Internal Improvements,
and the Public Lands were the absorbing issues, while both parties
took their stand against the humanitarian movement which subsequently
put those issues completely in abeyance, and compelled the country
to face a question involving not merely the policy of governing,
but the existence of the Government itself. When the slavery
question finally forced its way into recognition it naturally
brought to the front a new class of public men, and their numbers,
as I have shown, steadily increased in each Congress from the year
1845 till the outbreak of the Rebellion in 1861. The Congress
which came into power with Mr. Lincoln did not fully represent the
anti-slavery spirit of the Northern States, but it was a decided
improvement upon its predecessors. In the Senate were such men as
Collamer, Fessenden, Doolittle, Baker, Browning, Anthony, Grimes,
Hale, Harlan, Sherman, Trumbull, Sumner, Wade, Henry Wilson,
Chandler, Lane of Indiana, Harris of New York, Andrew Johnson, B.
Gratz Brown and Howard. In the House were Conkling, Bingham,
Colfax, Dawes, Grow, Hickman, Kelley, Potter, Lovejoy, Pike of
Maine, Ashley, Rollins of Missouri, Shellabarger, Thaddeus Stevens,
Elihu B. Washburne, Isaac N. Arnold and James F. Wilson.

During the Rebellion and the years immediately following, Ferry of
Connecticut, Creswell, Edmonds, Conkling, Morgan, Morton, Yates,
Carpenter, Hamlin, Henderson, Morrill of Maine, and Schurz, were
added to the prominent men of the Senate and Boutwell, Blair, Henry
Winter Davis, Deming, Jenckes, Garfield, Schenck, Banks, Orth,
Raymond, Butler, Hoar, McCrary, to the list in the House. During
this period the Democrats had in the Senate such men as Bayard,
Garrett Davis, Hicks, Saulsbury, Buckalew, Hendricks, Bright, Reverdy
Johnson, Thurman, and F. P. Blair; and in the House, S. S. Cox,
Crittenden, Holman, Kerr, Pendleton, Richardson, Vallandigham,
Niblack, Voorhees, Brooks, Randall, and Woodward. The men who
controlled Congress during these years of trial were not the
intellectual equals of the famous leaders who figured in the great
crisis of 1850, but they were a different and generally a better
type. They were summoned to the public service to deal with
tremendous problems, and lifted up and ennobled by the great cause
they were commissioned to serve. It did more for them than it was
possible for them to do for it. It took hold on the very foundations
of the Government, and electr