WE very rarely make allusion, in the way of reply or defence, to any of the remarks of the newspaper press upon the articles appearing in the pages of this Review; indeed we do not remember to have done so before. There has of late, however, been so much misapprehension and misrepresentation, on the part of a certain class of papers, of its course and disposition in regard to the great Southern statesman above-named-imagining and imputing motives and meanings so widely at variance with the truth-that we are tempted to deviate in this instance from our usual rule and practice. The leading paper in our last number, entitled "The Abolitionists," has been termed an attack upon Mr. Calhoun, conceived in a spirit of hostility, and designed for the purpose of his exclusion from the cabinet of the new administration, and the injury of his national standing and strength. The article in question proceeded from the pen of one of that gentleman's warmest admirersa personal friend, and an earnest disciple of most of his system of political doctrine. Long before Mr. Calhoun was received with any degree of cordiality or confidence, by the Democratic press of the country, into the relation and sympathies of friendly political communion-after all the violent animosities of the old Jackson campaigns, prior to the administration of Mr. Van Buren and the Independent Treasury-the Democratic Review took a prominent lead in warmly welcoming the great and noble Southerner back into cordial fraternization, with the party alone congenial to his character and doctrine. The feel ings which then prompted this ready and spontaneous greeting, have never undergone any change; and if we have felt compelled to disapprove of a great error of judgment and propriety into which he has allowed himself to be misled, in his mode of conducting the Texas negotiation, it has been the honest difference of a friend-entertained with regret-expressed with kindness-and spoken at all only under a strong compulsion of duty, to a great national question, which could neither be shunned, nor treated otherwise than frankly and truly. Throughout the whole of this business a great wrong was done to the North, and to all the States in which Slavery does not exist, by the grounds, or rather the ground, on which the Annexation policy was rested-a great wrong to the general public sentiment of those communities, and a doubly great wrong to the Democratic Party in them, which has so long and well stood by its Southern friends and brethren, at great peril and injury to its own proper interests. So far as Mr. Calhoun was personally concerned, this consisted mainly in his unhappy discussion of the general merits of Slavery in his two letters to Mr. Pakenham and Mr. King. For Mr. Upshur's and Mr. Tyler's course before his acceptance of the Department of State, he is not responsible. Documents of this kind are emphatically national ones. The Executive is the public organ through which the Union addresses, not merely the individual functionary or government to whom the despatch may be directed, but the whole world. No other than national views, ideas, or ar guments, ought ever to be allowed a place in such documents. The peculiar ideas of a class, of a section, or of an idiosyncrasy, have no right nor business there. How much stronger this truth when these ideas are not only thus local and limited in their prevalence, but absolutely repugnant in the highest degree to some of the strongest and most deeply seated sentiments of the rest of the Union thus represented and misrepresented! This fatal error against all official propriety and national duty, no eloquence of style, no power of reasoning, can redeem. Effective as they might be in a partisan essay, for which the pages of a Review, or a controversial pamphlet, would be perfectly appropriate, yet thus unhappily misplaced and misapplied, they but serve to aggravate the evil of which the country at large is entitled to complain, and against which it owes it to itself to protest, through all its forms of public expression. If our Southern brethren do not exactly appreciate the position in which the rest of the Union has been placed by this proceeding, it may perhaps aid them to do so, if they would imagine a Northern Secretary of State possessed with the opposite fanaticism on the subject of Slavery, volunteering the discussion of the merits of that institution, on a slight pretext afforded by a letter of a foreign minister, and strongly urging, in the name of the nation, all the views of that subject which are most obnoxious to the feelings and opinions of the South. And yet that case would fall far short of the present one. In the first place, the collective South is in a relative minority in the Union of about one-third to two-thirds. In the second place, the South itself is far from unanimity on the peculiar doctrines which form the staple of the despatches in question. And in the third place, in the case suggested, there would be a certain correspondence between the views supposed to be thus presented and the general public opinion of the world; so that no national odium would be awakened against our country, mortifying to witness and painful to endure on the part of the large majority of our people. This is the error against which we have felt bound to protest in the name of the general Democracy of the Union, and of the collective Union itself. These may be Mr. Calhoun's individual favorite grounds for desiring the annexation of Texas, but we deny, on behalf of all the Free States, the truth of the character which his negotiation would fasten upon that measure. We repel all national responsibility for them, stamping them as a peculiarity of a magnificent and magnanimous, but eccentric genius— disposed to a morbid one-sidedness on this particular subject; and have no hesitation in averring, that if the general opinion of the Free States, or of the ascendant Democratic party in them, was not satisfied that this ultra Southern view of the question was totally erroneous, and that the Annexation of Texas would not produce the effects hoped and argued for by the Secretary of State as its reason and motive--it would have had no chance of adoption as a common national measure. As it is, too, the profession of these motives, on the part of one bearing Mr. Calhoun's official relation to the measure, would have inevitably had the effect of defeating it for the present, and of postponing it for the altered action of the next administration, were it not for the danger which, in the actual crisis of the question, is felt to attend upon delay. That danger consists in the interference of England. Earnest as we know the efforts of that country to be to prevent it-favorably disposed as we know the present Government of Texas to be towards the British influence in preference to American Annexationeverything is to be feared from the effect of the high pecuniary terms and commercial advantages with which England would ply Texas during the coming summer, if the "golden moment" be now lost. Much as the North is entitled to complain of the false position into which it has been thus thrown great as is the sacrifice of feeling and pride to be made to patriotism and larger views of national policy, in yielding to the South on this point-we trust that the present session of Congress will not be suffered to leave the measure unconsummated. But if we at the same time feel compelled to repudiate the grounds of Mr. Calhoun's negotiation, it is doing us a great personal injustice to impute it to any disposition in regard to him, less friendly than those we have long freely avowed and freely acted upon. MAJOR DAVEZAC. (With a Portrait on Steel.) We are right well pleased to present Domingo. He early felt so powerful the readers of the Democratic this an impulse of attraction binding him to month with the portrait which accom- the soil and destiny of this glorious panies our present Number. Probably young republic of republics-his own no man-no Democrat, we mean-has spirit so well attuned to harmony with ever listened to the impassioned flow the genius of its institutions-that he of the gallant old Major's eloquence refused to return to St. Domingo, even (it may be pronounced either gal- when a formidable army of invasion lant or gallant, at pleasure)-with- seemed to render certain its immediate out carrying away a lively feeling of and complete re-subjugation. Wealth personal sympathy, and something re- to be purchased, or even recovered, with sembling affectionate attachment for the blood and the horrors of military conwarm-hearted and enthusiastic speaker. quest, had no charm for him; and castHow many hundreds of thousands, ing aside for ever all idea of ever abantherefore, distributed over many States doning the new home he was already of the Union, will be gratified by the eager to make his country, he engaged insertion of this faithful "counterfeit in the study of medicine, at Edenton, presentment," it would not be very in North Carolina, under the direction easy to compute. Within the recent of Dr. Dickinson. Notwithstanding, great political canvass alone, he deli- however, the interest and pleasure vered at least sixty addresses, to as which he experienced in penetrating many large assemblages of the Demo- the mysteries of the animal organizacracy, in whose cause he is so ardent tion, the practice of the medical proan advocate, so valiant a champion; fession never harmonized with his while the actual number of a hundred tastes. On the acquisition of Louisiana and sixty-six invitations to address to the Union, by the wisdom of Jefferpublic meetings in not less than twenty son, he proceeded to establish himself States, attest the wide-spread celebrity at New Orleans, where he was present of his popular oratory. at the process of the transfer of that noble region of our country from the dominion of the tricolor to the benigner sway of the "star-splangled banner." On the arrival of Edward Livingston, to take up his abode in the same new home, an intimacy sprang up between them, notwithstanding some disparity of years, which was never relaxed in its closeness or its warmth during the lifetime of that eminent statesman and jurist, who, by marriage with Mr. Davezac's sister, became his brother-in-law. The counsels of Livingston, supported by some instinctive presentiment of latent oratorical power, led him to abandon the profession of medicine for the bar. The tendency of his own inclination, together with some signal successes in criminal cases, led him to direct his studies and his labors particularly to that branch of the law; and he soon had no rivals in the criminal courts of Louisiana. No client of his ever suffered the penalty of death; and when one of the judges, whose more sanguinary A very brief sketch of the skeleton of Major Davezac's life, is all that our limits permit us to give in our present Number. He was born in the island of St. Domingo, when it was a French colony, previous to the memorable massacre which attended the expulsion of the whites from the island. The child of French parents and a tropical sun, we thus have at once explained the combined vivacity of imagination and ardor of temperament which compose a large part of his character. The exact year in which he entered the world in which he was destined to make so much noise, our amiable friend has inflexibly refused to disclose, for reasons which we leave it to others to divine. He was educated in France, at the celebrated military college of La Flèche. While still very young he came to the United States, where his family had sought a refuge from the horrors which had expelled them, together with the rest of the French inhabitants, from St. disposition had been often baffled by the resistless eloquence of the brilliant young advocate, heard of his appointment to a foreign diplomatic station, he exclaimed, "Thank God! We shall now be able to do a little hanging Davezac is gone!" The recollection of some of his splendid improvisations, in cases deeply exciting his feelings, has remained ever since in the minds of his hearers, as displays of pathetic and overpowering eloquence unparalleled before, and never to be heard again. The arrival of General Jackson in New Orleans, when ordered there for the defence of that city, changed "the whole moral being" of our friend, as he has often been heard to say. "He became my destiny! I instinctively foresaw his greatness and glory. My attachment to him was a religion of the heart!" Major Davezac early acquired relations of close intimacy with General Jackson, which will only be loosened by the hand which severs with its touch all human ties. He served with him through the campaign of New Orleans, as judge-advocate of the army and volunteer aide-de-camp, in very confidential relations with the General. Every man did his duty on that occasion. Nothing more can be said, nothing more need be said, than that Davezac did his to the full content of the army and its chief. During General Jackson's candidateship for the Presidency, Major Davezac devoted the whole powers of his tongue and pen to the cause of his absorbing political faith. Undiscouraged by the failure of the first attempt-a failure produced by means whose just punishinent received its last crowning consummation in November last--he gave himself up for the period from 1824 to 28, mainly to the labors of a second apostolate in the same cause. The result is history--when the masses rose in their true majesty, and the arms of the people bore their candidate from his noble and glorious retreat at the Hermitage to the national palace. In the midst of his triumph he did not forget the most attached of his friends; and his aide-de-camp at New Orleans, become a diplomatist at Naples and at the Hague, through the midst of all the splendors of two luxurious courts, preserved the simplicity of our institutions in his life, as he did the ardent love of them in his heart. Major Davezac was recalled by Mr. Van Buren, in consequence of an error on the part of the accounting officers, which placed him in the light of a delinquent in his accounts. The result of investigation was soon, however, to turn the tables, and to exhibit Major Davezac as in truth a creditor to the Government to an amount of nearly four thousand dollars. This circumstance produced no effect on his generous temper, of awakening any hostility to Mr. Van Buren. Satisfied that it was an accidental mistake, and deeply penetrated with respect for all that was great and good in that admirable statesman, Major Davezac was as devoted to the cause of Democracy when Mr. Van Buren was its representative and chief, as he had been when it was identified with the personal fortunes of his own particular friend and " destiny." Having become a resident of New York, he labored with all the zeal of youth for Mr. Van Buren's re-election. He was elected to the Legislature of the State in the fall of 1841, and again in 1843. When a member of that body, he was the first person who, in January of 1842, introduced a resolution for the refunding of General Jackson's fine. A zealous friend to the renomination of Mr. Van Buren at the Baltimore Convention of last May, he was one of those who most promptly and cordially set about the great task and the great duty, of carrying through the happy nomination upon which that body did unite, after the failure of the former object, to that glorious triumph by which we have seen it crowned. No individual could be named, who either labored more zealously, or, in the way of popular oratory, contributed more effectively, to arouse that deep and mighty excitement of the Democratic heart of the country which the late contest witnessed, than did the veteran subject of this slight and cursory sketch. Major Davezac is often little less felicitous in the elegance of his pen than in the impetuous yet graceful, the brilliant yet warm, eloquence of his tongue. He has contributed no small number of pages to some of the former volumes of this work; and we have on hand some of his manuscripts, with which we pro |