Educated in England, he was not of age when the Rebellion broke out; and in 1868, in his twenty-sixth year, was a member of the South Carolina Legislature, and elected to Congress from the Columbia district in 1872. He received 21,627 votes, against 1079 votes for the Democratic candidate, W. H. McCaw. Had any man predicted that this colored boy, while attending school, in 1853, at High Holborn Academy, and Eton College, England, in 1855, would sit in Congress from the capital of the proud State of South Carolina in 1874, and would there confute the ablest apostle of the old slave power, he would have been pronounced a madman.

And now Robert Brown Elliott is living in high health and hope, and Alexander H. Stephens has gone home to Crawfordsville, Georgia. Types of two facts, the growth of liberty and the death of servitude, they open the doors of an inscrutable future. In after-years those who read these pages will realize the solution of the problem. That South Carolina was long the scene of much misgovernment, even men like Mr. Elliott do not deny. Many of the existing evils seem to be incurable; many of the complaints of the whites are founded in justice; but Time is the great physician, and let us hope the race now in the ascendant may emerge from confusion into a healthy and enduring capacity for administration. There have been greater revolutions within the last decade.

William Gannaway Brownlow died in the beautiful city of Knoxville, Tennessee, several years ago. Wholly different in character and capacity, he may be called the aggressive statesman of an aggressive school. Stephens is the man of thought; Brownlow was the man of action. A writer and a speaker from his youth, he belonged to the rugged school. He never indulged in half-way measures. Slavery had no more fervent defender till it took up arms against the Government, and then he became its relentless assailant. The antagonist of Jackson, Van Buren, Polk, Cass, Pierce, and Buchanan, he

never was a Nullifier. The two motives of his life for fifty years were devotion to the Whig and opposition to the Democratic party. He was a defiant clergyman and a fighting editor. He was as ready to peril his life for his religion as for his party. Courage was as natural to him as the breath of his life. He was a combination of the belligerent priest and the tempestuous journalist. A temperance man always, he was frequently intemperate in his spoken and printed words. He had profound principles, but he indulged in the most pointed personalities. His sermons were often as full of adjectives as his editorials. He won by his native energy and honesty; by the pluck of his nature, the suddenness of his attacks, the fiery resentment of his retorts, and his indomitable industry. Even when his enemies hoped he was at death's door, he was a reader of books and newspapers in all his waking hours, and worked down to the hour of his death on his own journal.

Wasted by disease, a paralytic and a valetudinarian, his intellect was bright and his interest in public affairs intense. I remember when he came to Philadelphia, in 1858, to defend the institution of slavery as it existed in the South. Perhaps I could not give a better photograph than that drawn by himself in a work which he calls "Parson Brownlow's Book," published by George W. Childs in 1862, which had an immense sale, and netted the reverend editor a handsome little fortune. You have here a specimen of his style and a picture of the man:

"I was born in Wythe County, Virginia, on the 29th day of August, 1805. After the death of my parents, I lived with my mother's relations, who raised me up to hard labor, until I was eighteen years old, when I removed to Abingdon, in that State, and served as a regular apprentice to the trade of a house carpenter. I have been a laboring man all my life long, and have acted upon the Scriptural maxim of eating my bread in the sweat of my brow. Though a Southern man in feeling and principle, I do not think it degrading to a man to labor, as do

most of the Southern disunionists. Whether East or West, North or South, I recognize the dignity of labor, and look forward to a day, not very distant, when educated labor will be the salvation of this vast country!

"My education was imperfect and irregular, even in those branches taught in the common-schools of the country. I labored, after obtaining a trade, until I acquired the means of again going to school. I afterwards entered the Methodist travelling ministry, and travelled ten years without intermission. I availed myself of this position to study and improve my limited education, which I did in all the English branches.

"I am about six feet high, and have weighed as heavy as one hundred and seventy-five pounds—have had as fine a constitution as any man need desire. I have very few gray hairs in my head, and, although rather hard-favored than otherwise, I will pass for a man of forty years. I have had as strong a voice as any man in East Tennessee, where I have resided for the last thirty years, and have a family of seven children. I have been speaking all that time; and for the last twenty-five years I have edited and published a Whig newspaper, having a larger circulation than any political paper in the State, and even larger than all the papers in East Tennessee put together. I have taken a part in all the religious and political controversies of my day and time.

"I am known throughout the length and breadth of the land as the 'Fighting Parson;' while I may say, without incurring the charge of egotism, that no man is more peaceable, as my neighbors will testify. Always poor, and always oppressed with security debts, few men in my section and of my limited means have given away more in the course of each year to charitable objects. I have never been arraigned in the Church for any immorality. I never played a card. I never was a profane swearer. I never drank a dram of liquor until within a few years, when it was taken as a medicine. I never had a cigar

or a chew of tobacco in my mouth. I never was in attendance at a theatre. I never attended a horse-race, and never witnessed their running, save on the fair-grounds of my own county. I never courted but one woman, and her I married."

In this volume you find a life full of incident. The pervading thought is devotion to the Union. In conversation with one of his friends several years ago, I found that many of his most exciting adventures had been omitted, especially one in regard to General Jackson. Brownlow was a bitter adversary of Old Hickory; and on one occasion printed in his paper, the Jonesborough Whig, a statement based on the authority of a prominent Whig politician, now dead, seriously affecting the character of Jackson. This was in 1844, when Jackson was at home, at the Hermitage, near Nashville, retired from office, an earnest Presbyterian, quietly preparing to die. He saw Brownlow's article, and immediately wrote to the politician referred to demanding to know if he fathered the statement. For answer the politician repudiated Brownlow's version, and said. that he had wholly misunderstood him. This denial Jackson promptly printed in the Democratic paper at Nashville. Meanwhile, the politician wrote to his friend Brownlow asking him to sustain his contradiction to the old chief, and pleading old friendship as a claim. But Brownlow was not to be used. He immediately wrote a certificate, and had it signed by many persons who had heard the politician's statement against Jackson, and published that, with a terrible invective against the wily partisan, who was then running as a candidate for a high office. He then printed this vindication in his paper, the Jonesborough Whig, and sent a copy of that to the venerable ex-President. Of course, the politician was very indignant, and threatened terrible things. He even came to the town of the Fighting Parson to denounce him from the stump; but when he heard that Brownlow was armed and ready for any issue, and would write or fight him down, he avoided all allusion to this intrepid edi

tor. Shortly after, the parson-journalist met the old General and exchanged courtesies and buried the tomahawk.

In 1860, Brownlow had to choose between slavery and the Union. How he decided everybody knows. He stood his ground with great firmness, and risked his life repeatedly. His enemies made a serious assault upon his business. He was imprisoned for his bold editorials, but never once yielded to his adversaries. In September, 1860, William L. Yancey, of Alabama, the celebrated Secession leader, came to Knoxville to make a speech, and Brownlow attended the meeting; and, in reply to a question put by Yancey, mounted the platform and took his stand by his side, and said, "I am one of a numerous party at the South who will, if even Lincoln shall be elected under the forms of our Constitution, and by the authority of law, without committing any other offence than being elected, force the vile disunionists and secessionists of the South to pass over our dead bodies on their march to Washington to break up this Government." As he spoke these bold words he stood at the side of Yancey, armed and ready to maintain his faith at the cost of his life.

I remember him well in his place in the Senate of the United States before he left Washington to go home to die. It was gratifying to note that as he approached his final hour, while his attachment to his country was in no sense diminished, he was doing his best to reconcile the sections. I heard daily of his kindness to the ex-Confederates-a very natural sequel to a stormy life. Brownlow was a Southern man, and, with all his attachment to the Union, could not forget the Southern people. Born among them, living in the midst of slavery, defending it for many years, denouncing the Abolitionists, and even going to Philadelphia to take issue with one of their champions, it was easy to watch the process by which, after the victory of his Government, his early affections for his own people should revive. The close of such a life, sweetened