Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 | Page 8

population. Johnson spoke with ill-disguised hatred of "an
inflated and heartless landed aristocracy," not applying the phrase
especially to the South, but making an argument which tended to sow
dissension in that section. He declared that "the withholding of the use
of the soil from the actual cultivator is violative of the principles
essential to human existence," and that when "the violation reaches that
point where it can no longer be borne, revolution begins." His argument
startlingly outlined a condition such as has long existed in Ireland, and
applied it with suggestive force to the possible fate of the South.
He then sketched his own ideal of a rural population, an ideal obviously
based on free labor and free institutions. "You make a settler on the
domain," said he, "a better citizen of the community. He becomes
better qualified to discharge the duties of a freeman. He is, in fact, the
representative of his own homestead, and is a man in the enlarged and
proper sense of the term. He comes to the ballot-box and votes without
the fear or the restraint of some landlord. After the hurry and bustle of
election day are over, he mounts his own horse, returns to his own
domicil, goes to his own barn, feeds his own stock. His wife turns out
and milks their own cows, churns their own butter; and when the rural
repast is ready, he and his wife and their children sit down at the same
table together to enjoy the sweet product of their own hands, with
hearts thankful to God for having cast their lots in this country where
the land is made free under the protecting and fostering care of a
beneficent Government."
The picture thus presented by Johnson was not the picture of a home in
the slave States, and no one knew better than he that it was a home
which could not be developed and established amid the surroundings
and the influences of slavery. It was a home in the North-West, and not
in the South-West. Proceeding in his speech Johnson became still more
warmly enamored of his hero on the homestead, and with a tongue that
seemed touched with the gift of prophecy he painted him in the

possible career of a not distant future. "It has long been near my heart,"
said he in the House of Representatives in July, 1850, "to see every
man in the United States domiciled. Once accomplished, it would
create the strongest tie between the citizen and the Government; what a
great incentive it would afford to the citizen to obey every call of duty!
At the first summons of the note of war you would find him leaving his
plow in the half-finished furrow, taking his only horse and converting
him into a war-steed: his scythe and sickle would be thrown aside, and
with a heart full of valor and patriotism he would rush with alacrity to
the standard of his country."
Such appeals for popular support subjected Johnson to the imputation
of demagogism, and earned for him the growing hatred of that
dangerous class of men in the South who placed the safety of the
institution of slavery above the interest and the welfare of the white
laborer. But if he was a demagogue, he was always a brave one. In his
early political life, when the mere nod of President Jackson was an
edict in Tennessee, Johnson did not hesitate to espouse the cause of
Hugh L. White when he was a candidate for the Presidency in 1836,
nor did he fear to ally himself with John Bell in the famous controversy
with Jackson's protégé, James K. Polk, in the fierce political struggle of
1834-5. Though he returned to the ranks of the regular Democracy in
the contest between Harrison and Van Buren, he was bold enough in
1842 to propose in the Legislature of Tennessee that the apportionment
of political power should be made upon the basis of the white
population of the State. He saw and keenly felt that a few white men in
the cotton section of the State, owning many slaves, were usurping the
power and trampling upon the rights of his own constituency, among
whom slaves were few in number and white men numerous. Those who
are familiar with the savage intolerance which prevailed among the
slave-holders can justly measure the degree of moral and physical
courage required in any man who would assail their power at a vital
point in the framework of a government specially and skilfully devised
for their protection.
In all the threats of disunion, in all the plotting and planning for
secession which absorbed Southern thought and action between the

years 1854 and 1861, Mr. Johnson took no part. He had been absent
from Congress during