Preserving the white man s republic jacksonian democracy race and the transformation of american con
Preserving the White Man s Republic Jacksonian Democracy Race and the Transformation of American Conservatism
Joshua A Lynn
Visit to download the full and correct content document: https://textbookfull.com/product/preserving-the-white-man-s-republic-jacksonian-dem ocracy-race-and-the-transformation-of-american-conservatism-joshua-a-lynn/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant download maybe you interests ...
Making the White Man s West Whiteness and the Creation of the American West 1st Edition Jason E. Pierce
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
Firstpublished2019
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lynn, Joshua A., 1985– author.
Title: Preserving the white man’s republic : Jacksonian democracy, race, and the transformation of American conservatism / Joshua A. Lynn.
Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018052877 (print) | LCCN 2018053359 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813942513 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813942506 (cloth : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: United States Politics and government 1845–1861. | Conservatism—United States—History—19th century. | Populism—United States —History—19th century. | States’ rights (American politics)—History—19th century. | Democratic Party (U.S.)—History—19th century. | White supremacy movements—United States—History—19th century. | United States—Race relations—History—19th century.
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018052877
Cover photo: Inauguration ofJames Buchanan, Presidentofthe UnitedStates, at the East Frontofthe U.S. Capitol, 1857, photograph by John Wood. (Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Montgomery C. Meigs Papers)
ToDarleneandKevin
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Conserving the Happy Republic
One
The Northern Men and Their NationalPrinciple: Jacksonian Ideology, Popular Sovereignty, and White Men’s Democracy, 1847–1854
Two
Conservatism and Fanaticism: The Political Ideology of the Democracy before the Civil War
Three
Resisting Realignment: Democrats Respond to Partisan and Racial Disorder, 1854–1855
Four
Welcoming Realignment: Democrats, Old Whigs, and the Conservative Diaspora
Five
Doughface Triumphant: James Buchanan’s Manly Conservatism and the Election of 1856
The Other Douglas Debates: Democrats Debate White Supremacy and Popular Sovereignty
Conclusion
American Democracy, American Conservatism
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
WHEN STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS published a treatise that only caused him trouble, an opponent gloated that he had “fallen into the snare of ‘writing a book’ the very thing that ancient malice prayed that an ‘enemy’ might do.” Thanks to friends and colleagues, I hope to avoid the Little Giant’s fate.
I am grateful to extraordinary teachers, including Ray Glenboski at Millbrook Junior High School and Jennifer Cox at Stanhope Elmore High School; at Marshall University, Chuck Bailey, Robert Behrman, Timothy Burbery, Lee Erickson, Dan Holbrook, Charles Lloyd, Carlos López, Montserrat Miller, Bill Palmer, Robert Sawrey, Barry Sharpe, Chris White, and especially Donna Spindel and Jamie Warner; at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Vicki Behrens, Fitz Brundage, Jerma Jackson, Louise McReynolds, Lou Pérez, and John Wood Sweet.
The members of my dissertation committee at UNC guided the first iteration of this book, and their influence should be obvious. Laura Edwards often understood my arguments before I did. It will require several more books to fully address her questions and live up to the expectations she has set for my work, but I take comfort knowing she will continue to guide me along the way. Bill Barney always challenged me, and always in my best interests. Anticipating his critiques has made me more fully aware of my assumptions as a historian. Mike Lienesch honed my approach to political thought and equipped me to do more than just history. He made sure I play with ideas in a responsible way. Working with Joe Glatthaar was one of the great pleasures of UNC. He taught me how to teach. His zeal for his students and their scholarship, electric classroom presence, and friendship enhanced my graduate experience.
Whether I went into his office obstinate, panicked, or flummoxed, Harry L. Watson responded with unfailing good cheer and soft-
spoken reassurance. My adviser once wrote that “contemporary political historians have grown up in the school of hard knocks.” Yet Harry teaches his students to see this as an opportunity to be creative with their scholarship rather than close ranks or stubbornly stand athwart historiography. This is a book neither of us anticipated when I first became his student, and I hope I have justified his indulgence and encouragement. I will be fortunate if the sensitivity with which Harry approaches the past echoes in my scholarship, in my classrooms, and throughout my career. I thank him for taking a chance on me when I applied to be his student and for a subsequent decade of his generous mentorship and his friendship.
Nicole Etcheson and Matt Mason showed a collegiality as formidable as their scholarship by graciously reading the manuscript multiple times and helping me improve it dramatically. With such scholarly guidance, all remaining errors are attributable to my stubbornness. Dick Holway at University of Virginia Press was a joy to work with, and I am grateful for his enthusiasm from the beginning.
I wrote this book in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, LeRoy, Michigan, and Prattville, Alabama. I finished it in New Haven, Connecticut. The Yale Center for the Study of Representative Institutions and the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University were the most nurturing of scholarly homes. Michelle Zacks welcomed me into the family of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Abolition, and Resistance. Remarkable students in my seminars at Yale on Jacksonian Democracy, nineteenth-century popular politics, and American conservatism clarified my thinking and refined my arguments. I learned a lot from them.
Steven B. Smith became an indispensable friend and mentor. He showed me how to think about the history of ideas in new ways. He also initiated me into the mysteries of New Haven pizza. I can’t thank Steven enough for looking after me at a pivotal stage in my scholarly development and launching me on my career with so much
kindness and camaraderie. He also made my time in New Haven a lot more fun. I look forward to many more cigars at the Owl Shop.
I put the final touches on this book in my new home in Richmond, Kentucky. I thank my new colleagues in the Department of History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies at Eastern Kentucky University for their warm welcome.
I thank my friends and fellow scholars: Christina Carroll, Robert Colby, Greg Collins, Adam Domby, Brian Fennessy, Joey Fink, Jen Kosmin, Mordechai Levy-Eichel, Liz Lundeen, Ashley Mays, Dwight Mears, Sari Niedzwiecki, Brad Proctor, Joe Rizzo, Paul Turner, Tyler Will, Tim Williams, David Williard, Alison Wood, and Nic Wood. Shannon Eaves, Jeff Erbig, Robert Richard, Rob Shapard, and Zachary Smith deserve special thanks for reading and commenting on drafts. Shannon and Rob did the most to jump-start this project in our writing group. Their writing improved mine.
I hope that Tom Goldstein and Elizabeth Smith know how much their friendship means to me. From making me dinner as I soldiered through comps to forgiving my dog for destroying their furniture, they are the best friends. My friend and fencing partner Patrick Kent is a kindred soul. Robert, Emily, and Brian made Chapel Hill my home.
David R. Woodward at Marshall University provided me with an example of a historian that I will always strive to emulate. My model academic is my friend Richard I. Lester, who has been my mentor longer than all the others. Harvey Curtis Fenimore Jr., Henry Lynn, and Jerry Stilp talked to me about history a long time ago, and I have never stopped wanting to talk about it since. In addition to all the other ways in which they shaped me, Patrick Henry Lynn and Joan Toomey Lynn first turned my attention to the past. Although I never met her, Betty Irene Holmes unquestionably shaped me as well. I’m told I have her laugh.
The William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan, the Virginia Historical Society, the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, the Jack Miller Center, the Graduate School
at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the UNC-CH Center for the Study of the American South, the UNC-CH Department of History, the Yale Center for the Study of Representative Institutions, and the MacMillan Center at Yale supported my research and writing. The UNC-CH Writing Center and UNC Correctional Education are special programs. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to teach for them and to learn from them. A version of chapter 5 appeared in the Journal of the Civil War Era 8, no. 4 (Dec. 2018), published by UNC Press. Some material also appeared in the Muster blog (Sept. 13, 2016) of the Journal of the Civil War Era and in the Tennessee HistoricalQuarterly76, no. 3 (Fall 2017).
My dog Rupert was my companion for sixteen years, from my freshman year of high school in Millbrook, Alabama, through readying this book for publication at Yale. He more than kept his promise. Rupert’s love is matched only by that of my parents, to whom this book is dedicated.
Preserving the White Man’s Republic
Introduction
Conserving the Happy Republic
To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.
Edmund Burke, 1790
IN APRIL 1856 the steamer Arago deposited valuable cargo in New York City—the next president of the republic. A warm homecoming greeted James Buchanan. The “Old Public Functionary” had commenced his political career decades earlier opposing the Democratic Madison administration. Attuned to political shifts, he abandoned his father’s stale Federalism for Andrew Jackson’s populist coalition in the 1820s. Now the sanctimonious old bachelor and savvy partisan stood poised to inherit Old Hickory’s mantle. An observant Jacksonian, Buchanan genuflected before the selfgoverning masses welcoming him home from a diplomatic assignment. He answered the cheering throng, “I have been for years abroad in a foreign land, and I like the noise of the democracy!” “If you could feel how despotism looks on; how jealous the despotic powers of the world are of our glorious institutions,” he purred, “you would cherish the Constitution and Union to your hearts.” Buchanan’s praise doubled as admonition. The specter of “arbitrary power” haunted not only the Old World, he hinted, and Americans ought not be complacent about their exceptional republic.1 Accepting the Democracy’s presidential nomination two months later, Buchanan referenced the “dark spirit of despotism and bigotry” rampant in the United States—a domestic form of arbitrary power signaling something awry in the republic.2
The Happy Republic
Americans in the mid-nineteenth century were proud of their progressive republic. Democrats in particular congratulated themselves for the contrast between their nation’s “happy millions enjoying the blessings of a free government” and the “bloated and festering systems of the Old World.”3 “Our country, fellow-citizens, under democratic rule, has prospered beyond all former example of human greatness,” beamed a New Yorker in 1858, and “our people are now, through the kind interposition of Divine Providence, every where prosperous and happy.”4 Indiana’s Democratic governor celebrated “our happy republic” and claimed that nowhere else could be found “a political confederation more free, and better adapted, in its practical operations, to raise the whole human family to the highest attainable condition of virtue, freedom, knowledge, political equality, prosperity and safety.”5
Jacksonian Democrats credited their principles for the unprecedented degree of popular participation characterizing their happy republic. The recognition that “the peopleare capable of self government,” gloated an Alabamian, was a “startling principle which amazed the sovereigns of the old world.” But it was the basis for “the great democratic Republic of America.”6 What many historians rightly deem an exclusionary polity was the most democratic yet realized, in which all white men were designated equally the nation’s sovereigns. Alongside egalitarianism and majoritarianism, Jacksonians advocated what today would be considered a classically liberal credo regarding the uninfringeable rights of white male individuals and the negative beneficence of the limited state. Taken together, republican equality, majoritarian democracy, and liberal antistatism were meant to elevate the individual by removing constraints on the free exercise of his power, making him, Democrats maintained, the fillip of progress nationally and worldwide.
Democrats had forged this revolutionary political order by enshrining a modern conception of rights as equal, natural, and racially defined. They overturned older understandings of society, by which one’s obligations and rights were calibrated relative to others on a sliding scale of social hierarchy. A spectrum of rights existed in
colonial and early republican America, when economic and household status determined political privilege. The American Revolution loosened the bonds of this deferential society. The followers of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson then burst them asunder by reversing the equation whereby social standing predicated political power, starting instead with the premise of equal political rights for all white men by virtue of their whiteness and manhood. Impermeable racial boundaries supplanted social gradation, placing white men on a base level of political equality, from which more radical Jacksonians like the Loco-Focos spun out notions of socioeconomic equality. Thus did Democrats discard an organic model of society dating from antiquity for Enlightenment egalitarianism, natural rights, and racial essentialism.7
Although Democrats proclaimed rights to be “natural,” their rightsbearing individual was not a universal abstraction. He was a white man, making Democrats’ happy republic a whiteman’srepublic.This historically contingent individualism also made their happy republic a fragile one. If, as Democrats contended, individual rights derived from nature, their extension to new groups would be unnatural and corrosive of rights already achieved. In the late 1840s and 1850s, so-called fanatical reformers, especially slavery’s opponents, threatened to push progress too far by empowering marginalized Americans. James Buchanan’s 1856 campaign biography decreed that “the peace, prosperity, and safety of twenty millions of the happiest, freest, and most advanced white men, with their noble structure of republican government . . . should not be sacrificed— nay, not even jeopardized for the supposed interests of three millions of the African race.”8 Expanding rights, Democrats worried, would resurrect a social order in which their own rights were relative.
Alarmed by the precariousness of the racial equilibrium, Democrats no longer aspired to enlarge democracy but to conserve it exclusively for white men. The party previously decried for its radicalism manifested a reflexive conservatism in the 1850s, when they perceived a new generation of reformers seeking coercive state
power to enforce gender and racial equality. Additional tinkering, Democrats concluded, would only harm America’s already exceptional republic. Maligned then and now as the Slave Power’s white supremacist stooge, the late antebellum “Democracy,” as the party was commonly known, was still committed to democracy. To preserve their progressive, racially pure republic, Democrats renounced neither democracy nor Enlightenment liberalism. “The great conservative democratic party”9 instead reimagined democracy as a tool for conserving white men’s individual rights and equality, reinventing American conservatism in the process.
The Noise of the Democracy: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Culture
James Buchanan told his boisterous well-wishers that, after his errand among Old World tyrants, he savored the “noise of the democracy.” If, like Buchanan, we listen to the Democracy’s noise, we will discern the conservative shift in their partisan ideology in the late 1840s and 1850s. Antebellum Americans took political rhetoric seriously. Bemoaning his party’s defeat in Pennsylvania’s 1847 election, a Whig told his Democratic (“Locofoco”) friend that he would have run a stronger campaign by paying attention to what his opponents actually said. He regretted not having “raked from the oblivion to which Locofocoism would now willingly consign them, every Locofoco speech, every Locofoco Banner, every Locofoco song,” whereupon he would “have blazoned them to the eye & reiterated them in the ears of the honest rank & file until I have stamped upon the forehead of Locofocoism the deep and demining fraud in characters too indelible for even time to obliterate.”10 I also rake, blazon, and reiterate what Democrats said, read, and sang to comprehend their ideas, albeit without the goal of promoting Whiggery.
Acknowledging that “folks think a senator should be a talking machine,” a congressman counseled circumspection to a colleague.11
Fortunately, few heeded this advice, and in their gasconade, antebellum Americans intended not to prevaricate but to expound their beliefs. An array of print sources—speeches, banners, and songs—broadcast political principles and cultural values. While recent scholarship stresses the conventions of print culture and cultural practices as unifying partisan rituals, texts and rites were secondary to the ideas they transmitted.12 When Democrats distributed speeches and pamphlets in “Stronghold[s] of Negroism” or regions “strongly tinctured with modern whiggery,” it was “to furnish speakers and writers with the material for defence or assault.”13 “We are confident, if the pending issues are properly discussed before the people, that the time-honored principles of the Democratic party will be sustained at the polls,” a party committee implored Kentuckian Joseph Holt in 1855. Holt was a sought-after speaker during the 1856 presidential canvass. In Louisville, he informed his wife, “I spoke 2 ½ hours, much longer than was prudent or kind to the audience.” “I found my clothes almost as wet as if I had been plunged in the river,” he recounted, “& in despite of all precautions I took cold.” His wife pleaded prudence, but his party beseeched.14 Democrats needed ideological proselytizers in a contest the stakes of which transcended the spoils of patronage.
Although historians now recognize the Civil War era as riven by ideological sparring over sectionalism, race, and slavery, the Democracy rarely figures as protagonist. Studying ideology reoriented the political history of the period away from politicians blundering into an unnecessary war to analyses of genuine and decisive moral and political disagreements over race and slavery. This bevy of scholarship prioritizes actors with sectional visions— antislavery northerners and proslavery southerners. Compared to antislavery Republicans and to its own earlier history, the 1850s Democracy appears bereft of its Jacksonian verve, impelled only by partisan inertia. Roy F. Nichols’s 1948 assessment of the party as “old and faction-scarred, institutionalized, and no longer spurred by pristine enthusiasm” stands unchallenged.15
The prevailing historical view, inaugurated by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and reenergized by Sean Wilentz and Jonathan H. Earle, holds that the racist, reactionary, and prosouthern Democracy of the 1850s ceased to be the party of Jacksonian Democracy. True Jacksonians abandoned the party for the antislavery Free Soil and Republican Parties. Many of these historians find something worthwhile in Jacksonian Democracy and would insulate it from a party beholden to the “Slave Power” and its northern “Doughfaces.” Denunciations of the Democracy as undemocratic also evince a reluctance to acknowledge that democracy can coexist with white male supremacy and that white supremacy can be a substantive ideology. The Democratic Party, accordingly, was undemocratic because it was racist and proslavery, with the party’s support attributed to undemocratic manipulation and the opiate of race baiting. Given a meaningful democratic choice, the people would have preferred Abraham Lincoln’s Republicans to Stephen A. Douglas’s Democrats.16 Democrats nonetheless persisted in calling their party “the Democracy,” because they continued to conflate their principles and practices with democratic self-governance itself.17 Their white male supremacy and their hostility to antislavery and other “fanatical” reformism were not cynical means to hoodwink white men into betraying their interests. These stances resonated with much of the electorate, keeping the Democracy in power and competitive throughout the decade. Many Jacksonians did desert their party. Those Democrats whose interpretation of Jacksonian producerism and egalitarianism propelled them into antislavery ranks to advance the rights of alllaborers have been extensively chronicled. Yet those whose Jacksonianism made them hunker down in their ancestral party to defend white men’s equality have received scant attention. The house of Jackson was capacious. Those who remained in the party were just as Jacksonian as those who left. Their ideology synthesized democracy, equality, and white male supremacy. White men nationwide identified with the Democracy’s racial and gender assumptions. Not only could democracy and white supremacy coincide, they necessitated one another for these Americans.
Democrats in the 1850s were still Jacksonians, and they were still democrats, even as they rebranded themselves as a conservative party dedicated to preserving racial and gender inequality in the white man’s republic. The reciprocity between self-government and white male supremacy reminds us that democracy is not inherently progressive. It is often conservative.18
Racial democracy united white men from the slave states and the free states. While the Democracy fractured in 1860, its endurance as an intersectional institution in an age of sectionalism testifies to the nationality of its worldview. Contention over slavery precipitated a partisan realignment in interbellum America. The Democracy trudged along as established parties collapsed and new ones coalesced between the Mexican War and the Civil War. I focus on those who stayed in the party. Most accounts examine only northern Democrats, assuming sectional differentiation and a shallow democratic political culture in the slave states. Southern Democrats appear only as the Slave Power, which demanded sycophantic northern Doughfaces sabotage democracy to perpetuate slavery. Historians largely agree with a critic’s 1858 rendering of the Democracy as “the slaveholders of the South on the one hand and the demagogues and office seekers of the North on the other.” This study goes beyond Doughface and Slave Power caricatures by reevaluating both northern and southern Democrats as more than proslavery allies of convenience. Northern Democrats cannot be understood apart from southern Democrats, with whom they shared a partisan cultural identity that often outranked any sectional affinity felt toward fellow northerners outside their party. National in scope and ideologically vibrant, the party knitted together white men across the country to protect the racial and gender hierarchies upon which their identities as democratically self-governing white men were based.19
The interbellum era was a discrete period in the Democracy’s ideological development. The 1850s witnessed the breakdown of the second party system and the eclipse of its divisive economic disputes. Territorial acquisition after the Mexican War made the
moral impasse over slavery and its expansion paramount in politics for the next decade. Drawing on Jacksonian teachings, Democrats responded to the antislavery movement and related reformism with “popular sovereignty.” As party doctrine from 1848 to 1860, popular sovereignty provided coherence and continuity to Democratic thought during the interwar period. With popular sovereignty, Democrats recommended that white men in the territories democratically determine whether to permit slavery. Devolving decision making, Democrats promised, would exert a conservative influence, as white men could be trusted to use democracy to preserve the racial and gender order from which they benefited. Local democracy rested at the heart of Democrats’ conservatism and informed their approach to other fraught moral and cultural issues such as temperance and nativism. Committed to popular sovereignty and officially indifferent to the morality of slavery, the party shed its most avowedly antislavery membership, reinforcing its conservative cast.
Haranguing voters on the hustings about popular sovereignty, Democrats were not just proposing public policy. They were also explicating political philosophy. Rather than scrutinize individuals’ political thought, we can recapture the politicalthought of a party, found not in the arid texts of elite political theorists, themselves a rarity in this era, but in newspapers, speeches, cartoons, songs, and private writings authored by Democrats from all walks of life and all regions. Democrats were partisans and government officials. Yet, like other antebellum Americans, they imbued electioneering and policy making with theoretical heft, peppering bland debates with talk of rights, equality, and self-government.20 Exalting politics to the plane of first principles backfired, however, when party platforms could not subsequently be compromised. The invocation of rights and equality on the stump, moreover, often jarred with reality. Rhetoric about equal natural rights obscured socioeconomic disparities among white men and the way that rights operated in law and local custom.21 By steeping policy in Enlightenment thought, Democrats crafted a compelling worldview for white men. The repeated failures of that
worldview point to the problems politicians created for themselves by posing as political theorists. When mapping a political party’s philosophy, we cannot expect intellectual rigor. The inconsistencies themselves are historically significant.
Just as important is the messy cultural context that hindered the straightforward realization of ideological visions. Synthesizing ideology and culture enmeshes political principles in the quotidian concerns of daily life, nestling politics within wider histories of race, gender, sexuality, and the household. Democrats’ appropriation of conservatism occurred at the intersection of political thought with cultural constructions of race and gender. Democratic manhood, for example, complemented their understanding of political economy and the state. While slave states and free states diverged culturally before the Civil War, northern and southern Democrats’ common partisan culture encompassed shared templates of manhood, whiteness, and domesticity. Democrats enacted gender and structured their households in ways distinct from other parties. They sought to conserve their party’s normative cultural assumptions in the 1850s. Appreciating that race, gender, and sexuality were also the stuff of partisan politics and that competing conceptions of the family were just as much components of a party’s platform as a position on the tariff explains why all antebellum Americans found the stakes of politics so high.22
Conserving the White Man’s Republic
Juxtaposing published texts and unpublished manuscripts grounds political theory in this cultural setting, allowing us to historicize the Democracy’s variant of conservatism, a political ideology uniquely conditioned by context. Conservatism has been defined as a preference for the “familiar,” a “disposition,” according to theorist Michael Oakeshott, “to delight in what is present rather than what was or what may be.” For other theorists, it entails systematic, timeless principles. But context still matters. Samuel P. Huntington,
who classified conservatism as an “ideology” in opposition to Oakeshott’s “disposition,” clarified that it is a “positional” ideology dependent upon the specific present it is enlisted to defend. The late-eighteenth-century thinker Edmund Burke, often regarded as the source for whatever principles characterize conservatism, emphasized that “circumstances . . . give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect.”23
Changed circumstances meant that interbellum Democrats were no longer the rabble-rousers denounced by their conservative opponents in the 1820s and 1830s. Historian and Democrat George Bancroft watched from London as the Revolutions of 1848 convulsed the Continent. He found that “all Europe has its eyes turned towards us.” “The world has entered in a new era,” Bancroft effused, “with America openly in the lead among the nations; & the sovereigns know it.” Yet Bancroft was not referring to revolutionaries finding inspiration in the American republic but to “the lovers of order [who] now look to the United States.” Bancroft told Lewis Cass, the Democrats’ 1848 presidential nominee, that “it is while all Europe is full of anxiety, that you will be called to preside over the happy republic, whose only danger is in the pride of its exuberant prosperity.” Democrats’ happy republic, long resisted by European and even American conservatives as an unsteady siren of democracy, suddenly modeled stability.24
Before returning to the United States to claim the presidency in 1856, James Buchanan dined with exiled leaders of those failed revolutions. The luminaries at the 1854 London dinner party included Hungary’s Lajos Kossuth, Italy’s Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini, and Russian socialist Aleksandr Herzen. A ribald old flirt, Buchanan inquired of the host’s wife “if she was not afraid the combustible materials around her would explode & blow us all up.”
“They are very able & agreeable men,” Buchanan relayed to the secretary of state, and “should the revolutionary spirit again break out in Europe, which they all anticipate within a brief period, they are sensible of the necessity of confining it within more rational limits than in 1848.” Buchanan judged that “Kossuth’s views upon
this subject are quite reasonable,” as he was “against Socialism, Fourierism & all other isms inconsistent with liberty & order.” Six years earlier Bancroft had suggested that monarchs besieged by these men look to the United States. Buchanan recommended Europe’s liberals and radicals do likewise. Both conservatives and revolutionaries could turn to the happy republic, a synthesis of “liberty & order.”25
Even as they adopted a conservative disposition to maintain order in their republic, Democrats’ stand was principled, because their happy republic was the culmination of Jacksonian Democracy. To conserve their progressive republic, as well as the race and gender relations that buttressed it, Democrats relied on democracy, hardly a typical conservative panacea. Rather than a romanticized nationstate, aristocratic elites, or the clergy, Democrats expected local majorities of white men to instill social order. While heady Democrats touted their party’s “great principles of liberty and equality” and its “respect for the universal rights of man,”26 their liberal individual was not a neutral construct. He was the white master of female and black dependents. Democrats argued that self-rule would stabilize society, because white men would not undermine the racial and gender inequality that generated their democratic equality. The democratic process projected their household mastery into political power over all women and Americans of color. Democracy was an assertion of white manhood. Because he would uphold the racial and gender prerogatives that empowered him, the progressive, selfgoverning individual was simultaneously the conservative bulwark of the status quo, with the intermingling of “liberty & order” in his person a microcosm of their reciprocity within the republic. Thus were democracy, liberal individualism, egalitarianism, and white supremacy turned toward conservative ends.
The repurposing of Jacksonian Democracy as “the great cause of conservative Democracy”27 constitutes a homegrown American conservatism. Historians usually locate antebellum conservatism among Federalists, Whigs, and slavery’s apologists, who, despite their differences, idealized a hierarchical and organic society over
democracy, individualism, natural rights, and modern notions of indelible racial difference.28 Starved of sources of conservative legitimacy, such as a feudal past, landed aristocracy, established church, or deferential society, philosophical conservatism in the European vein struggled to take root in America’s liberal democratic political culture.29 The germ of an indigenous American conservatism, amenable to modern liberal democracy, is not to be found in the invasive Burkeanism of traditional conservatives skeptical of self-government but among Jacksonian Democrats, who began with the tenets of egalitarian democracy and individualism and nudged them in a conservative direction.
In 1815 James Buchanan, still a callow Federalist youth, had arraigned Democrats as “enemies of social order” and espousers of “wild and visionary theories.”30 Almost forty years later, as that party’s presidential nominee, he hailed the Democracy as “the only true conservative party of the Country.”31 That the stodgy James Buchanan became the standard-bearer of Jackson’s rough-andtumble party shows the extent to which the Democracy had assumed a conservative posture by the 1850s. After decades of partisan brawling, Democrats had realized their wild and visionary theories in the brittle concreteness of the white man’s republic. Styling themselves conservatives in their quest to preserve this republic, they remained wedded to potentially radical doctrines. White men’s democratic self-governance was a novel proposition for safeguarding a regime of racial and gender privilege. The disastrous results of relying on local democracy to defuse questions of slavery and race would eventually vindicate the young Buchanan’s distrust of Democrats as guarantors of social order.
In the long run, however, Democrats transformed American conservatism, giving it the buoyancy to carry it into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. To perpetuate the gender and racial exclusivity of their republic, Democrats updated conservatism by placing it on a uniquely American foundation of local, egalitarian democracy and liberal individualism. Somewhere between John Locke and Barry Goldwater, “liberalism” became “conservative” in the
United States, and historians have vexed themselves in pursuit of the turning point.32 In attempting to conserve white men’s democracy, Democrats laid the intellectual groundwork for modern American conservatism. They failed to preserve their happy republic, but they did start conservatism on a new, populist trajectory, one in which democracy is called upon to legitimize inequality, a distinctly American conservatism that endures in our republic today.
One
The Northern Men and Their NationalPrinciple
Jacksonian Ideology, Popular Sovereignty, and White Men’s Democracy, 1847–1854
It is better to give time for the councils of moderation to be heard.
Lewis Cass, 1846
DEMOCRATS ENTERED the last antebellum decade exultant. The Democratic Polk administration had conquered Mexico, transformed the United States into a continental republic, and implemented decisive economic reforms. By 1849, despite decades of Federalist and Whig obstruction, the party of Jefferson and Jackson had given the American people a political culture sanctifying mass democracy for equal white men, a political economy sundering the national state from the market, and a foreign policy rejecting colonization in favor of conquest, accession, and assimilation into an eclectic federal system. Altogether it was a regime facilitating the unimpeded spread of a white man’s republic across space and through time. The victorious Democracy thrilled over its happy republic and looked forward to an era of consolidation under its uncontested stewardship.
Yet new challenges to Jacksonian hegemony arose between the end of the Mexican War and the start of the Civil War. Disputes over slavery in the new national domain imperiled the white man’s republic at the moment of its continent-wide consummation. Historians chronicling these events tell a story of ideological antipodes, with the South clamoring for slavery’s expansion and the North demanding its proscription. The Democratic Party’s compromise solution of “popular sovereignty,” which allowed
territorial settlers to determine the status of slavery themselves, is often dismissed as a disingenuous bid for southern support by northern “Doughfaces,” those “northern men with southern principles.” By countenancing the democratically sanctioned spread of both free labor and enslaved labor, Democrats in fact drew from their ideological heritage to articulate a national and conservative response to antislavery “agitation” and related “fanatical” reformism. Inspired by the Jacksonian preference for local self-government under a minimalist state, Democrats proposed that territorial settlers democratically decide the fate of African Americans—the ultimate demonstration of white men’s political power. The Democrats who introduced popular sovereignty in the late 1840s turned the radical tenets of Jacksonian Democracy toward the conservation of racial order.
Jacksonian Overture
Democrats considered themselves the nation’s natural majority party. “The Democratic has been the dominant and ruling party ever since the formation of the general government,” boasted an Alabamian in the 1850s, concluding, “the principles of that party prevailed and now obtain in the country.” James Shields, an Irish-born Illinoisan who donned a general’s uniform in the Mexican War, similarly gloated in 1852 that “for the last fifty years the history of the democratic party is the political history of this country.” Given this ascendancy, a Tennessee Democrat suggested that the people investigate competing parties, in order “to satisfy themselves what party it is upon the administration of whose principles the country has attained its gigantic proportions and unequalled prosperity.”1 Such an inquiry reveals that Jacksonian principles, forged in battles with Whigs during the second party system, conditioned Democrats’ reactions to new challenges in the 1850s. Andrew Jackson had primed his party to be wary of any source of power antagonistic to its rightful wielders—the sovereign people. The Old Hero warned
that despotic monopolies, whether in the guise of the state, a national bank, or abolitionist fanaticism, usurped white men’s democratic power and eroded their equality. Democrats in the interbellum period transferred their animus from the Whiggish Money Power to a new tyranny—fanatical reformers who craved centralized state power to inflict moral reforms on otherwise autonomous white men. Democrats responded to this foe as Jackson had taught them.
Claiming to be a party of principles, Democrats publicized their beliefs at every opportunity. “When I see the measures which are in contest, and the distinctive principles upon which they are based,” James Bayard of Delaware asserted, “I know where to place myself.” His self-assurance contrasted with “that class of politicians who bellow about democratic principles, without attempting to define them, and who consider party as a mere union of men to secure power of office.”2 Partisans like Bayard offered up their “Democracy” for inspection when standing for election or grubbing after patronage. A Democrat vying for a postmaster appointment bore the recommendation that “he is undoubtedly qualified & his democracy I believe is undoubted.”3 James Buchanan found Irish Americans immune to Whig electioneering; they were “hard to be blarneyed themselves, especially out of their Democracy.” Henry A. Wise of Virginia began and ended his antebellum political career as a Democrat. Accounting for the “wayward political predilections” that diverted him to Whiggery in the interim, he claimed fidelity to the Democracy’s principles, if not to the party. Having returned to the fold, Wise explained his consistent beliefs in 1846: “That is my democracy, contradistinguished on the one hand from the Exclusive principles which would erect an eminence high enough for a few only & which would kick all others down; and from the mob principles on the other hand which would kick & keep all down.”4
Like Wise, Democrats of all ranks willingly submitted to political catechesis. Angling for political advancement while an officer in Mr. Polk’s army of occupation in Mexico City, General William J. Worth
Another random document with no related content on Scribd:
place where the chest had stood, in Koku’s room, and outside the building.
“It sure is,” agreed the young inventor. “All my plans for the trainstopping device were in that chest. Now they’re gone, and I have no duplicates!”
“And your tidal engine, too,” suggested Ned.
“Yes,” sighed Tom. “I guess my dream of harnessing the ocean will not be realized for some time. Of course I may be able to work out the ideas in some other way, but it means a big loss. And there are other papers, too. There were dad’s designs of the gyroscope flier, and——”
“What’s that about my gyroscope flier?” asked Mr. Swift, at that moment entering the place. “I’ve come for those plans now, Tom. I have just thought of a new idea in connection with the engine.”
“I’m afraid you can’t have the plans, Dad,” returned the son. “They’re gone! The whole chest of secrets has been stolen!”
Tom had been debating in his mind whether or not to tell his father the bad news, fearing the effect it might have on the elderly man’s heart. But Barton Swift was no weakling. Like a charger sniffing the powder of battle from afar, he drew himself up and together at the same time crying:
“So our enemies are at some of their old tricks, are they, Tom? Well, don’t let them see that we mind! Don’t show the white feather. We’ll fight ’em, Tom! We’ll fight ’em!”
“That’s the talk!” cried Ned, while Tom was much delighted to note that his father took the blow standing up.
“I can reconstruct those gyroscope plans!” cried the old man. “I remember most of them, though it will set me back very much to have them taken. Of course it’s a big loss, Tom. The whole chestful gone! How did it happen?”
He was told, and then he confirmed Tom’s first idea that he had heard nothing during the night to indicate an attack on the shop.
“I done t’ink I heard somethin’,” Eradicate said when they asked him about the matter. “It was a sort of hootin’, hollerin’ sound. But I figgered it was an owl bird, an’ I went to sleep again!”
“That was probably Koku shouting at the robbers,” decided Tom. “He’s either still after them or they’ve done for him.”
“Koku gone?” cried Rad, and when told him that the giant was missing the colored man forgot all his petty animosity against the big fellow and expressed only sympathy. “I’s gwine to find him!” declared Eradicate. “I go look for him!”
Tom did not pay much attention to his colored helper, since there were other matters that needed his attention. The net result of the searching on the part of his men was nothing. There were no clews that could be followed. Reconstructing the crime, it was thought that the gang of men had gained entrance by means of a false key. Then, being unable to open the chest because of the special locks on it, they had carried it away.
Surprised at this by Koku, they must have silenced the giant in some manner and have carried him off while he was unconscious. Doubtless an auto was used, though so many of these came and went at the Swift office that the tire marks of no special one could be picked out.
“All that remains is for us to make a search,” suggested Tom. “And we have this much to go on—that I suspect my chest was stolen by the same men, or some representing them, whose offer I turned down when Mr. Damon made it on behalf of Mr. Blythe.”
“Then why not have Mr. Damon over here,” suggested Mr. Swift. “He may be able to give us some clews as to these scoundrels.”
“I’ll do it!” cried Tom, and he sent an airship for Wakefield Damon at once.
“Bless my fire insurance policy, Tom Swift, but this is a terrible affair!” cried the odd man when he entered the office a little later. “I wouldn’t have had it happen for a million dollars! Bless my check book if I would! And it’s all my fault.”
“How do you make that out?” asked Tom, with a smile.
“I was foolish enough to bring you that offer from Mr. Blythe, though I took it in good faith, and never knew he was such a scoundrel! To think of his kidnapping Koku and taking your chest.”
“Blythe didn’t do it!” exclaimed Tom. “Nor did he have anything to do with it! Blythe isn’t that kind of a man. I know that from my oilgusher dealings with him. Doubtless he has been deceived by these men as I was deceived by Barsky. And I think if we could get hold of Barsky we’d have the key that would unlock this whole puzzle. Why
we sent for you, Mr Damon, is to ask if you could give us any clews as to the men associated with Blythe.”
“I think I can,” was the answer. “Oh, Tom Swift, to think that such a thing could happen! Bless my overshoes! it’s enough to make a man a misanthrope all the rest of his life.”
By dint of further questioning Tom and Ned gleaned certain facts from Mr. Damon, and these were a little later communicated to Mr. Plum, the lawyer, with instructions to set certain confidential investigators at work in distant cities.
“Do you think, Mr Plum, that this robbery here had any connection with the theft of the Liberty Bonds of which my father is accused?” asked Ned.
“I don’t know,” was the answer. “It’s possible. There’s no obvious connection, but I’ll check up on the matter and let you know.”
With this Tom and Ned had to be content for the time being. After all the information possible had been collected, the foremen went back to their shops and work was resumed. Mr. Swift at once began to redraw his gyroscope plans, and Tom, sick at heart over his big loss, late in the afternoon spoke to Ned about the advisability of going for a ride across country.
“We might get a trace of Koku or the robbers in that way,” Tom said.
“Good idea,” commented Ned. “It will be something to be on the move. Nothing is worse than sitting still waiting for news. Come on.”
As they were about to start in the electric runabout, Eradicate, who had disappeared soon after the discovery of the robbery, came hurrying to the garage.
“Massa Tom! Massa Tom!” cried the colored man, much excited. “I’s done found ’im!”
“Found them? You mean Koku and my chest of secrets?” shouted the young inventor.
“No, I didn’t find de chest, but I found Koku! I found dat big giant!”
“Is he—is he dead?” faltered Tom.
“No, Massa Tom. Dat giant’s off in de woods tied to a tree! I couldn’t loose de ropes or I’d a set him free. Dat’s why I came back fo’ you all. But I done found Koku!”
CHAPTER XX
MANY STRANGE CLEWS
“C on, Rad! Hop in! Show us where Koku is and we’ll soon have him loose!” cried Tom, as he motioned to the rear of the runabout, for he and Ned were seated in front.
“How is Koku taking being tied up?” asked Ned while the colored man climbed in as quickly as his rheumatic joints would allow “Is Koku mad?”
“Mad? He done froth at de mouth!” cried the old servant. “By golly, I wouldn’t like to be de one whut done tied him up after he gits free!”
“Koku would be one of the best fellows in the world to take along on the search for the robbers, Tom,” suggested Ned. “He’ll be so angry he can easily handle half a dozen with one hand—if there should prove to be that many in the gang.”
“Shouldn’t wonder but what there are more than that in the plot,” agreed Tom. “It’s a queer game! But come on. We must help Koku. Where is he, Rad?”
“Over by Lake Carlopa—dat place where you and me used to go fishin’.”
“You mean Chestnut Point?”
“Dat’s de place, Massa Tom.”
“A lonely region,” remarked the young inventor, as he started the runabout. “They couldn’t have picked out a better—or rather, a worse —place to leave poor Koku. How’d you happen to think of looking there, Rad?”
“Well, Massa Tom, I t’ought maybe Koku might go there of his own se’f. Onct I kotched a big fish there, an’ I was tellin’ him ’bout it. He always said he could kotch a bigger fish’n whut I did. So I t’ought maybe he was tryin’ to beat me, an’ maybe de robbers didn’t tuk him after all. So I looked an’ I done see him tied to a tree!”
The run to Chestnut Point did not take long, and, following the directions of Eradicate, Tom guided his machine along a lonely road. They had traversed this a short distance when Ned cried: “Hark!”
“What did you think you heard?” asked Tom, shutting off the motor to render the machine silent.
“Some one calling,” answered Ned. “Listen!”
A loud voice was borne to their ears by the wind, and Tom had no sooner heard it than he cried:
“That’s Koku! And he sure is mad!”
The giant was like an enraged bull, but so securely was he bound to a tree with many strong ropes and straps that even his great strength was of no avail, especially as he was so cunningly bound that he was unable to exert his full strength.
“Good you come, Master Tom,” grunted Koku, as he saw his friends approaching in a run. “You friend of mine from now on, Rad— you bring help to me.”
“Cou’se I’s you’ friend,” chuckled Eradicate. “De only time when we has any disputations is when you tries to take my place wif Massa Tom.”
It was the work of some time for Ned and Tom, even with their sharp knives, to cut the straps and the ropes, the knots of which had proved too hard for the colored man to loosen. Then, working his great arms and striding up and down amid the trees to restore his stagnant circulation, the giant cried:
“Where are ’um? Where are ’um mans that tied me? Once I git ’um—I mince pie ’um!”
“Guess he’s heard the expression ‘make mince meat of them,’ ” remarked Ned to Tom.
“Very likely. But I’ve got to get him quieted down so I can question him. He will be the best one to give us clews by which we may trace these fellows.”
Accordingly Tom talked to his giant helper and finally got an account of what had happened. Tom could do more with Koku and understand his peculiar English better than any one else. Also Tom knew something of the giant’s own language.
Gradually a coherent story emerged. Koku had been left on guard the previous night in Tom’s private office building, following the attack on the young inventor. The early part of the evening had passed without anything to disturb the giant’s sleep. Later, however, the alarm bell over his bed rang. Tom had not trusted altogether to
his giant remaining awake when on guard, and, as old readers know, the whole place was wired in burglar alarm fashion.
So that, even though the door was opened with a skeleton key, as was proved later to have been done, the swinging of the portal set off one signal, the wire to which had remained intact, and Koku awakened.
He had been awakened some months before by the alarm bell, but that time it was Tom himself who entered the place late at night to make notes on a certain plan before he should forget the idea that occurred to him. Tom forgot about the burglar alarm, and set it off, bringing Koku running with a gun in his hands.
Of course Tom laughed at the incident, but Koku now remembered this, and, thinking it might be another false alarm, he did not at once rush to the floor below, but proceeded cautiously. If the intruder should prove to be some one with a right to enter, Koku would go back to bed again.
Going down softly, and looking in the room where the big oak box was kept, the giant saw several strange men trying to force the locks. This being beyond them, one of the men had cried, as Koku understood it:
“Let’s take the whole shooting match along! The Blue Bird will carry it and we can open it in the woods.”
So they had picked up Tom Swift’s chest of secrets and carried it out of the office. Even then Koku did not give the alarm, for his brain did not work as fast as the brain of an ordinary person. Then, too, the giant thought he had plenty of time, and could, when he got ready, sweep the robbers off their feet and take the chest away from them.
But he delayed too long. Following the men—there were eight of them, he counted on his fingers—Koku went out of the office building into the darkness. The men carried the chest to a large automobile that was waiting in the road, the motor running and the lights off. Then, just as they loaded it in and Koku was about to spring on them, the men discovered his presence and jumped on the giant before he could get into action.
Even a little man will have the advantage of a much larger and more powerful fellow if the little man gets started first, and this was
what happened in the case of Koku. Besides, there were eight of the robbers, and though under some circumstances Koku might have been able to fight eight, or even ten men, taken as he was by surprise, he was knocked down.
He struggled, but the men threw “something into his face” that stung and made him “feel funny” and he was gagged, bound and lifted into the auto, though his weight made the men “grunt like pigs,” as the giant expressed it.
So the thing happened, and Koku, helpless, a little stunned, and silent, was driven off in the night, no struggle at all having taken place in the office.
Where he was taken the giant did not know in the darkness. But after a while he was lifted out of the car and tied to the tree where Eradicate found him.
“But what became of the robbers and Tom’s chest?” asked Ned.
“ ’Um robbers go off in Blue Bird with chest of secrets,” answered the giant.
“What does he mean—Blue Bird?” asked the manager.
“It’s a big aeroplane painted blue,” explained Tom. “The men had it hidden in a cove on the lake. It must be a hydroplane, though possibly it’s a combination of both types of machine. Koku had a glimpse of it because the robbers used pocket flashlights. They put the chest in the blue aeroplane and soared off with it. Koku said he could hear the throb of the motors for a long time after they were gone.”
“What’s the next thing to be done?” asked Ned. “We can’t do anything here, and it’s getting late. Did Koku see any of the faces of these fellows?”
“They all wore masks,” Tom said. “Yes, Koku, what is it?” the young inventor asked, for he noticed that his giant wanted to tell him something in addition.
Followed then more of the queer, jumbled talk of the big man, who, now and then, used some of his own words, which Tom alone could translate. Then came silence.
“He says,” interpreted Tom, “that one of the men walked with a slight limp and had a queer habit of throwing his left elbow out from his side.”
“Limping! Throwing out his elbow!” excitedly cried Ned. “Does that mean anything to you?” asked Tom. “Does it? I should say it does. Why, that’s the very thing Renwick Fawn does!”
“Renwick Fawn!” exclaimed Tom. “You mean——”
“The man who accused my father of taking the Liberty Bonds!” fairly shouted Ned. “I always thought that fellow was a crook, and now I know it. Tom, he’s in with the scoundrels that robbed you!”
“Maybe,” assented the young inventor. “I wouldn’t put it past him, since I’ve had a look at his face. But if this is the case, we have several clews to work on now, Ned. The limping man with the queer elbow action, the blue aeroplane, and some other things that Koku told me. Let’s go back and get busy!”
CHAPTER XXI
SCOUTING AROUND
F well satisfied that he had secured some clews that would be of value to him, Tom Swift hurried home with Ned, Koku and Eradicate in the electric runabout. On the way the giant recovered somewhat from the rough treatment accorded him by the robbers, and talked of what he would do to them when he caught them.
“You must be hungry,” suggested Ned, as they neared Shopton. For Koku had been taken away the previous midnight and evening was now coming on again.
“Me eat ten loaves of bread!” cried the giant, opening wide his enormous mouth.
“We’ll give you something else, too!” chuckled Tom. “But I know poor Mrs. Baggert will almost faint when she sees you begin to eat.”
The giant’s appetite was always a source of wonder to the housekeeper, and now, starved as he was by his enforced fast, it might reasonably be expected that he would clean out the pantry. Tom had the foresight to stop and telephone word to Mrs. Baggert of the situation, so she sent out and got in plenty of food before the wayfarers returned. Thus was Koku provided for.
“Well, Ned, let’s get together and talk this thing over,” suggested Tom to his manager, leaving the giant still eating, long after the others had finished. Eradicate, true to his promise to be friends with the big man, remained to help serve him.
“Yes,” agreed Ned, “we had better make some plan to work on. But this discovery that Renwick Fawn is in the plot rather surprises me.”
“I must see if Mr. Damon knows anything about him in this connection. He may have heard Blythe speak of him.”
Mr. Damon was communicated with over the telephone, and after several queer “blessings” announced that, as far as he knew, Fawn was a stranger to Mr. Blythe.
“He doesn’t know anything of Blodgett either,” Tom told Ned, recalling the conversation Mary had overheard in the restaurant.
“Then we’ll have to tackle Fawn on our own account,” said Ned. “I know where he lives. Shall we go to his house and ask for him?”
“What shall we say to him if he’s at home?” Tom wanted to know. Ned thought for a moment and replied:
“We can ask him, for a starter, if he has recovered any of the Liberty Bonds he says my father took. Then, after that opening, you can mention the theft of your box and ask if Fawn thinks there is any connection between the two.”
“Then what?” Tom inquired.
“Well, if things turn out the way we expect—I mean if this Fawn has really had a part in the robbery at your place—he’ll get confused and maybe give himself away. That’s our one hope—that he will give himself away.”
“It’s worth trying,” decided Tom, after a little consideration. “Come on.”
A little later in the evening the two young men set off in a small gasoline car to call at the home of the suspected man. Ned had had occasion to go there before some time since, months prior to the accusation against Mr. Newton.
But it was with some feelings of apprehension and with wonderings as to what they had best say to the man when he saw them that Ned and Tom walked up the steps of the Fawn home.
A maid answered the door, and when they said they had called to see Mr. Fawn she remarked:
“I think Mr. Fawn is not at home, but Mrs. Fawn is. Please come in and I will tell her you are here.”
Mrs. Fawn, a small, pale, unimpressive woman, came timidly into the room where the boys waited.
“You wanted to see my husband?” she asked, and Tom jumped at once to the conclusion (in which Ned later joined) that she knew nothing of the man’s peculiar activities. Their feeling that he was a brute and a bully toward her was afterward borne out by facts.
“We have some business to transact with Mr Fawn,” stated Ned. “But the maid said he wasn’t at home.”
“No, he isn’t,” answered Mrs. Fawn, and the boys did not doubt her. “He has gone to Chicago on business. At least I think it is
Chicago,” she added. “He goes to so many places I sometimes forget. But I know it was out West.”
“Well, if he’s that far off, I guess we can’t see him to-night,” returned Tom with a smile as he arose to go. “When did he leave town?”
“The day before yesterday,” answered Mrs. Fawn.
Ned had not given his name, and though Tom had mentioned his, he did not believe Mrs. Fawn knew enough of her husband’s business to connect her callers with the bond accusation against Mr. Newton.
But the two young men glanced sharply at each other when Mrs. Fawn spoke of her husband having gone to Chicago two days previous. If that was the case he could hardly have been engaged in the theft of Tom’s strong box.
“Do you want to leave any word for Mr. Fawn when he returns?” asked his wife.
“Thank you, no,” answered Tom. “It wasn’t important. We’ll see him when he gets back.”
When they were outside Ned asked:
“Well, what do you think now, Tom?”
“I don’t know what to think. Koku is pretty sharp. When he says he saw a thing you can make up your mind that he did. Of course it’s possible there may be two men who limp and throw out their left elbows, you know.”
“It’s possible, but not very probable,” answered the young manager. “I believe Fawn is guilty, but his wife may not, and very likely doesn’t, know anything about it. She’s a meek little lady.”
“Yes, indeed,” agreed Tom. “Well, we’re stuck for the time being. However, to-morrow is another day. Something may turn up then. Anyhow, even if it doesn’t, I’m going to start out.”
“Start out where?” Ned wanted to know.
“To look for that blue aero-hydroplane. I’m going to scout around in the Blackbird and see if I can’t get on the trail of the fellows who have my chest of secrets.”
“I’d like to go with you.”
“Wouldn’t think of taking off without you, old scout!” cried Tom.
He guided the car down the street and out on a wide avenue, going along at a steady pace and with such an evident object in view that Ned asked:
“Where are you heading?”
“I thought I’d stop at the Nestors’ a minute,” answered Tom.
“Then let me out here and I’ll take a trolley home,” said Ned.
“Let you out here! What’s the idea?” cried Tom.
“Well, you’re going to call on Mary, and——”
“Forget it!” laughed Tom, clapping his chum on the back. “This is a sort of joint call, and you’re coming in. Mary isn’t fussy that way, and she always likes to see you.”
“Thanks,” murmured Ned.
The two young men were no strangers in the Nestor home, Tom especially; and soon the whole family was in conversation. Tom mentioned the fact that he and his chum had just called on Mr. Fawn but found that he had left for the West two days before.
“Left for the West!” exclaimed Mr. Nestor. “That’s queer!”
“Why so?” Tom asked.
“Because I saw him in town yesterday morning. And he couldn’t have been going to Chicago.”
“Are you sure?” inquired Ned.
“Of course. I know the man as well as I know you. He was limping along, tossing his left elbow out every now and then as he has a habit of doing.”
Ned and Tom glanced at one another. If this was the case it would explain matters. Fawn may have told his wife he was leaving for Chicago, and even have packed a bag to go. But he went to some other place and remained about Shopton long enough to take part in the robbery that night.
Mr. Nestor’s mention of the peculiar gait of the man and his habit of tossing his left elbow away from his body while walking or talking was almost positive proof that there could be no mistake.
But Tom was not yet ready to let it be known that Fawn was caught in a falsehood. There were many more points to be cleared up before the affair was on the way to be solved. So, passing the matter off as though it did not amount to much, murmuring that
possibly he had misunderstood Mrs. Fawn, Tom turned the talk into other channels.
The chums left the Nestor home near midnight, Mary expressing her indignation at the loss inflicted on Tom and asking if she could not do something to help.
“I’ll let you know if you can,” Tom told her as he pressed her hands.
For a few minutes Tom and Ned rode on in silence, each busy with his thoughts, and then Ned asked:
“Well, Tom, what do you make of it?”
“You mean about Fawn not going to Chicago at all?”
“Yes.”
“Well it means he’s a trickster surely, but more than that. He’s in the plot, of course. And I’m beginning to believe that it’s bigger than I thought. Fawn and Barsky—both in the same town, both probably working together against dad and me. It was a sorry day when I let that so-called Russian into my shop!”
“It surely was,” agreed Ned. “But it’s too late to think of that now. What is the next move? I want to get my hands on Fawn, as well as on the others.”
“We start scouting to-morrow morning!” decided the young inventor. “It oughtn’t to be hard to pick up the trail of this blue aeroplane. I had some inquiries made around Lake Carlopa, and she seems to have headed west. That, naturally, would be the best place for the robbers to go—plenty of open places to land, and with widely scattered cities and towns they wouldn’t run so much risk of being captured. We’ll start scouting in the morning.”
Accordingly the Blackbird was made ready. This craft was not as small nor as speedy as the Hummer, but she would carry three, and Tom decided to take Koku along to identify the robbers if possible.
“Good luck, Tom!” called his aged father, as he was ready to take off the next morning. “Bring back that chest!”
“I’ll do my best!” was the answer
CHAPTER XXII
A STRANGE MESSAGE
T he had no more than very slight clews on which to pursue the robbers, Tom Swift was not without a definite plan on which he proposed to operate.
As he had mentioned to Ned, he had obtained information which indicated that the big blue aeroplane, after the robbers had put the chest on board and had left Koku tied to the tree, had departed toward the west. Of course there was no guarantee that it would keep on this course, and absolutely no way of telling how long it would hold it.
“But we can stop from time to time,” said Tom to Ned, “and make inquiries about the plane. A big blue aeroplane isn’t easily hidden from sight.”
“It sounds like good dope,” agreed Ned.
Koku was no stranger to aeroplane rides, and he felt perfectly at home in the Blackbird. Indeed, as those of you remember who have read the earlier books of this series, Koku was brought from his home in a strange land by an airship. He rather liked to ride in them.
So Tom, Ned and Koku flew off on their strange quest.
Up into the air soared the Blackbird. She was a powerful machine, and, as has been said, was roomy. Really, she was built to carry four, but on account of the size of Koku a partition between two cockpits had been taken out, making a large space where he could dispose of his enormous legs and big body
Before starting on the search for his chest of secrets, Tom had caused inquiries to be made about the missing Barsky. But the man seemed to have disappeared completely after leaving Tom in the cistern.
“Though of course he might have been, and probably was, one of the gang that took the chest and bound Koku,” suggested Ned.
For several hours the trio of adventurers soared along, not going so high but what they could from time to time make observations of the earth below them through field glasses. For of course it was possible that the blue aeroplane might be on the ground.
She also might be soaring along in the air, and Tom and Ned did not neglect to scan the heavens for signs. Once they saw a plane coasting along, and gave chase. But when within good viewing distance they made out that it was one of the government mailcarriers, and they turned back on their original course.
It was near noon when Ned heard Tom give a sudden exclamation.
“See anything?” asked the young manager.
“Nothing that gives me any pleasure,” replied Tom grimly. “I see a leak in one of the oil pipes and that means we’ve got to go down and mend it. Lucky I discovered it in time!”
An aeroplane engine, or for that matter an auto motor, that does not receive copious and continuous lubrication is going to overheat, bind and stop in a surprisingly short time.
A look over the side showed Tom that they were flying across fairly open country, and, picking out a broad meadow as a suitable landing place, he, having shut off his motor, headed for it. Koku, half asleep in his enlarged cockpit, sensed that they were going down and asked:
“We catch ’um robbers?”
“Not yet, Koku,” replied Tom, with a grim laugh. “So far they are a couple of tricks ahead of us, but the game has only started.”
The Blackbird made a perfect landing under Tom’s skillful guidance, and when it had come to a stop after a run over the somewhat uneven field, Tom and Ned got out to begin work on repairing the oil pipe. Ned had some knowledge of mechanics, and could at least help his chum.
“It isn’t as bad as I thought,” Tom said, after a careful inspection. “It’s just a loose union connection, and not a break. I won’t have to solder anything, and I think I have a spare union in the tool box.”
It was while he was looking for this and while Koku was strolling about, heaving big stones for his own amusement (and possibly with the sensation that he was thus treating his enemies) that Ned called:
“Some one’s coming, Tom!”
The young inventor, who had found the union connection he was looking for, looked up and saw a farmer approaching across the field.
“Maybe he’s going to order us off,” suggested Ned. “We’re trespassers all right. Didn’t even ask his leave to drop in on him.”
“No, we didn’t have time,” grimly chuckled Tom. “But if he makes a fuss I guess a few dollars will make him see the light of reason. I’ve dealt with that kind before.”
However, the farmer, for such he proved to be, was a friendly person. He smiled at the chums, looked with amazement at Koku, who was lifting a rock that three ordinary men could not have handled, and then asked:
“Are you having trouble? Can I help you?”
“Thank you, very much,” responded Tom. “It’s only a slight defect, and I’ll have it mended in a minute or two.”
“We thought possibly you were coming to order us off,” said Ned, as he got ready to help his chum replace the broken union on the oil feed pipe.
“Oh, no,” laughed the farmer, who gave his name as Mr. Kimball. “We’re getting used to aeroplanes landing here.”
“You mean the government machines?” asked Tom. “I know this is their route.”
“Well, a mail plane was forced down in this field last year,” said Mr. Kimball. “But I didn’t mean that. Only yesterday a big blue machine had to come down about where you are.”
“A blue machine?” repeated Tom, concealing his excitement.
“Regular landing or a crash dive?” asked Ned.
“I guess they came down on purpose,” said Mr. Kimball. “They landed gently enough—no crash. It seems they ran out of water in their radiator. That’s happened to me many a time in my little Ford, so I knew just how they felt about it. I came over and showed them a spring where they could get water. Then they went on again.”
Ned and Tom looked at each other. They did not want to tell too much of their plans, yet they must make inquiries and get information. Koku was still doing his “daily dozen” with the big rocks.
“How many men were in this blue machine?” asked Tom.
“Oh, four or five, I should say. Maybe half a dozen. It was the biggest aeroplane I’ve ever seen. But then they look a lot bigger on the ground than when they’re up in the air.”
“It must have been a pretty good-sized plane to carry four or five men,” observed Ned. “Did you notice any of the passengers? Did one of them walk with a limp?”
“Why, yes, come to think of it, one of them did seem a bit lame,” replied Mr. Kimball. “And he had a queer habit of jerking his elbow out like this,” and the farmer illustrated.
“Was it his right elbow?” asked Tom, emphasizing the word that indicated the dexter hand.
“No—let me see now—no, it was his left. Why? Do you know him?”
“Yes,” answered Ned, with a queer look at Tom. “We know him.”
“I suppose they’re friends of yours, both of you being in the airship business, so to speak,” went on Mr. Kimball.
Neither of the young men answered that, but Tom, after he had taken off the damaged union coupling, asked:
“Did you happen to notice if one of the men had red hair?”
The farmer considered for a moment, and then replied:
“No, I didn’t see any one like that.”
This was not surprising, considering that Barsky’s hair was so short that its redness could not be noticed until he took off his hat. And very likely he would be wearing a leather helmet in the aeroplane.
But Tom and Ned had established the fact that the blue aeroplane containing the robbers had passed this way recently. Tom made a cautious inquiry about the chest, but Mr. Kimball had not noticed that. And, very likely, it was stowed away in the fuselage of the craft, out of sight.
“How long did they stay?” asked Ned.
“Oh, only long enough to buy some food off me and take on water, then they soared away again.”
“Headed west?” asked Tom.
“Headed west,” answered Mr. Kimball.
The farmer remained, an interested observer, while Tom and Ned made the slight repairs needed. When they had finished and were about to go on, Mr. Kimball, with a glance toward the giant, asked:
“Is he yours?”
“Yes, in a way,” replied Tom. “Why?”
“Um! I only want to say if you ever want to get rid of him I’d like to hire him. What a hired man he’d make! My, the chores he could do without getting tired! He’d be worth three ordinary hired men—and they’re so hard to get now. But I don’t suppose you want to let him go?”
“No,” answered Tom, with a laugh and a glance at Koku, who, to amuse himself, was tossing up great rocks and catching them in his bare hands.
“Well, I don’t know as I blame you,” said Mr. Kimball.
Having made repairs and gotten some unexpected and valuable information, Tom and Ned called to the giant, took their places in the machine again, and, after Koku had spun the propeller, once more were off.
All that day they traveled, Tom and his chum keeping a lookout for the blue machine, but not seeing it. The young inventor had so laid his plans that before it got too dark he descended in a broad field on the outskirts of a big city. As the aeroplane was large enough to permit of sleeping in it and as Tom had brought along blankets, they decided to spend the night in the Blackbird.
It was the next morning about nine o’clock, and just about the time Tom and Ned were taking off again on the second day of their trip, that Mr. Swift was summoned to the telephone in his office.
“Dey’s somebody dat wants to talk to you ’ticklar like,” reported Eradicate.
“Perhaps it’s a message from Tom!” exclaimed Mr. Swift. “He may have caught the robbers and gotten back his chest.”
“No, sah, it don’t sound like Massa Tom,” said the colored man.
The voice to which the aged inventor listened was not that of his son. Instead, over the wire came strange tones asking:
“How much will you pay us for the return of your chest of secrets?”
Mr. Swift was so surprised that he almost dropped the receiver.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE BLUE MACHINE
B S was the true father of his energetic son, and Tom inherited his qualities from his father. Which is to say that in his youth Barton Swift had been fully as active and quick as was now the young inventor.
Though age and illness had to some extent dimmed and enfeebled the powers of the man, still it needed but this spark—that strange telephone message—to galvanize him into action. After the first shock of hearing so unexpectedly about the stolen chest of secrets, Mr. Swift was ready to take active measures to trace the voice coming out of the machine.
“What’s that you say?” he asked, nerving himself to carry on an ordinary conversation about a most extraordinary topic. “Who are you and where are you?”
“Don’t you wish you knew?” came back the challenging inquiry “Are you ready to talk business?”
“Of course I am,” answered Mr. Swift. “We want that chest back, and we’ll pay any reasonable amount.”
“I’m not saying the amount will be reasonable,” was the reply, and emphasis was laid on the last word. “But you’ll pay our price or you don’t get the chest. And I warn you that if you try to communicate with the police or set the detectives on our trail we’ll immediately break off negotiations.”
Trying to get in touch with the police was just what Mr Swift was then doing. Ned Newton’s father had entered the office, and, seeing him, Mr. Swift at once took pencil and paper from his desk and while he talked in a rather general way with his unseen listener, he jotted down a few words, explaining matters and suggesting that Mr. Newton go to another telephone to learn from the central operator where the mysterious call was coming from.
There were several trunk telephone lines running into the Swift office, so it was a comparatively easy matter for Mr. Newton to go to another instrument to get the information needed.
Meanwhile Mr Swift was holding the other man in conversation. Having started Mr. Newton to ferreting out some information, the aged inventor asked:
“How much do you want to return the chest and how can I get in touch with you?”
“If you will take fifty thousand dollars in unmarked bills, make a bundle of them and bring them——”
But at that moment the criminal either heard something—perhaps the movements of Mr. Newton—or he suspected something, for he sharply broke off what he was saying and cried:
“It’s all off! You’re trying to double cross me! Now you’ll never get your chest back!”
There was a click which told that the distant receiver was hung up, and then the line went dead.
“Wait a minute! Wait just a moment! I want to talk business with you!” cried Mr. Swift, rapidly moving the hook of the receiver up and down.
But it was too late. Only silence ensued until finally the operator, attracted by the flashing light which resulted when Mr. Swift moved the hook, asked:
“Number, please?”
“I was talking to some one, but I was cut off,” said the inventor. “Can you get them back for me? It’s important.”
“What number were you talking to?” the girl asked.
“That’s just what I want to know,” said Tom’s father.
“I’m sorry, but if you don’t know the number I can’t ring it for you.”
Mr. Swift knew only too well that this was the case. It was not the girl’s fault—it was the fault of the system, and not so much the fault as the limitation.
“If I had only had Tom’s photo-telephone attachment hitched on here I could have seen who it was I was talking with,” lamented Mr. Swift. “How about it, Mr. Newton, did you succeed in getting any information?” he asked, as the latter came away from the second instrument.
“The manager said he would try to trace the call for you,” was the reply. “But I didn’t have much time. Whoever it was got suspicious too quickly.”
