The Choir Invisible

It was early autumn when the first letters from him were received over the

mountains. All these had relation to Mount Vernon and his business there.

To the Transylvania Library Committee he wrote that the President had mad a

liberal subscription for the buying of books and that the Vice-President and

other public men would be likely to contribute.

His sonorous, pompous letter to a member of the Democratic Society was much

longer and in part as follows: "When I made know to the President who I was and where I came from, he

regarded me with a look at once so stern and so benign, that I felt like one

of my school-boys overtaken in some small rascality and was almost of a mind

to march straight to a corner of the room and stand with my face to the

wall. If he had seized me by the coat collar and trounced me well, I should

somehow have felt that he had the right. From the conversations that

followed I am led to believe that he knows the name of every prominent

member of the Democratic Society of Lexington, and that he understands

Kentucky affairs with regard to national and international complications as

no other living man.

While questioning me on the subject, he had the manner

of one who, from conscientiousness, would further verify facts which he had

already tested. But what impressed me even more than his knowledge was his

justice; in illustration of which I shall never forget his saying, that the

part which Kentucky had taken, or had wished to take, in the Spanish and

French conspiracies had caused him greater solicitude than any other single

event since the foundation of the National Government; but that nowhere else

in America had the struggle for immediate self-government been so necessary

and so difficult, and that nowhere else were the mistakes of patriotic and

able men more natural or more to be judged with mildness.

"I think I can quote his very words when he spoke of the foolish jealousies

and heartburnings, due to misrepresentations, that have influenced Kentucky

against the East as a section and against the Government as favouring it:

'The West derives from the East supplies requisite to its growth and

comfort; and what is perhaps of still greater consequence, it must of

necessity owe the secure enjoyment of indispensable outlets for its own

production to the weight, influence, and future maritime strength of the

Atlantic side of the Union, directed by an indissoluble community of

interest, as One Nation.' "Memorable to me likewise was the language in which he proceeded to show

that this was true: "'The inhabitants of our Western country have lately had a useful lesson on

this head. They have seen in the negotiations by the Executive, and in the

unanimous ratification by the Senate of the treaty with Spain, and in the

universal satisfaction of that event throughout the United States, a

decisive proof how unfounded were the suspicions propagated among them of a

policy in the General Government and in the Atlantic States unfriendly to

their interests in regard to the Mississippi. . . . Will they not henceforth

be deaf to those advisers, if such there are, who would sever them from

their Brethren and connect them with Aliens?' "I am frank to declare that, having enjoyed the high privilege of these

interviews with the President and been brought to judge rightly what through

ignorance I had judged amiss, I feel myself in honour bound to renounce my

past political convictions and to resign my membership in the Lexington

Democratic Society. Nor shall I join the Democratic Society of Philadelphia,

as had been my ardent purpose; and it will not be possible for me on

reaching that city to act as the emissary of the Kentucky Clubs. But I shall

lay before the Society the despatches of which I am the bearer. And will you

lay before yours the papers herewith enclosed, containing my formal

resignation with the grounds thereof carefully stated?"