erless, uninviting, and not a harbor on it? What
use have we for this country?"

Franklin Pierce, who had served two terms in the House of
Representatives, was then elected to the Senate. He proved a
valuable recruit for the Southern ranks, as when in the House he
had risen one day to a question of privilege, and warmly resented
the reading by Mr. Calhoun in the Senate of an article from the
Concord _Herald of Freedom_, which declared that the Abolitionists
in New Hampshire were as one to thirty. This journal, Mr. Pierce
said, "was too insignificant, too odious, in the eyes of his
constituents, to be cited as authority. No age or country had ever
been free from fanatics, and with equal justice might the whole
people of New York be charged with being followers of Matthias as
the people of New Hampshire for favoring the designs of the Knapps
and Garrisons and Thompsons."

Sergeant Smith Prentiss, who came to Washington during the Van
Buren Administration to claim a seat in Congress as a Representative
from Mississippi, was the most eloquent speaker that I have ever
heard. The lame and lisping boy from Maine had ripened, under the
Southern sun, into a master orator. The original, ever-varying,
and beautiful imagery with which he illustrated and enforced his
arguments impressed Webster, Clay, Everett, and even John Quincy
Adams. But his forte lay in arraigning his political opponents,
when his oratory was "terrible as an army with banners;" nothing
could stand against the energy of his look, gesture, and impassioned
logic, when once he was fairly under way, in denouncing the tricks
and selfish cunning of mere party management. The printed reports
of his speeches are mere skeletons, which give but a faint idea of
them. Even the few rhetorical passages that are retained have lost
much of their original form and beauty. The professional stenographers
confessed themselves utterly baffled in the attempt to report him,
and he was quite as unfitted to report himself. Indeed, he complained
that he never could reproduce the best thoughts, still less the
exact language, of his speeches.

The principal antagonist of Mr. Prentiss, in the courts of Mississippi,
was Joseph Holt, a young Kentucky lawyer, who had acquired a national
reputation for oratory by a speech which he made in the National
Democratic Convention of 1836, when he advocated the nomination of
Colonel Richard M. Johnson in a speech of great beauty and powe