job on any such terms."

The proposed repeal of the Missouri Compromise opened up the slavery
debate anew and gave it increased vitality. Hell literally broke loose
among the political elements. The issues which had divided Whigs
and Democrats went to the rear, while this one paramount issue took
possession of the stage. It was welcomed by the extremists of both
sections, a very godsend to the beaten politicians led by Mr. Seward.
Rampant sectionalism was at first kept a little in the background. There
were on either side concealments and reserves. Many patriotic men
put the Union above slavery or antislavery. But the two sets of rival
extremists had their will at last, and in seven short years deepened and
embittered the contention to the degree that disunion and war seemed,
certainly proved, the only way out of it.

The extravagance of the debates of those years amazes the modern
reader. Occasionally when I have occasion to recur to them I am myself
nonplussed, for they did not sound so terrible at the time. My father
was a leader of the Union wing of the Democratic Party--headed in 1860
the Douglas presidential ticket in Tennessee--and remained a Unionist
during the War of Sections. He broke away from Pierce and retired from
the editorship of the Washington Union upon the issue of the repeal
of the Missouri Compromise, to which he was opposed, refusing the
appointment of Governor of Oregon, with which the President sought to
placate him, though it meant his return to the Senate of the United
States in a year or two, when he and Oregon's delegate in Congress, Gen.
Joseph Lane--the Lane of the Breckenridge and Lane ticket of 1860--had
brought the territory of Oregon in as a state.

I have often thought just where I would have come in and what might have
happened to me if he had accepted the appointment and I had grown
to manhood on the Pacific Coast. As it was I attended a school in
Philadelphia--the Protestant Episcopal Academy--came home to Tennessee
in 1856, and after a season with private tutors found myself back in the
national capital in 1858.

It was then that I began to nurse some ambitions of my own. I was going
to be a great man of letters. I was going to write histories and dramas
and romances and poetry. But as I had set up for myself I felt in honor
bound meanwhile to earn my own living.

III

I take it that the early steps of every man to get a footing may be of
interest when fairly told. I s