“I was always strong. The conditions tended to make strong men, in
those days. I went to college in my eighteenth year. I think I acquired
a broader view there, and sound ideals which have been great helps. It
was not a period of toil, however, as some would have made it.”
His time at Yale was in no respect wasted. The vigorous, athletic,
fun-loving boy was developing into a man with a strength and
independence of character, very imperfectly understood at first by the
already long list of men who liked him.
“What profession did you fix upon as the field for your life work?” I
asked.
“That of the law. I always looked forward to that; and, after my
graduation, in 1856, I went into a law office (that of Hon. William
Nelson,) at Peekskill, and prepared for practice. That was a time of
intense political excitement. There were factions in the Democratic
party, and the Whig party seemed to be passing away. The Republican
party, or People’s party, as it had first been called, was organized in
1856, and men were changing from side to side. Naturally, I was mixed
in the argument, and joined the Republican party.
“When I was graduated at Yale College, in 1856,” he continued,
“I came home to the village of Peekskill to meet my father, my
grandfather, my uncles and my brothers, all old Hunker, state-rights,
pro-slavery Democrats. But I had been through the fiery furnace of
the Kansas-Nebraska excitement at New Haven, and had come out of it a
free-soil Republican. Two days after my return, I stood, a trembling
boy, upon a platform to give voice in the campaign which was then in
progress, to that conversion which nearly broke my father’s heart, and
almost severed me from all family ties. It seemed then as if the end
of the world had come for me in the necessity for this declaration of
convictions and principles, but I expressed my full belief. In this
sense, I believe a young man should be strong, and that such difficult
action is good for him.”