y the reconciliation of
the sections, that the age-long strife should come to an end
and be forgotten, and that the whole South should share the
prosperity and wealth and refinement and contentment, which
submission to the new order of things would bring.

He was a far-sighted man. He was not misled by temporary
excitement or by deference to the majority of his political
friends who were less far-sighted than he, into any mistakes.
When there was an attempt to break faith in regard to what
was called the Wheeler compromise in the Democratic House,
Mr. Lamar interposed and prevented it. Just after the count
under the Electoral Commission had been completed, there was
a very dangerous movement to delay action on the returns from
Vermont, which would have prevented the completion of the
work before the 4th of March. Mr. Lamar put forth all his
powerful influence among his Democratic associates on the
floor of the House, and saved the peace of the country. He
knew very well that the cause of the South, as he would have
called it, and the cause of the Democratic Party itself, would
not be promoted by a new civil convulsion, still less by any
breach of faith.

He voted against the free coinage of silver in spite of the
fact that the people of his State earnestly favored it, and
against the express instructions of its Legislature. In 1874,
at a time when the passions of the Civil War seemed to blaze
higher, and the angry conflict between the sections seemed
to blaze higher even than during the war itself, he astonished
and shocked the people of the South by pronouncing a tender
and affectionate eulogy on Charles Sumner. He testified to
Sumner's high moral qualities, to his intense love of liberty,
to his magnanimity, and to his incapacity for a personal
animosity, and regretted that he had restrained the impulse
which had been strong on him to go to Mr. Sumner and offer
him his hand and his heart with it. It would have been almost
impossible for any other man who had done either of these
things to go back to Mississippi and live. But it never shook
for a moment the love for Lamar of a people who knew so well
his love for them.

Afterward Mr. Lamar was made an Associate Justice of the Supreme
Court of the United States. I voted against him--in which
I made a mistake--not because I doubted his eminent integrity
and ability, but because I thought that he had little professional
experience and no judicial experien