rought into
the most friendly and intimate relations with the men whose recreancy
to humanity they had unsparingly denounced for years. They were
now working with these men because the subjects on which they had
been divided were withdrawn, and the country had entered upon a
new dispensation. The mollifying influence of peace, aided, no
doubt, by the organized roguery which in the name of Republicanism
held the Nation by the throat, unveiled to Liberals a new political
horizon, and they gladly exchanged the key-note of hate and war
for that of fraternity and reunion. They saw that the spirit of
wrath which had so moved the Northern States during the conflict
was no longer in order. The more they pondered the policy of
amnesty and followed up the work of the canvass the more thoroughly
they became reconstructed in heart. They discovered that the men
whom they had been denouncing with such hot indignation for so many
years were, after all, very much like other people. Personally
and socially they seemed quite as kindly and as estimable as the
men on the other side, while very many of them had undoubtedly
espoused the cause of slavery under a mistaken view of their
constitutional obligations, and as a phase of patriotism, while
sincerely condemning it on principle. Besides, Democrats had done
a very large and indispensable work in the war for the Union, and
they now stood upon common ground with the Republicans touching
the questions on which they had differed. On these questions the
party platforms were identical. If their position was accepted as
a necessity and not from choice, they were only a little behind
the Republicans, who, as a party, only espoused the cause of the
negro under the whip and spur of military necessity, and not the
promptings of humanity. In the light of such considerations it
was not strange that the Greeley men gladly accepted their deliverance
from the glamour which was blinding the eyes of their old associates
to the policy of reconciliation and peace, and blocking up the
pathway of greatly needed reforms.

Soon after the State election I resumed my work on the stump, which
included a series of appointment in Kansas, where I addressed by
far the most enthusiastic meetings of the campaign. My welcome to
the State was made singularly cordial by the part I had played in
Congress in opposing enormous schemes of land monopoly and plunder,
which had been concocted by some of her own publi