Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Politics volume 4 .djvu/214

202 those terms. Even his celebrated horse contributed to his master's election, and drew votes for the President by the thousand.

4. Then he was a successful soldier. The dullest man in the Alleghany mountains, or in the low lanes of New York and Boston, or the silliest behind the counters of a city shop, can understand fighting, and remember who won a battle. It is wholly needless for such to inquire what the battle was fought for. Hence military success is always popular with the multitude, and will be, I suppose, for some ages in America as everywhere else. Our churches know no God but the "Lord of hosts," "A man of war!"

5. Then he was a southern man, and all our masters must be from the South, or of it, devoted to its peculiar institution. If he had been born in Barnstable county, and owned a little patch of yellow sand at Cape Cod, and had the freeman's hatred of slavery, even Churubusco and Buena Yista would not have given him the votes of the Convention, and his war-horse might have lived till this day, he would not have carried his master to the presidency. He was a slaveholder, as seven Presidents had been before him, holding office for eight-and-forty-years. There are some men at the North, chiefly in the country towns, who think it is not altogether right for a man to steal his brother; such men were to be propitiated. So it was diligently rumoured abroad in the North, that the candidate was "opposed to slavery," that he would " probably emancipate his slaves as soon as he was elected." I am told that some persons who heard such a story actually believed it; I think nobody who told it believed any such thing. The fact that he was a slaveholder, that he had lately purchased one hundred and fourteen men, women, and children, and kept them at hard work for his advantage, showed the value of such a story; and the opposite statement, publicly and industriously circulated at the South, that he loved slavery, desired its extension, and hated the Wilmot Proviso, shows the honesty of some of the men at the North, who, knowing these facts, sought to keep them secret.

These seem to have been the chief reasons which procured his nomination and election. It is easy to see that