ere he
was serving at the outbreak of the civil war.

While Mr. Johnson had been during his entire political life a member
of the Democratic party, and had attained complete control in his
State, the Southern leaders always distrusted him. Though allied to
the interests of slavery and necessarily drawn to its defense, his
instincts, his prejudices, his convictions were singularly strong on
the side of the free people. His sympathies with the poor were acute
and demonstrative--leading him to the advocacy of measures which in a
wide and significant sense were hostile to slavery. In the early part
of his career as a representative in Congress, he warmly espoused, if
indeed he did not originate, the homestead policy. In support of that
policy he followed a line of argument and illustration absolutely and
irreconcilably antagonistic to the interests of the slave system as
those interests were understood by the mass of Southern Democratic
leaders.

The bestowment of our public domain in quarter-sections (a hundred
and sixty acres of land) upon the actual settler, on the simple
condition that he should cultivate it and improve it as his home, was
a more effective blow against the spread of slavery in the Territories
than any number of legal restrictions or _provisos_ of the kind
proposed by Mr. Wilmot. Slavery could not be established with success
except upon the condition of large tracts of land for the master, and
the exclusion of the small farmer from contact and from competition.
The example of the latter's manual industry and his consequent thrift
and prosperity, must ultimately prove fatal to the entire slave system.
It may not have been Mr. Johnson's design to injure the institution of
slavery by the advocacy of the homestead policy; but such advocacy was
nevertheless hostile, and this consideration did not stay his hand or
change his action.

Mr. Johnson' mode of urging and defending the homestead policy was at
all times offensive to the mass of his Democratic associates of the
South, many of whom against their wishes were compelled to support the
measure on its final passage, for fear of giving offense to their
landless white constituents, and in the still more pressing fear,
that if Johnson should be allowed to stand alone in upholding the
measure, he would acquire a dangerous ascendency over that large
element in the Southern population. Johnson spoke with ill-disguised
hatred of "an inflated and heartless