Page:The American review - a Whig journal of politics, literature, art, and science (1845).djvu/133

1845.] their aggregate vote would have produced the same result; in Virginia, Indiana and Louisiana collectively, a not much more considerable variation was needed for the success of Mr. Clay.

It is also noticeable, that at the close of the elections of the year 1843, the governments of but eight States, including only seventy-one electoral votes, were controlled by the Whigs; in the remaining eighteen States, with two hundred and four electoral votes, the adverse party was dominant.

This, so to speak, is the "materiel" of the result, and upon its face it appears that the withdrawal of the votes cast for the Abolitionist candidate from the issue between the two contending parties, has prevented the complete ascertainment of popular opinion upon that issue. That under a form of government, which reposes all ultimate power in the people, and acknowledges as its fundamental principle "that the will of the majority shall rale,"—every administration of which depends for its v/hole moral force in the country upon the fact of its resting upon the will of such a majority, and its constitutionally expressing that will—that under such a form of government the dominancy should be gained, and held, and swayed by a minority, is an anomaly. That there should be found in our midst a large body of voters so indifferent to the great systems of policy which divide the nation, as to throw away their franchise on an issue desperate in itself and entirely extrinsic to that on which their country commanded their voices, is matter of grave astonishment. We have neither time nor temper to discuss that sorry compound of weakness and arrogance, simplicity, malice and profligacy of which this mischievous faction is made up. The pity and disdain of all right-minded men rest upon them, and the cause which they have espoused shows more and wider wounds of their own infliction, than it could ever have suffered from its foes.

But aside from all the influences to which we have adverted, we find a sincere conviction that great actual as well as moral fraud in the election was perpetrated by the Radical faction, and that to this cause our defeat may be fairly set down. The Placquemines transaction, by which, within a narrow precinct, there were cast more democratic suffrages than the entire population of men, women and children, has never been explained; and the charge of direct and concerted fraud based thereon never rebutted. "Ex pede Herculem,"—if this footprint be so broad and deep, how vast and monstrous the body, could we but trace its form and lineaments! We cannot encumber our pages with extended tables, or we would exhibit the evidence upoa which we base our opinion, that New-York, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Louisiana were carried by fraud; not deceptive argument, not lying as.sertion, not trick nor bribery do we speak of now, but the downright and violent frauds of illegal, false, spurious votes.

Time was, when the Democratic party seemed to have "taken a bond of fate" for the security and permanence of their ascendency, and the ranks of a watchful and fearless opposition were the only line of public service open to the conservative patriotism of the country. The intrinsic worthiness of our principles, and the patient and disinterested adhesion to them, of the best and ablest men of the nation, through long adversity, gradually won upon popular favor, and the Whig party, year by year, gained strength in the country. The catastrophe to public credit and prosperity, which the wicked principles and perverse measures of the Radicals wrought out under Mr. Van Buren's administration, hastened their downfall, and gave us a triumph, complete in appearance, but perhaps premature. The death of Harrison and the treason of Tyler swept away the fruits of our success, and under accumulated discouragements the battle was to be fought over again. It has been fought, and nobly fought; and if our discomfiture were complete and final, if with our party's disaster the sun of our country's destiny had gone down forever, we do not know that any just self-reproaches would have embittered our pangs at defeat.

A survey of the whole matter, however, in its length and breadth, and from its beginning to its end, forbids us to attribute any such important character, or to impute any such serious consequences to the issue of the late struggle. We cannot but regard it as evincing a fortitude, solidity, and concord in the Whig organization, to which it has been for a long time growing, indeed, but which it never until now has reached—as evidence of a diffusion of sound political opinions, and a prevalence of active patriotism throughout the land, which recall, almost, the heroic age of our history—as showing a general popularity and a confirmed numerical strength on