It was Col. Mulberry
Sellers, Mark Twain's hero, who gave currency to the conceit and enunciated
the principle of "the old flag and an appropriation." He did not claim the
formula as his own, however. He got it, he said, of Senator Dillworthy, his
patriotic file leader and ideal of Christian statesmanship.
The original of Senator Dillworthy was recognized the country over as
Senator Pomeroy, of Kansas, "Old Pom," as he had come to be called, whose
oleaginous piety and noisy patriotism, adjusting themselves with equal
facility to the purloining of subsidies and the roasting of rebels, to
prayer and land grants, had impressed themselves upon the Satirist of
the Gilded Age as upon his immediate colleagues in Congress. He was a
ruffle-shirted Pharisee, who affected the airs of a bishop, and resembled
Cruikshank's pictures of Pecksniff.
There have not been many "Old Poms" in our public life; or, for that matter
Aaron Burrs either, and but one Benedict Arnold. That the chosen people of
God did not dwell amid the twilight of the ages and in far-away Judea, but
were reserved to a later time, and a region then undiscovered of men, and
that the American republic was ordained of God to illustrate upon the
theater of the New World the possibilities of free government in contrast
with the failures and tyrannies and corruptions of the Old, I do truly
believe. That is the first article in my confession of faith. And the
second is like unto it, that Washington was raised up by God to create it,
and that Lincoln was raised up by God to save it; else why the militia
colonel of Virginia and the rail splitter of Illinois, for no reason that
was obvious at the time, before all other men? God moves in a mysterious
way his wonders to perform.
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