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Henry Winter Davis was the son of a Protestant Episcopal minister. He was born at Annapolis, where his father was president of a college and rector of a parish. In early times the father had much prejudice against Democrats, and early taught his son to "beware of the follies of Jacksonism." When the war for the Union came on, the son had forgotten such a peculiar teaching, for if there was one thing connected with the service of General Jackson more manifest than another, it was his attachment to the Union. Henry Winter Davis graduated at Kenyon College, Ohio, in 1833, during the presidency of Bishop McIlvaine. He was a successful and laborious scholar, and a rare debater in the conflicts of the societies. He, no doubt, learned his power of analysis and his graces of expression through such exercises. He returned to his native State of Maryland thoroughly accomplished in all that equips for free, profound, and legal investigation. Those who remember Mr. Davis can recall a certain boyishness in his manner and figure. This wore off the moment he began to speak. In the writer's opinion he was the best orator in, every sense of the word, whom he has ever heard in Congress. He had logic, but it was logic set on fire of rhetoric. The writer never heard him upon the hustings, but his reputation as an out-door orator is said to have been equal to that which he gained in the forum. He stood high professionally, socially, and politically. He was the idol of the young lawyers of Baltimore. He always had a chosen circle from the time of his election to the Thirty-first Congress until his death. After the adjournment of the Thirty-eighth Congress he was engrossed by the momentous questions which were urged for adjustment. He was among the first to consider the great necessity of reconstruction. He was in the Thirty-ninth Congress, and although heartily received by his colleagues and comrades, he did not long remain with them. He died in his forty-ninth year. The writer served with him upon the Foreign Affairs committee, and without collision as to questions connected with the war and international law. He is especially proud to make this memorial tribute to Mr. Davis, because as the war was winding up and personal liberty became almost as indispensable to our country and its institutions as the Federal Union itself, it was Henry Winter Davis who rose to the front rank of debate, and by his silvery style and cogent logic held Congress almost enthralled until something was accorded to the dignity of personal and public liberty which had been invaded by the excesses of the war.

This Maryland statesman passed through many dark days, not only for his state but for the country. He was ever for the unconditional maintenance of the Union, and though once defeated by Henry May, a Union conservative of great oratorical skill and fervor, he did not remain in the rear, but still pushed to the front. As he once said in a speech at Brooklyn: You see the conflagration from a distance. It blisters me at my side. You can survive the integrity of the Nation., We in Maryland would live on the side of

a gulf perpetually tending to plunge into its depths. It is for you life and liberty. It is for you greatness of strength and prosperity." What he did in Maryland has been well remembered by his compatriots. He is also remembered for his austerely energetic yet elegant style. It is said that he had no humor. But humor is nearly allied to wit and sarcasm. It is confessed he had much of the latter, but it was frequently blended, as the writer has seen, with great good temper. In some of his speeches, especially those in the midst of the war, he made others sympathetic with his own heroic resolve. In one of them he eloquently said: "If we fall with honor, we transmit the liberty committed to our keeping untarnished to go down to future generations. If we must fall, let our last hours be stained by no weakness, let the ruins of the Republic remain to testify to the latest generations our greatness and our heroism, and let Liberty, crownless and childless, sit upon these ruins crying aloud in a sad way to the nations of the world, 'I once brought up children and they have rebelled against me.' Some of his conspicuous efforts were connected with the reconstruction of the states, beginning with Tennessee. Why he failed to produce the desired effect, was owing perhaps to a lack of moderation in temper and to an enthusiasm which had been generated in contending so closely in a border state with those who opposed him.

To offer the olive-branch of peace on honorable terms to our Southern brothers was regarded as treason by the radical leaders. Yet at any time the pen of fraternal compromise would have been more powerful than the sword of war in restoring the old harmony between the sections. All the lessons of history were ignored. Even from Ireland, with her many rebellions and much suffering, the Muse of History pointed with menacing finger to the result of the policies of subjugation. What a picture then for observation! There stood Ireland in chains, fettered to the land of Magna Charta which boasted of habeas corpus and civil liberty! A conspiracy here, a plot there, a rebellion at the capital, a rising at the extremities, public waste, private impoverishment, general corruption, periodical starvation, political turpitude, and national bankruptcy—these were the features of national thraldom which Ireland presented for our warning, when men talked so glibly of subjugation and confiscation. How much better would it have been for all countries, had the sagacious advice of Sydney Smith been followed, when he said:

"How easy it is to shed human blood; how easy it is to persuade ourselves that it is our duty to do so, and that the decision has cost us a severe struggle; how much, in all ages, have wounds, and shrieks, and tears been the cheap and vulgar resources of the rulers of mankind. The vigor I love consists in finding out wherein subjects are aggrieved, in relieving them, in studying the temper and genius of a people, in consulting their prejudices, in selecting proper persons to lead and manage them in the laborious,

THE OLIVE-BRANCH NOT OFFERED YET.

239 watchful, and difficult task of increasing public happiness by allaying each particular discontent."

When would the olive-branch be offered the South? Not until the last armed foe expires, say the Republicans. They who hoped for terms must wait in vain; for the passions of man were aroused in the radical breast, bidding defiance to every element of law, every guarantee of freedom, and every sentiment of clemency and brotherhood. Under such a condition, could men of American mould stop the conflict while there was any power left in the South to muster a battalion or fire a round of canister? Was it any wonder that these men,—with famine in the camps, barefooted and in rags, with munitions of war all exhausted and nothing left but their valor and despair,― held at bay, for a year almost, the first captain of the age and the grandest army that was ever mustered on the face of the earth? No less loyal a hand than that of General Garfield himself has written in imperishable letters, on the annals of the Nation, these words which will go down to all time as a memorial of American patriotism and brotherhood: "The soldiers of the two armies, if left to themselves, would at any time have come to a peaceful settlement of the war in half an hour!" What was this but an admission that the soldiers of the Union army were at all times fighting under the original pledge, which gave Democratic enthusiasm to this cause that the war was for the Union, and not for any fanatical scheme or issue? It was well said in the burning eloquence and patriotism of Mr. Voorhees in his speech on the state of the Union, in March, 1864,—that the baleful band of political destructionists who then unhappily possessed the high seats of national authority, did not want peace. "No," said he, "they invoked the storm which had rained blood upon the land. They courted the whirlwind. They danced with hellish glee around the bubbling caldron of civil war. They welcomed with ferocious joy every hurtful mischief which flickered in its lurid and infernal flame. Compromise, which had its origin in the love and mercy of God; which made peace and ratified the treaty on Calvary between Heaven and the revolted and rebellious earth; compromise, which is the fundamental basis upon which all human associations have been created and upheld, was then pronounced a treasonable word and covered with reproach by skillful knaves intent on enriching themselves at the expense of national sorrow and blood,- that compromise which would have restored peace and fraternity to the distracted land, and spared the desolation of bereavement and death to a million firesides, was rejected by the arch-traitors of abolitionism." There were then "patriots" in plenty who denounced Mr. Voorhees as a traitor and a copperhead for such utterances. But not all the bastiles that were ever built could restrain the proud spirits of such men as Voorhees and Vallandigham, and their Democratic confréres. These men loyally sustained our armies in the field in order to conquer a peace, while they hesitated not to assault the satrap Secretary of War, when ten thousand of his armed guards were ever ready to execute his most ferocious orders.

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Did the contest for civil liberty end with the war? No. Far from that. When secession died, as it did in the last ditch, then it was that the malign spirit which had hovered in the rear of the conflict came to the front to gloat over the prostrate Southern land. The gray picket was no longer at his post to challenge the spirit of hate and eternal discord. No right was now to be known but that of conquest and spoliation. Now, indeed, had the fruit of victory turned into the dust of Sodom. The Union was at last rent in twain! What neither secession nor war to the last could do, was now done by act of Congress, and radical hate. A new Executive had come with a very small olive-branch in his hand. What cared the victorious conspirators for that? They spat upon it with contempt. They impeached him for that small tender. What cared they now for executive clemency? What cared they for Constitution guaranties or Supreme Court decisions? They would have no peace in the South land. They would have no law but martial law in the conquered provinces," until they could lay broad and deep in Southern soil, the foundations of a party structure that neither time nor the American people could ever overthrow! Here, in the opening year of the second decade of this history, began the second contest to save the Union; a contest no less pregnant with the fate of American institutions than the first, and no less bitterly fought; a contest which was not finally settled until the very last year of Republican sway. It took almost a quarter of a century to silence the guns of Moultrie and Sumter !

66

At last, a measure of content comes upon the despoiled and prostrate South. The party of constitutional liberty, state fealty, and Federal unity has succeeded, and the prophecy has been realized, for the old standard has again been high advanced : "Good tidings shall bind up the brokenhearted, and to them that mourn in Zion, give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, and the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. And they shall build the old wastes, they shall raise up the former desolations, as the earth bringeth forth her bud, and the garden causeth things that are sown in it to spring forth." "Go through, go through the gates, prepare ye the way of the PEOPLE; cast up, cast up the highway; lift up a standard for the PEOPLE!"

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CHAPTER XII.

PROSCRIPTION OF PERSONS AND PROPERTY.

LEGISLATIVE AND EXECUTIVE MODES NON-INTERCOURSE THEORY AND PRAC-
TICE- WAS SECESSION WAR OR NOT - IT WAS A PRACTICAL FACT DILEM-
MA AS TO“ PIRATES" AND PRISONERS OF WAR LINCOLN'S SOLUTION - AN-
OMALOUS RIGORS, NORTH AND SOUTH-HIGHER LAW NEWLY APPLIED –
ESOP'S SATYR— AFTER THE WAR - FOLLY OF NON-ACTION SOUTH – TWO
DECADES OF TROUBLE MIGHT HAVE BEEN AVERTED - RADICAL PROSCRIP-
TIONS UNCONSTITUTIONAL - RATIFICATION OF AMENDMENTS - CONFISCA-
TION ACTS — ATTAINDER AND EX POST FACTO LAWS - BELLIGERENT STATUS
VIOLATED-TEST OATHS - LOYALTY — CUMMINGS AND PERMOLI CASES -
IN RE GARLAND — JUSTICE FIELD'S DECISIONS - FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT
A BILL OF ATTAINDER- ITS MONSTROSITY — FORCE BILL AND ITS FATE-
LIBERTY ECLIPSED-TEST OATH REPEALED IN 1884-RAPINE BY LAW-
DEMOCRATIC PROTESTS AGAINST OSTRACISM AND TYRANNY.

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HEN it was finally determined that no compromise would be offered to the South by the Republican party without an absolute waiver of all the questions affecting slavery, there was no mode left for the settlement of the issue of secession, other than that by force of arms. True, Mr. Lincoln issued, from time to time, his proclamations to the South; but these were always read by the people to whom they were addressed, in the light of past experience. Mr. Lincoln did not, and could not for his party, give any assurance that the grievances of which the South complained would be remedied by submission to Federal authority. Seeing that the idea of compromise was rejected with contempt, the Confederates at once organized a de facto government. That government was republican in form. It had its constitution, and its three departments of authority — the legislative, the executive, and judicial. Armies were put in the field and a naval force was created to maintain the independence declared by the Southern States. In this condition of affairs, the President of the United States, on April 15, 1861, issues a proclamation to the

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