r the
quality of his honest convictions, as determined chiefly by his
peculiar experience, that the real question opens.

Mr. Johnson was a Southern "poor white." He became the ornament, then
the champion of his class; rescued it from political subjection in
Tennessee, and, in his own election to the Governor's chair, and then to
the United States Senate, gave it a first feast of supremacy. In this
long struggle, the peculiar opinion and sentiment of his class--that is,
of its best portion--became with him, though in an enlarged form,
impassioned convictions, deeply incorporated with his character, and
held with somewhat of religious fervor.

In the first speech contained in the present collection, dating so
lately as 1858, he is found still resting upon this experience. His
sympathy is wholly with the simpler forms of country life, with
mechanics and small landholders, "the middle class," as he calls them.
He hates cities; he cannot help showing some mild jealousy of the
commercial and manufacturing interest; literature and science he does
not wish to undervalue, but his whole heart is with the class who live a
well-to-do, honest life, by manual labor in their own shops or on their
own acres. Like his class, he dislikes the cotton lords, but likes
Slavery, and has no faith in the negro; it has not occurred to him to
think of the negro as a man, and he wished that every white man in the
country had a slave to do his "menial" labor.

In the next speech, made two years later, he is confronting the
immediate probability of Secession. He grapples with it sturdily, but
still regards it from a strictly Southern point of view,--that of his
class. The South, he thinks, has real grievances; it has, indeed, been
wronged by the election of a "sectional President and Vice-President";
it is entitled to redress; only it should seek redress in the Union, not
out of it.

Even when what he feared and fought against was become overt and bloody
war, when his own life was vengefully sought, when his own friends were
hunted down, and either murdered without mercy or dragged mercilessly
away to fight an alien battle with a sword behind and cannon in front,
even then he finds great difficulty in changing his point of view. He
speaks no more of wrongs which the South has suffered; but it is because
his feeling of that is overwhelmed by his sense of the horrible wrong it
is committing. He declares, at length, that, if Slavery or the Union