hen his State was admitted to the Union in 1861 he was
rewarded with the honor of being one of her first senators in Congress.
His course in the Senate, until the time of his defection, had been
specially marked for its aggressiveness in support of the war and the
destruction of the institution of slavery. He was profoundly attached
to Mr. Lincoln and had received many marks of his friendship. The
motive for his strange course under President Johnson was never clearly
disclosed. He was in the full vigor of life when he closed it with his
own hands, being a few weeks beyond his fifty-first birthday.

The Administration of Mr. Johnson had, before the death of Mr. Lane,
been unhappily associated in the popular mind with another suicide.
A few days before the assembling of Congress Mr. Preston King,
collector of the port of New York, had drowned himself in the Hudson
River by leaping from a ferry-boat. He had been for more than twenty
years an intimate friend of Mr. Johnson and held, as already narrated,
a confidential relation to him at the time of his accession to the
Presidency. He had been especially influential in the National
Republican Convention of 1864 in securing for Mr. Johnson the
nomination for the Vice-Presidency. The original disagreement with Mr.
Seward was generally ascribed to the influence of Mr. King upon the
President, but when, with Mr. Seward in the Cabinet, Mr. King was
appointed collector of customs for the port of New York, it was
understood to mean that a perfect reconciliation had taken place
between all the Republican factions in his State. The change in the
President's position was a complete surprise to Mr. King and left him
in a peculiarly embarrassing situation. He was essentially a radical
man in all his political views, and the evident tendency of the
President towards extreme conservatism on the question of
reconstruction was a keen distress to him. He was at a loss to
determine his course of action. If he should resign his position it
would be the proclamation of hostility to one to whom he was deeply
attached. If he should remain in office he feared it might be at the
expense of forfeiting the good will of the tens of thousands of New-York
Republicans who had always reposed the utmost confidence in his
fidelity to principle, and who had rewarded him with the highest honors
in their power to bestow. He had not desired the collectorship, and
consented to accept it only from hi