Her dinners became of real
political significance and her husband figured more and more as a
leading Southerner. The result was two-fold. Cresswell, on the one hand,
with his usual selfishness, took his rising popularity as a matter of
course and as the fruits of his own work; he was rising, he was making
valuable speeches, he was becoming a social power, and his only handicap
was his plain and over-ambitious wife. But on the other hand Mrs.
Cresswell forgot two pitfalls: the cleft between the old Southern
aristocracy and the pushing new Southerners; and above all, her own
Northern birth and presumably pro-Negro sympathies.
What Mrs. Cresswell forgot Mrs. Vanderpool sensed unerringly. She had
heard with uneasiness of Cresswell's renewed candidacy for the Paris
ambassadorship, and she set herself to block it. She had worked hard.
The President stood ready to send her husband's appointment again to the
Senate whenever Easterly could assure him of favorable action. Easterly
had long and satisfactory interviews with several senators, while the
Todd insurgents were losing heart at the prospect of choosing between
Vanderpool and Cresswell. At present four Southern votes were needed to
confirm Vanderpool; but if they could not be had, Easterly declared it
would be good politics to nominate Cresswell and give him Republican
support.
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