men of the volunteer forces;' 'to incorporate the National Freedmen's Saving Bank;' 'to incorporate the National Academy of Sciences;' 'to encourage enlistments, and promote the efficiency of the military and naval forces, to making free the wives and children of colored soldiers;' and a joint resolution 'to encourage the employment of disabled and discharged soldiers.' The important legislation securing to colored soldiers equality of pay from the 1st of January, 1864, and to officers in the field an increase in the commutation price of the ration, and three months' extra pay to those who should continue in service to the close of the war, was moved by Mr. Wilson upon Appropriation bills.

HIS LABORS FOR THE NEGRO.

"But while laboring, with ever-watchful care, for the interests of the army and the support of the government in its gigantic efforts to suppress the Rebellion, Mr. Wilson did not lose sight, for a moment, of slavery, to the ultimate extinction of which he had consecrated his life more than a quarter of a century before slavery revolted against the authority of the nation. In that remarkable series of anti-slavery measures which culminated in the antislavery amendment of the Constitution, he bore no undistinguished part. He introduced the bill abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, which became a law on the 16th of April, 1862, and by which more than three thousand slaves were forever made free, and slavery became forever impossible in the nation's capital. He introduced a provision, which became a law on the 21st of May, 1862, providing that persons of color in the District of Columbia should be subject to the same laws to which white persons were subject; that they should be tried for offenses against the laws in the same manner as white persons are tried, and if convicted, be liable to the same penalty, and no other, as would be inflicted upon white persons for the same crime. On the 12th of July, 1862, he introduced from the Military Committee the bill, which became a law on the 17th, to amend the act of 1795, calling for the militia to execute the laws. This bill made negroes a part of the militia, authorized the President to receive, into the military or naval service, persons of African descent, and made free such persons, their mothers, wives, and children, if they owed service to any persons who gave aid to the rebellion. On the 24th of February, 1864, he caused the enrollment act to be so amended as to make colored men, whether free or slave, part of the national forces; and the masters of slaves were to receive the bounty when they should free their drafted slaves. On the committee of conference, Mr. Wilson moved that the slaves should be made free, not by the act of their masters, but by the authority of the government, the moment they entered the service of the United States, and this motion prevailing, the act passed in that form. General Palmer reported that in Kentucky alone more than twenty thousand slaves were made free by it. He subsequently introduced, and in the face of the most persistent opposition, carried through, a joint resolution making the wives and children of all colored soldiers forever free.

Six months after the passage of this bill, Major-General Palmer reported that in Kentucky alone, nearly seventy-five thousand women and children had received their freedom through it.

"Senator Wilson also moved and carried an amendment to the Army Appropriation bill of June 15, 1864, providing that all persons of color who had been or who might be mustered into the military service should receive the same uniform, clothing, arms, equipments, camp equipage, rations, medical attendance and pay, as other soldiers, from the 1st day of January, 1864.

His efforts in behalf of the Massachusetts colored regiments are well known, and it was due to his persistency, that they received a part of what was their just due. The Freedmen's Bureau bill was originally reported by him, and in all the subsequent legislation on that subject, he was active and decided in favor of its organization and maintenance. He defended with great ability and secured the adoption of negro suffrage as a part of the Congressional plan of reconstruction, and in both the thirty-ninth and fortieth Congresses, he has maintained fully his old reputation as the champion of the oppressed and downtrodden.

"Mr. Wilson was a prominent candidate for the Vice Presidency in the political campaign of 1868, and though, eventually, Mr. Colfax received the nomination, the vote for Mr. Wilson was 61 on the fifth ballot, on which Mr. Colfax was nominated.

A THIRD TIME ELECTED SENATOR.

"In 1871 Mr. Wilson was again re-elected to the Senate, without any organized opposition, for the full term of six years ending March 4, 1877, and was again placed at the head of the Committee on Military Affairs, a position which he still retains. Although his colleague in the Senate, Mr. Sumner, joined in the crusade against the administration of President Grant, he held fast to the party and its regular organization, and, in a letter addressed, in November, 1871, to the Committee on the Organization of the Labor Reform movement, in Washington, announced his continued adherence to the party in the following words :—

I am a

"I cannot, with my 'views of propriety, join in this movement.' Republican by conviction as well as by association. Born in extreme poverty, bound as an apprentice at an early age, I learned by bitter trials and hardships the poor are doomed to suffer from boyhood. Every pulsation of my heart has been in sympathy with the sons and daughters of toil of all races. My early experiences made me abhor wrong and oppression, so I early became any enemy of slavery and of the rule of the slave-masters. I saw and felt the degrading influences of a system that held working-men in enforced toil, that allowed capital to own labor. For more than twenty years I strove to make a political power to emancipate the slave and end the iron rule of the

master.

"The Republican party came into being to break the power of the owners

of labor and to deliver the laborer, to lift from the brows of workingmen the dishonor of enforced toil, and to make our country a glorious land where labor can look up and be proud amidst its toil. I did what I could to bring it as a party into being. It has done grand work for the country and for the toiling men of the country, and of the world, too. History records no nobler achievements. Its work is not yet secure, nor is it completed. I can do nothing to endanger that work; nor can I do anything to arrest the completion of the work imposed upon the Republican party by the needs of the country and the logic of its own principles, that require it to be as true to the interests of white workingmen as it has been to the interests of black workingmen. I am constrained by an imperitive sense of duty to stand by the Republican party till its great work is secured and finished. But whatever I can do shall ever be done to aid in improving, elevating and rewarding. labor."

Mr. Wilson is now writing, and has published one volume of an elaborate "History of the Slave Power in America," which promises to be a monumental work on the subject.

CHAPTER XXIX.

BENJAMIN GRATZ BROWN.

Of Aristocratic Family-Graduates at Yale-Studies Law-Moves to St. Louis-Cultivates the Germans-Goes to the Legislature-Starts the Democrat "-Elected to the United States Senate-Governor of Missouri-His Characteristic Traits-A Habitual Bolter and Extremist-How he Doubled on his Track as to Amnesty-Brown and the Schoolma'amsSome of his Flights Accounted for.

The Democratic candidate for Vice-President is Benjamin Gratz Brown, of Missouri. Mr. Brown is not, as Greeley called him, not long since, “a third-rate lawyer." He is a man of ability, and his career has been a brilliant one, erratic, perhaps, but still brilliant. Some points of it follow.

Unlike the three other gentlemen whose names appear upon the national ticket of 1872 as candidates for the Presidency or Vice-Presidency, Mr. Brown is of what we may call aristocratic birth; and this fact in Kentucky was unquestionably of great service to him. His father was the late Judge Mason Brown, of Frankfort, a lawyer and jurist of note, and the son of John Brown, the first person ever chosen Senator from Kentucky. He is a kinsman of the Prestons, Breckenridges, Blairs. McDowels, Bentons and other well-known families, whose members have been prominent in national