Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 | Page 8

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 the exciting period when the Missouri Compromise was overthrown; and though, after his return in 1857, he co-operated generally in the measures deemed essential for Southern interests, he steadily declared that a consistent adherence to the Constitution was the one and the only remedy for all the alleged grievances of the slave-holders. It was natural therefore, that when the decisive hour came, and the rash men of the South determined to break up the Government, Johnson