Born in a Democratic camp, and growing to manhood on the Democratic
side of a political battlefield, I did not accept, as I came later to
realize, the transcendent personal merit and public service of Henry
Clay. Being 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.