eing of Tennessee parentage, perhaps the figure of Andrew Jackson
came between; perhaps the rhetoric of Daniel Webster. Once hearing me
make some slighting remark of the Great Commoner, my father, a life-long
Democrat, who, on opposing sides, had served in Congress with Mr. Clay,
gently rebuked me. "Do not express such opinions, my son," he said,
"they discredit yourself. Mr. Clay was a very great man--a born leader
of men."

It was certainly he, more than any other man, who held the Union
together until the time arrived for Lincoln to save it.

I made no such mistake, however, with respect to Abraham Lincoln. From
the first he appeared to me a great man, a born leader of men. His death
proved a blow to the whole country--most of all to the Southern section
of it. If he had lived there would have been no Era of Reconstruction,
with its repressive agencies and oppressive legislation; there would
have been wanting to the extremism of the time the bloody cue of his
taking off to mount the steeds and spur the flanks of vengeance. For
Lincoln entertained, with respect to the rehabilitation of the
Union, the single wish that the Southern States--to use his homely
phraseology--"should come back home and behave themselves," and if he
had lived he would have made this wish effectual as he made everything
else effectual to which he addressed himself.

His was the genius of common sense. Of perfect intellectual acuteness
and aplomb, he sprang from a Virginia pedigree and was born in Kentucky.
He knew all about the South, its institutions, its traditions and its
peculiarities. He was an old-line Whig of the school of Henry Clay, with
strong Emancipation leaning, never an Abolitionist. "If slavery be not
wrong," he said, "nothing is wrong," but he also said and reiterated it
time and again, "I have no prejudice against the Southern people. They
are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now
exist among them they would not introduce it. If it did now exist among
us, we would not instantly give it up."

From first to last throughout the angry debates preceding the War of
Sections, amid the passions of the War itself, not one vindictive,
prescriptive word fell from his tongue or pen, whilst during its
progress there was scarcely a day when he did not project his great
personality between some Southern man or woman and danger.

III

There has been much discussion about what did and what did not occur at