Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18.djvu/642

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NDREW JOHNSON has dealt the most cruel of all blows to the respectability of the faction which rejoices in his name. Hardly had the political Pecksniffs and Turveydrops contrived so to manage the Johnson Convention at Philadelphia that it violated few of the proprieties of intrigue and none of the decencies of dishonesty, than the commander-in-chief of the combination took the field in person, with the intention of carrying the country by assault. His objective point was the grave of Douglas, which became by the time he arrived the grave also of his own reputation and the hopes of his partisans. His speeches on the route were a volcanic outbreak of vulgarity, conceit, bombast, scurrility, ignorance, insolence, brutality, and balderdash. Screams of laughter, cries of disgust, flushings of shame, were the various responses of the nation he disgraced to the harangues of this leader of American "conservatism." Never before did the first office in the gift of the people appear so poor an object of human ambition, as when Andrew Johnson made it an eminence on which to exhibit inability to behave and incapacity to reason. His low cunning conspired with his devouring egotism to make him throw off all the restraints of official decorum, in the expectation that he would find duplicates of himself in the crowds he addressed, and that mob diffused would heartily sympathize with Mob impersonated. Never was blustering demagogue led by a distempered sense of self-importance into a more fatal error. Not only was the great body of the people mortified or indignant, but even his "satraps and dependents," even the shrewd politicians—accidents of an Accident and shadows of a shade—who had labored so hard at Philadelphia to weave a cloak of plausibilities to cover his usurpations, shivered with apprehension or tingled with shame as they read the reports of their master's impolitic and ignominious abandonment of dignity and decency in his addresses to the people he attempted alternately to bully and cajole. That a man thus self-exposed as unworthy of high trust should have had the face to expect that intelligent constituencies would send to Congress men pledged to support his policy and his measures, appeared for the time to be as pitiable a spectacle of human delusion as it was an exasperating example of human impudence.

Not the least extraordinary peculiarity of these addresses from the stump was the immense protuberance they exhibited of the personal pronoun. In Mr. Johnson's speech, his "I" resembles the geometer's description of infinity, having "its centre everywhere and its circumference nowhere." Among the many kinds of egotism in which his eloquence is prolific, it may be difficult to fasten on the particular one which is most detestable or most laughable; but it seems to us that when his arrogance apes humility it is deserving perhaps of an intenser degree of scorn or derision than when it riots in bravado. The most offensive part which he plays in public is that of "the humble individual," bragging of the lowliness of his origin, hinting of the great merits which could alone have lifted him to his present exalted station, and representing himself as so satiated with the sweets of unsought power as to be indifferent to its honors. Ambition is not for him, for ambition aspires; and what object has he to aspire to? From his contented mediocrity as alderman of a village, the people have insisted on elevating him from one pinnacle of greatness to another, until they have at last made him President of the United States. He might have been Dictator had he pleased; but what, to a man wearied with authority and dignity, would dictatorship be worth?