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 cannot, with my 'views of propriety, join in this movement.' I am a 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