Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/256

 of the session of Congress was highly characteristic. He argued in substance that while no State had a constitutional right to secede from the Union, yet, if a State did so, there was nowhere any power to keep it in the Union. President Buchanan was the very personification of the political species then known as the “Northern man with Southern principles,” that is, a Northern politician always ready to do the bidding of the slave-holding interest. I had been introduced to Mr. Buchanan with a multitude of other people at a White-House reception and taken a good look at him while after the hand-shaking he conversed with some Senators. He was a portly old gentleman with a white head, always slightly inclined to one side, and a cunning twinkle in his eye which seemed to say that although he might occasionally not appear to be of your opinion, yet there was a secret understanding between him and you, and that you might trust him for it. He always wore a white neckerchief like a divine. His moral weakness was of the wise-looking kind. He could pronounce the commonplace sophistries of the pro-slavery Democracy with all the impressiveness of unctuous ponderosity. He had rendered the slave-power abject service in the Kansas affair, again and again putting forth statements of fact which he could not possibly believe to be true, and constitutional doctrines that could be supported only by the most audacious shifts of logic. He was mindful of the fact that he owed the presidency to the trust of the slave-power in his fidelity to its behests. So far he had justified that trust to the full of his ability and of his opportunities. No Southern pro-slavery fanatic could have served the slave-holding interest with more zeal and—considering his position as a Northern man—with more self-denial. By forfeiting the good opinion of his neighbors he had really made himself a martyr to the cause of slavery. But when his Southern