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.