That legislative hall was like a tinder box, a miniature arsenal, many of the leaders armed with a pistol or a bowie-knife, ready for an emergency. The North was to be bullied, and malcontents were jeered, even Democrats, if not shouting the party shibboleth. James H. Lane, of Indiana, afterward Senator from Kansas, said his fall by a duel or by assassination was only a question of time. Not toleration, but disunion or war was in the air.

THE RADICAL GROUP.

For years Clay, Webster and Calhoun were in public esteem the Senatorial triumvirate. Now the charm was broken, and who were to be their successors in national fame? There were three, bold and able, with national repute, by an overruling power to enlighten the North, while staying the progress of the slave propagandists. These were Senators Seward, S. P. Chase (whose personality and service I have given elsewhere), and John P. Hale of New Hampshire.

Could there have been statesmen whose words were better enforced by an honored, national, public career, or blessed with more varying adaptations by native gifts for grand and decisive debate? Senator Hale broke the shackles of party on the admission of Texas, and had enjoyed the honors of a Free Soil Presidential candidate. Jovial in social life, apt in repartee and story, without fear, and free from party shackles, his presence was an expectation. There was humor in the flashing eye, and power in the sarcastic tongue, which gave him all the qualities of a minority leadership. His wit was perennial, and powerful in repelling attacks.

Senator Seward's speeches taught the people, while he was held to be an artful Machiavelli by those across the chamber. Always in good temper, and never prevoked to personal retort.

S. P. Chase was ready with the law, and spoke with solemnity on great themes which he had studied, not in threat, but in a spirit of statesmanship, which was above slave laws, and codes, and in defiance of creed enactments. A towering brow and great purity of character were only tokens of a conscientious statesman.

I think the picture of Mr. Chase, standing while reading the Emancipation Proclamation, and his face on the greenback which was our financial savior, striking portraits of the great Senator.

With a greenback in my pocket I felt that I carried good money, and the image of a true man whose nature was hearty, loyalty unquestioned. Chase was eminently a lawyer rather than a gifted orator. He was denied the gift of humor, but the solemnity of manner in appeal to great principles, became a prophesy of his future. He was afterward Governor of Ohio, Secretary of the Treasury-our second Hamilton-and elevated to the chair of Chief Justice, where, by the testimony of the great lawyers of that bench, he never had a superior.

He was a great student fortified to assault, and a severe judge of measures, which later perplexed Mr. Lincoln. The Minister of Finance was not second to the Minister of War, and delays with failures in the field were reprobated at least by indirection, and Radical leaders would have made him the successor of Mr. Lincoln after his first term. What was his ambition but honorable? Others were sowing and reaping where he had prepared the soil. A Cabinet adviser was only a name, and there was no ear for a Radical suggestion in prosecution of the war, and a promotion to the Chief Justiceship was looked upon as an expedient to placate a rival who personally was in accord with the radical politics of Butler and Fremont, and Gen. Phelps, the Louisiana radical.

Charles Sumner, after a contest of national import, was elected Senator in place of Mr. Webster. Bearing state seal and commission, he was never a place seeker; was a student and companion of Justice Story, and the author of the "True Grandeur of Nations," which has linked his fame with the world's savants and orators.

Mr. Sumner was the scholar of the body, and in his first term an orator unapproached in the beauty of language and fervency of appeal. If unlearned in parliamentary law, he was an authority in international law, and our statutes and their interpretations were quoted as readily as the most familiar maxims. It was an error that he was engrossed with a single idea. The wants of incohate states found in him an advocate on a high plane of statesmanship. The wrongs of sailors and soldiers were not overlooked, and the world never saw the Fugitive Slave Law in its full deformity until exposed by Sumner. That he was out of the line of a Presidential aspirant lent power to his utterances, and prepared the country for an execration of slavery in the crime against Kansas, and the assaults of an assassin.

In native personal endowment there were attractions, added to

the culture of a scholar and marked colloquial vivacity, which caused him to become the envy of tread-mill conservatives, as well as the idol of young Americans. I forget his antagonisms with Grant, social scandals, infelicities, and that temporary clouding of his fame on the fraternal battle-flag resolutions. All of calamity incident to a great actor, including a murderous assault, is not to be mentioned in the view of an obverse bright shield more than heraldic. The fame of a Nestor in the Senate was reached. The industry and unfaltering devotion of a public servant was found in volumes, making the richest contributions to our national history, by a statesman; and apart from petulance and pedantry, so-called by indolent inferiors, his career stands unchallenged by the critics. of the world.

It was my fortune to hear his first Senatorial speech- which was in debate on a welcome to the patriot Kossuth. It was of all the efforts brief, pathetic and classic, a prelude to a rich flavor in debate, with an elevating tone in discussions, led by a supreme master of assemblies. How clear the tones in fascinating cadence: "Our guest waits at the door for a boon of hospitality which tyranny denies. An expatriated hero who has passed the Bosphorus to meet the perils of the ocean on a patriotic mission sublime as that of Lafayette. Millions wait on your deed, doubly valued by a spontaneous welcome." All the previous speeches seemed as cold, studied declamations, contrasted with this effort, with a Senator, a man and soul behind it. The status of an orator was fixed beyond cavil, as that of a never-setting star in the heavens. With all the early caricature of Mr. Sumner as a looking-glass declaimer, one never found him in an encounter trivial, but learned and powerful as an antagonist.

After the Brooks assault on Mr. Sumner, Massachusetts, to her honor, kept a seat for the wounded Senator while in Europe-partially restored to see decades of service after the great traitors had fled the chamber, and brutal Brooks had, while yet a young man, been called to his final account.

Senator Ben. Wade, of Ohio, comes on the stage. A roughspoken, reputed profane man. He took a full measure of men, and bluster only set him in defiance of fire-eaters, who never made a second attack. It was known that he was a good shot, and quite a stranger to fear. In our war he was a large figure; not popular in the chamber, yet brave, and an oracle with the masses down

through the Johnson impeachment trial, when Wade might have been a successor of the false “Moses.”

In the House there was a small Radical force, but effective for attack. The old man eloquent, John Quincy Adams, had passed away, but the venerable Horace Mann, of national fame, had appeared as his successor. Joshua R. Giddings, of Ohio, was a bold speaker, and in the use of stern logic called out barbarous imprecations, and an expulsion by the slaveholders, which gave him greater power and fame on a re-election. George W. Julian, of Indiana, the Quaker, became a progressive educator. Gen. R. C. Schenck, then a flaxen-haired youth, was often on the floor, in service with bold and bitter retorts.

Thaddeus Stevens I then saw for the first time, and heard in debate, to be assured that in a majority party he would become a dauntless color-bearer. The "Old Commoner" was a born leader, more than able, of rare perception in the analysis of character, happy in assault, firm as a rock to resist the Hotspurs of the day, and the evil ambition which culminated in treason and war. In the overthrow of slavery was he not a potent helper of the great War Minister Stanton, and our great army captains?

I have pictured him down to the war era, execrating rebels, later drawing the greenback bill, and securing the law for the issue of hundreds of millions of bonds, certain they would never be dishonored, so abiding was his faith in our cause and the Nation.

CONSCIENCE WHIGS

was a party designation of the time, occasioned by a bolt upon the nomination of President Taylor, who had earned the confidence of Liberals, while they distrusted his successor Fillmore, who signed the Fugitive Slave Bill. Daniel Webster seemed the especial aversion of Charles Allen, of Worcester, Massachusetts, leading in denunciation of Mr. Webster for receiving a subscription of tens of thousands of dollars in Boston, through the agency of Peter Harvey, which was held up as an act pensioning the betrayer of Massachusetts. I listened to the defense of Mr. Webster by George Ashman, of Springfield, Massachusetts, and by Mr. Hilliard, of Alabama, which created a great sensation. My predictions at that time came to be history. The Supreme Court of the United States was struggling to conceal its spirit in the Dred

Scott decision. I could see no settlement of the slavery question in the compromise measures which precipitated the great Kansas struggle, involving a great issue, which it required civil war to decide. Southern Senators from the different states seemed to hunt like beasts of prey, in couples; while the Radicals on the defensive brought to their aid powerful recruits like Wilson of Massachusetts, Fessenden of Maine, and Chandler of Michigan. The lapse of forty years sweeps every one of these great actors mentioned from the legislative halls, and I can think of none of the number conspicuous who have not passed over to the silent majority, save Robert C. Winthrop of Massachusetts, Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, and George W. Julian of Indiana.

In retracing the Radical actors of four decades agone, I am moved with devout gratitude to God for the legislators who became instructors by speech and example to the nation. I hold in special regard those "faithful among the faithless found," whose cheeks did not blanch before threats and violence, and were never suspected of venality in the marts of business, or in the counsels of the political caucus. All men have not a price for recreancy to principle or a trust.

A biographical estimate of the foes of liberty in the halls of Congress, in a study of those who lost station and honor, is a measure of the losses by perjury, not less than of lives clouded by defeat in an unholy cause, and sorrows of war, anew enforcing the Divine admonition: "They that take the sword shall perish by the sword."