The first impression he made on me was that of a country schoolmaster,
or of a professor, on his good behavior, who had got his notions of the
polite world from Chesterfield; though, when I knew him better, and
learned that he had been a tutor in the Alston family of South Carolina,
I detected the original type of his perpendicularity, serious composure,
and stateliness,--the archetype. I was constantly reminded of John C.
Calhoun, a fellow-student with him at Yale, and a man he always
mentioned, with a strange mixture of admiration and awe, as if he
thought him an offshoot from the Archfiend himself, "skilled to make the
worse appear the better reason." His tall figure, his erect, positive
bearing, and somewhat uncompromising, severe expression of countenance,
when much in earnest, with black, heavy eyebrows, clear blue eyes which
passed for black, and stiff black hair, were all of that Huguenot
Southern type, which, like the signs of the Scotch Covenanter or of the
old English Puritan, are as unlikely to die out as the Canada thistle,
where they who sow the wind are content to reap the whirlwind. In their
steadfast pertinacity, whether right or wrong, in their adamantine
logic, as unyielding as death, and calm, serious energy of action, and
in a part of their transcendental theories, they were alike; and alike,
too, in their tried honesty. The great Nullifier and the great Reformer
were both Titanic, in the vastness and comprehensiveness of their views,
in their unrelenting self-assertion, in their metaphysics, and in their
theories of government. If the dark Southron made open war upon his
country till it grew to be unsafe, the dark Northerner would tear the
Constitution of that country to tatters, and trample it under foot, as
he did upon one occasion, without remorse or compunction, because it was
held by others to give property in man, though for himself he denied
that it did so, or that it sanctioned slavery in any shape,--as he did,
I say, though I was not an eyewitness of the outrage, and have only the