gn
documents," that, as late as 1844. there was money spent and labor
done for the purpose of placing him in nomination for the highest
office.

Calhoun failed in all the leading objects of his public life, except
one; but in that one his success will be memorable forever. He has
left it on record (see Ben on, II. 698) that his great aim, from 1835
to 1847, was to force the slavery issue on the North. "It is our
duty," he wrote in 1847, "to force the issue on the North." "Had the
South," he continued, "or even my own State, backed me, I would have
forced the issue on the North in 1835"; and he welcomed the Wilmot
Proviso in 1847, because, as he privately wrote, it would be the means
of "enabling us to force the issue on the North." In this design, at
length, when he had been ten years in the grave, he succeeded. Had
there been no Calhoun, it is possible--nay, it is not improbable--that
that issue might have been deferred till the North had so outstripped
the South in accumulating all the elements of power, that the
fire-eaters themselves would have shrunk from submitting the question
to the arbitrament of the sword. It was Calhoun who forced the issue
upon the United States, and compelled us to choose between
annihilation and war.

[Footnote 1: Mr. Calhoun had still Irish enough in his composition to
use "will" for "shall."]

JOHN RANDOLPH.

In June, 1861, Dr. Russell, the correspondent of the London Times, was
ascending the Mississippi in a steamboat, on board of which was a body
of Confederate troops, several of whom were sick, and lay along the
deck helpless. Being an old campaigner, he had his medicine-chest with
him, and he was thus enabled to administer to these men the medicines
which he supposed their cases required. One huge fellow, attenuated to
a skeleton by dysentery, who appears to have been aware of his
benefactor's connection with the press, gasped out these words:

"Stranger, remember, if I die, that I am Robert Tallon of
Tishimingo County, and that I died for States' Rights. See,
now, they put that in the papers, won't you? Robert Tallon
died for States' Rights."

Having thus spoken, he turned over on his blanket, and was silent. Dr.
Russell assures his readers that this man only expressed the nearly
unanimous feeling of the Southern people at the outbreak of the war.
He had been ten weeks travelling in the Southern States, and he
declared that the people had but one bat