the seeds of Bolshevism and Communism in certain sections. of the country. His Report to the Virginia Legislature in 1860 on the "John Brown Raid" is a vigorous and powerful exposure of the treasonable conspiracy by Northern abolitionists against the Federal Government, which culminated in the capture and legal execution of Brown and his associates; and contains an illuminative discussion of the then burning question of slavery. This Report affords a singular comparison, in its vigor and fearlessness, with the majority Report of the Senate Committee of Congress on the same subject, signed by James M. Mason, Jefferson Davis and G. N. Fitch, which has been pronounced by Brown's biographer, Villard, "disappointingly ineffective from the slavery point of view, when it is considered that such able men as Jefferson Davis and James M. Mason constituted it." In the fateful Virginia Convention of 1861, in which the Union men were in an overwhelming majority, Mr. Stuart was an earnest and persistent champion of the Union; and not until the people of the Commonwealth ratified by their votes the Ordinance of Secession, wrung from a reluctant majority by Lincoln's call for troops to suppress "rebellion" in the seceded Southern States, did he attach his name to the instrument. Up to the last moment, hoping against hope, he sought, with his brother-in-law, Colonel John B. Baldwin, and Summers and Janney and others of the Union leaders in the Convention, to keep Virginia in the Union, and to bring back the seceded Southern States. In the often angry dissensions of the delegates he kept a cool head and a prudent tongue, and a dignified composure, whether while Wise in the lobby outside the Convention hall, apostrophized Houdon's statue of Washington as "Glorious old Rebel!" or when the Union-loving women of Richmond crowned Baldwin, after a great argument against secession, with a wreath of roses; and more in sorrow than in anger he beheld the pen, made from an eagle's feather, brought in for the use of the forty-five original secession delegates, who had constituted for weeks the minority, in signing their names to the Ordinance. But when the die had been cast and the Rubicon crossed, there was no faltering on Mr. Stuart's part, nor shadow of turning. Like that other great Union-lover, Robert E. Lee, he conceived it to be his patriotic duty to go with his state; and he went unhesitatingly. Throughout the long and heart-breaking struggle he bore himself with the innate spirit of his breed and blood; and scorning to deny that he had rendered "aid and assistance to the Rebellion," when the end came, he turned his back with contemptuous rejection on the infamous "Test Oath," which a relentless and vindictive conqueror imposed on a brave and vanquished people. When the sun of the Confederacy had "gone down in the gloom of eternal night," he bent himself with noble energy to binding up the wounds left by the bloody and devastating conflict. He sought by every means within the compass of his sagacity and his ability to restore, as much as might lie within the bounds of human effort, the physical territory of the Mother of States, who had given to the Union, without money and without price, the imperial domain of the Northwest Territory, in which she had forbidden through all time the existence of African slavery; and who had suffered the loss of one-third of her possession, in the unhallowed rape of West Virginia. He guided the stricken Commonwealth, with prescient wisdom, by means of the "Committee of Nine," into an avenue of honorable escape from the Reconstruction horrors that befell the other Southern states; and he thus foiled the sordid purposes of the carpet-baggers and scalawags, with their following of ignorant and illiterate negro ex-slaves, that had been "injected into the belly of the Constitution" by the malignancy of the Stevenses and Mortons, who sat in the seats of the mighty among the relentless conquerors. When this achievement had been accomplished, he took up the great matter of education in Virginia and the South; and as Rector of the University of Virginia, and as member of the Peabody Board, he was a pioneer among the earliest of those Southerners who sought, through schools and colleges, to dissipate the ignorance, and to make capable and efficient the citizenship of white and black alike in the South. However much Mr. Stuart differed with others of his generation and time, or they with him, in views of governmental measures, or in the partisan politics of a period of great differences, no one, whatever his political inheritances or beliefs, can peruse this story of his life, so modestly and clearly written by his son-in-law, Mr. Robertson, without the profound conviction, upon the retrospect of it all, that he was a lofty patriot, a true American, and a devoted Virginian; and that he gave of his best, which was of the best, with unselfish devotion to the service of his country and of his fellow-citizens. Staunton, Virginia, ARMISTEAD C. GORDON. CHAPTER I ANCESTRY LEXANDER HUGH HOLMES STUART was of Scotch-Irish descent and came from a distinguished ancestry, both on the paternal and maternal side. His great-grandfather, Archibald Stuart-the first of the family who came to America-was a ScotchIrishman who lived not far from Londonderry. His will, written by himself and now in the office of Augusta County, Virginia, dated 1759, and recorded in 1761, presents unquestionable proof that he was a man of education. In early life he married Janet Brown, a sister of John Brown, who studied divinity at Princeton and became the pastor of Providence Church in what is now Rockbridge County, Virginia. He occupied this pulpit for forty-four years, and was the second rector of Liberty Hall Academy, now Washington and Lee University. Archibald Stuart had two children by his wife, Janet, while living in Ireland—a son named Thomas, and a daughter named Eleanor. About 1725-26 the persecutions of the Presbyterians and other dissenters became so intolerable that Archibald Stuart became one of the active promoters of an avowed insurrection or rebellion to defend their rights. The military power of the government was invoked to suppress the rebellion, and when that was done Archibald Stuart was one of those proscribed; and if he could have been arrested, he would have been executed for treason. Being compelled to fly for his life, he made his escape to the coast, where he contrived to get on board a ship bound for America, leaving his wife and two children in Ireland. He reached America in safety and sought refuge in western Pennsylvania, where he remained in concealment |