or of Greek at Harvard; and in 1824, at the age of
thirty, he was chosen to represent the Boston district in Congress. He
remained there for ten years, served four terms as governor of
Massachusetts, was ambassador to England, and then, president of Harvard
from 1846-1849; was appointed secretary of state on the death of Daniel
Webster in 1852; and finally, in the following year, was elected to the
Senate, but was soon forced to resign on account of ill-health.

Soon afterwards, he threw himself into the project to purchase Mount
Vernon by private subscription, delivered his oration on Washington 122
times, netting more than $58,000 toward the project; obtained another
$10,000 from the _Public Ledger_ by writing for it a weekly article for
the period of a year, and added $3,000 more, secured from the readers of
that paper. From that time on, he delivered various lectures for
philanthropic causes, the receipts aggregating nearly a hundred thousand
dollars. They are little read to-day because, in spite of his erudition,
polish and high attainments, Everett really had no new message to
deliver.

* * * * *

With the coming of the Civil War, another triumvirate emerges to control
the destinies of the nation--Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner and
William Henry Seward. Stevens and Seward had been introduced to politics
by the ineffectual and absurd anti-Masonic party, which flitted across
the stage in the early thirties. In 1851, Massachusetts rebuked Daniel
Webster for his supposed surrender to the slavery party, made in hope of
attaining the presidency, by placing Sumner in his seat in the Senate,
and retiring him to private life, where he still remained the most
commanding figure in the country.

Seward was already in the Senate, had spoken in reply to Webster, and
assumed the leadership which Webster forfeited. In the House, too, was
Stevens, who soon gained prominence by a certain vitriolic force which
was in him, and these three men labored unceasingly for the defeat of
the South--indeed, for more than its defeat--for payment, to the last
drop, for the sins it had committed. They were bound together by party
ties and in other ways, but most closely of all by a hatred of slavery,
which, with Stevens and Sumner, mounted at times to fanaticism and led
them into the errors always awaiting the fanatic.

Thaddeus Stevens, the oldest of the three, had been born in Vermont, but
removed to Penns