Sketches 577

LIST OF PORTRAITS.

PAGE
1.--Hon. Schuyler Colfax, Frontispiece.

2.--Hon. Thaddeus Stevens, 29

3.--Hon. William D. Kelley, 59

4.--Hon. Sidney Clarke, 89

5.--Hon. Thomas A. Hendricks, 109

6.--Hon. Henry Wilson, 135

7.--Hon. Samuel C. Pomeroy, 171

8.--Hon. Reverdy Johnson, 203

9.--Hon. James F. Wilson, 239

10.--Hon. William M. Stewart, 275

11.--Hon. Ebon C. Ingersoll, 307

12.--Hon. Robert C. Schenck, 353

13.--Hon. Richard Yates, 399

14.--Hon. Edwin D. Morgan, 453

15.--Hon. William B. Stokes, 481

16.--Hon. George H. Williams, 517

17.--Hon. John Conness, 541

18.--Hon. James M. Ashley, 567

INTRODUCTORY.

By HON. SCHUYLER COLFAX,

SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES.

The Congress that has just passed away has written a record that will
be long remembered by the poor and friendless, whom it did not forget.
Misrepresented or misunderstood by those who denounced it as enemies,
harshly and unjustly criticised by some who should have been its
friends, it proved itself more faithful to human progress and liberty
than any of its predecessors. The outraged and oppressed found in
these congressional halls champions and friends. Its key-note of
policy was protection to the downtrodden. It quailed not before the
mightiest, and neglected not the obscurest. It lifted the slave, whom
the nation had freed, to the full stature of manhood. It placed on our
statute-book the Civil Rights Bill as our nation's magna charta,
grander than all the enactments that honor the American code; and in
all the region whose civil governments had been destroyed by a
vanquished rebellion, it declared as a guarantee of defense to the
weakest that the freeman's hand should wield the freeman's ballot; and
that none but loyal men should govern a land which loyal sacrifices
had saved. Taught by inspiration that new wine could not be safely put
in old bottles, it proclaimed that there could be no safe or loyal
reconstruction on a foundation of unrepentant treason and disloyalty.

The first sessio