The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [172]
Whenever Roosevelt, in the course of tracing Benton’s thirty years in Congress, comes upon one of his own bêtes noires, the text fairly crackles with verbal fireworks. Some of these pop-pop harmlessly, as when he castigates President Jefferson as a “scholarly, timid, and shifty doctrinaire,” and President Tyler as “a politician of monumental littleness.” Others, however, are (or were) genuinely explosive, for example his assertion that “there is no more ‘natural right’ why a man over twenty-one should vote than there is why a negro woman under eighteen should not.”62
The most controversial chapter of the book is that devoted to Benton’s doctrine of westward expansion, which Roosevelt defines as “our manifest destiny to swallow up the land of all adjoining nations who were too weak to withstand us.”63 The “Oregon” of the 1840s—an enormous wilderness stretching west from the Rockies, and north from California to Alaska—was a prize that both the United States and Britain were entitled to share. But the “arrogant attitude” of Senator Benton, in claiming most of it, “was more than justified by the destiny of the great Republic; and it would have been well for all America if we had insisted even more than we did upon the extension northward of our boundaries.” Warming to his theme, Roosevelt declares that “Columbia, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba would, as States of the American Union, hold positions incomparably more important, grander and more dignified than … as provincial dependencies of a foreign power … No foot of soil to which we had any title in the Northwest should have been given up; we were the people who could use it best, and we ought to have taken it all.”64
Roosevelt acknowledged, with an almost audible sigh, that the concept of an American Pacifica stretching from Baja California to the Bering Straits was academic in 1886. But this did not detract from Benton’s visionary greatness. In attempting to summarize it, the twenty-seven-year-old author became something of a visionary too. He could have been writing about himself, as future President of the United States, rather than the long-dead Senator from Missouri:
Many of his expressions, when talking of the greatness of our country … not only were grandiloquent in manner, but also seemed exaggerated and overwrought even as regards matter. But when we think of the interests for which he contended, as they were to become, and not as they at the moment were, the appearance of exaggeration is lost, and the intense feeling of his speeches no longer seems out of place or disproportionate … While sometimes prone to attribute to his country a greatness she was not to possess for two or three generations to come, he, nevertheless, had engrained in his very marrow and fiber the knowledge that inevitably and beyond all doubt, the coming years were to be hers. He knew that, while other nations held the past, and shared with his own the present, yet that to her belonged the still formless and unshaped future. More clearly than almost any other statesman he beheld the grandeur of the nation loom up, vast and shadowy, through the advancing years.65
ROOSEVELT PENNED THE LAST pages of Benton at Elkhorn between 29 June and 2 July 1886. He rose every day at dawn, and would stand for a moment or two on the piazza, watching the sun rise through a filter of glossy cottonwood leaves.66 Then he sat down at his desk, writing as fast as he could while the morning was still cool.67 By noon the log-cabin was too stuffy to bear, for a crippling heat-wave had struck Dakota. The grass outside, weakened by the late frosts of spring, turned prematurely brown. Mrs. Sewall’s vegetable garden began to wilt, despite frantic watering. On 4 July the temperature reached 125 degrees Fahrenheit, and an oven-like wind blew through the Badlands, killing every green thing except for a few riverside