then turning from the sacrifice and counseling such frank acknowledgment as could not fail to reach the magnanimity of the authorities so deeply offended-such was the loved, not faultless, sage of "Homewood" during the fortnight that transpired before the "golden bowl was broken," or the flowers of his own choice placed upon his bier. "Stronger by weakness, wiser men become, As they draw near to their eternal home; Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view, [May 28, 1871.] XXI. CALLED to Washington on official business, I find myself this warm and breezy morning of the 30th of May seated at the open window of my old room in the Mills House, once more' looking over into the sacred grounds of Arlington, where twenty thousand Union soldiers sleep their last sleep, and silently yet sternly sentinel the Capitol they saved. And this is Decoration day! The Departments are closed in honor of the dead heroes. From Maine to Mexico, wherever the grave of a Union soldier is found, it will be visited by some Union man or woman. "Such graves as these are pilgrim shrines, The Meccas of the mind." The fervor with which Decoration day is venerated proves the undying love of our people for their country. The sentiment is a conviction that grows with every hour, and ripens only to be renewed in freshness and vigor. Decoration day is, therefore, another Independence day; precisely as the abolition. of human slavery in 1863 gave force to the abolition of British surveillance in 1776. But it was more than this. It was the intellectual disenthralment of four millions of blacks and thirty millions of whites. It revolutionized the wicked work of ages of misrule. It wrought in less than nine years the destruction of the evils of almost as many centuries. Where were we all on the 30th of May, 1861? As I ask the question, Robert E. Lee's Arlington house shines out white. from the dark green foliage of the southern side of the Potomac, and seems to answer: "Ten years ago this day my owner had just tendered an unstained sword, with a troubled heart, to his country's foe. Ten years ago Abraham Lincoln, Stephen A. Douglas, Stonewall Jackson, James Buchanan, Edward D. Baker, Howell Cobb, John B. Floyd, Lewis Cass, Owen Lovejoy, were living; they have since gone before the Great Judge, and have answered for all their mortal deeds. Ten years ago the thousands of slain around me, and 'three hundred thousand more,' were active and intelligent men, useful fathers, husbands, sons, and brothers. But these dead have left behind lessons and warnings that will not die." "Ah! gentlemen," said Frederick Douglass, the really great leader of the colored race of America, yesterday afternoon, "who shall tell the story of these last ten years? I can not. To me all is changed; and what an unutterable, indescribable change! From slavery to liberty, from ostracism to equality, from ignorance to self-respect, from sin to schools, from the lash to the light, from the bludgeon to the ballot, from a country bound in chains to a nation robed in glory, from a capital that seemed to be rooted in despotism to a great city, free and wholesome and beneficent. Find your orator to tell us of these marvels. I have no speech to describe, though my heart cherishes them all." "Blessed be this night," said another of the same race on an other occasion. "Five times have been sold into slavery in Washington-three times on the block, and twice with the ball and chain on my feet; and now I am free, and all my children, and their children's children." } And what could John M. Langston, the law professor of the Howard University, say? The son of a gentleman of Virginia by his own slave, he lives to represent the intellect of his father as his accepted offspring, and to honor and bless his mother. But on this sacred day other memories are revived. I recall as I write the face, the form, the character, and history of James S. Jackson, of Kentucky, who sleeps with the blessed Union martyrs. The readers of these hasty anecdotes will perhaps. recollect my reference to him on the night of my Mazeppa speech on Missouri Avenue, after I had been elected Clerk of the House of Representatives in December of 1859. Jackson was afterward a Whig Representative in the Thirty-seventh Congress from Kentucky, and when elected was about forty. He was chosen as a pro-slavery man, with intense attachment to Henry Clay, John J. Crittenden, and the old leaders of that school of politics, but also with intense attachment to the Union. I never met him until I met him as a Representative in the great Congress preceding the rebellion. His genial nature, his extremely handsome face and athletic form, his eloquence of speech and magnetism of manner, attracted me; and yet, although somewhat differing in politics-he as the ideal of the old Whig Party in its best days, and I as the ideal of the better days of the Democracy-we coalesced in ardent devotion to the Union. He was against me for Clerk, yet he was glad I was elected—not because he cared for me, but because he desired to rebuke the administration of Mr. Buchanan, whose course on the Kansas Question he did not hesitate to denounce as unutterably bad. On this Decoration day, as I look out upon Arlington. Heights and hear the guns thundering over the graves of those who perished that their country might live, I think of handsome Jackson, and of an incident related to me by one of his devoted Kentucky friends, now holding a high and honorable position under General Grant's administration. Jackson left his seat in the House to offer his life to the Republic. In doing this he felt that he was separating from many near and dear friends in Kentucky, all of whom, equally devoted to the Union, were also devoted to slavery. He had served several months in the war when slavery was abolished in the District of Columbia. His old associates, believing they could swerve him from his fidelity to his country, conceived that emancipation would greatly disappoint him, and one of their number wrote him a letter, stating now that the Yankees had shown that this was simply an abolition war, he ought to leave the "Federal" army and come over to his old friends, in which case a better position awaited him. This letter, owing to circumstances unnecessary to relate here, fell into the hands of his brave wife, a Kentucky woman. She was so indignant at the attempt to debauch her husband that she tore it up, but immediately after, believing that he had better see it, womanlike, gathered the fragments and sent the missive forward to her husband. He received it in the company of friends, laughed heartily at it, and referred to the Confederate who had written it as a capital good fellow, but as one who had wholly misunderstood his character. Among those who heard of the letter was the well-known Brigadier-General William Nelson, subsequently killed by General Jefferson C. Davis in a personal rencontre at the Galt House, in Louisville, on the 29th of September, 1862. Nelson remarked, after the letter to Jackson had been read, that the writer seemed to know his man or he never would have written it. This observation was reported to Jackson by some convenient friend, who belonged to the order of men who always report unpleasant remarks, and resulted in a challenge from Jackson to Nelson. Nothing prevented a mortal meeting but the inter ROCHESTER HISTORICAL 95 JAMES) §. JACKSON. LIBRARY vention of the venerable John J. Crittenden, the friend of both, who came from Louisville to the camp and stepped between the young Hotspurs. But they never spoke until after one of the subsequent battles, in which Nelson displayed almost superhuman bravery. Jackson's cavalry regiment could not be called into the fight, and he lay chafing at a distance from the field. But when he came into camp and found that praise of his adversary was in the mouth of every soldier, he rushed up to him, and threw his arms around his neck, and said: "I never can be the enemy of a man who has fought so bravely for the old flag." They both died in 1862-Jackson at the head of his regiment in the battle of Perryville, Kentucky, and Nelson, as I have said, by the hands of Jefferson C. Davis, a brave and noble soldier, now in New York, whom Nelson had grossly insulted. Jackson and Nelson were both men of strong convictions; they were men of storm and tempest, but of noble hearts; they loved Clay, Crittenden, Breckinridge, Preston, and Prentice of the Louisville Journal. To go into the Union cause against all their social prejudices and friends was a great struggle, but go they did. They died young, but they had lived a long experience. Nelson was a commander in the navy, and died a brevet major-general in the army. Jackson had just got into Congress when the war broke out, and died before he finished his Congressional career. [June 4, 1871.] XXII. LOOKING back along more than half a century of the varied, brilliant, and useful works of Adolphe Thiers, the present virtual head of the French government, who is now seventy-four years old, the thought occurred to me what an interesting chapter |