasing to take part in the strife of the times. In other respects, what mighty changes have these two brief decades that separate us from 1840 witnessed! What a difference between the United States of 1840 and the United States of 1860! Not a mile of telegraph wire then in all our borders; few railroads completed—scarcely any in the West; stages and steamboats the general method of traveling; the daguerrean art, invented in 1839, hardly known in 1840; seventeen millions of people in the United States then, nearly double, or thirty-two millions of people now; California, Oregon and our Pacific coast, now the seat of flourishing members of the American Union, as little known to the people almost as the centre of Africa is now; gold scarce and hard to obtain, now it comes almost at the rate of a million dollars a week from California. When we looked at Europe, we beheld Nicholas of Russia, Louis Phillippe in France, the Duke of Wellington in England, Metternich in Austria, as the great representative men of that continent. They have all gone!
The youthful Queen of Great Britain, then just married—now a grandmother! Hardly a steamer upon the ocean, and fifteen or sixteen days considered a quick passage to Europe. The vast continent of Australia has been lifted up from the mists of the southern ocean, which had obscured it from the light of civilization, and become a great member of the family of nations, with an illimitable future before it. The twenty years past have indeed been active ones in the history of the world, and will keep the pen of the future historian busy to record their momentous events. The twenty years from 1820 to 1840 were comparatively quiet and unimportant. The world was taking its rest, and recovering from the tremendous shocks and the unparalleled exertions of the wars of Napoleon and the French Revolution of 1789. What a retrospect flashes across our memory as we look back to 1840! The annexation of Texas; the war with Mexico; the conquest of California; the French revolution or rather the European revolution of 1848; the downfall of Louis Phillippe and the rise of Napoleon III; the coup d’etat; the alliance of France and England against Russia; the Crimean war; the struggle before Sebastopol—a siege which has no parallel in modern times; the mutiny in India; the war of France with Austria, and the appearance again of the French eagles upon the Italian plains, from which they had been so long banished.
At home the rise and progress of the abolition agitation, which has been marching steadily to the overthrow of our Union and the destruction of our national prosperity, has been one of the leading features of the times. We saw its germs in 1840, when Birney, as an abolition candidate for President, received but seven thousand votes in the United States. Then it was neglected and despised. Little or nothing was said about Slavery in 1840, outside of the small band of Birney fanatics. Log cabins, hard cider, coon-skins and gold spoons, intermixed with something about the currency and hard times, were then the great themes of discussion and political dispute. Trivial and contemptible as was the electioneering trash and slang of 1840, how infinitely preferable to the pestiferous issues which have been made between North and South in 1860! What patriot would not like to see now a national and political campaign conducted without the appearance of the inevitable negro! Who would not rejoice to see the harmony and fraternal feeling which characterized the intercourse of the States in 1840, again returned! Politics were then national, having their adherents in every State in the Union—not as now divided upon geographical lines. From 1840 to 1860 we had a continual and unnecessary wrangle in the United States upon this slavery question. The strands of our Union have been frittering away with a slow and gradual process. It has implanted the bitterest feeling of sectional hate between brethren—between States of the same Union. No bondsman has been freed, no benefit has occurred from it to any human being! Still it is going on with accelerated pace and there are not wanting prophets who tell us that this second from 1840 will witness the final of the American Union as now constituted!
When we look at the changes since 1840, we are filled with wonder as to what will be the condition of the world and of this country in 1880, another period of two decades. The men to-day, who are now acting their parts upon the busy stage of public life, will have vanished as completely as those of 1840 have now. What an effect it would have on the actions of many, if not all of our people, could the great scroll of future history be unloosed by the hand of Omnipotence, and its mighty events—its tale of individual short-sightedness, of party madness and national convulsions—be exposed to view!