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opponent was the Hon. John B. Henderson, a lawyer of signal ability, famous as the author of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. But at this time he professed a political creed widely different. He was a follower of Douglas, the Independent Democrat. Neither of these gentlemen had at heart any sympathy with slavery; both would resist its aggressions, but neither would advance beyond the Constitution and the law. Of the twain Rollins would make the less obeisance to the Southern fetish. In their hearts both doubtless concurred in the aims, though not in the methods, of the Republican party. But the constituency was largely composed of slaveholders, and any avowal or confession of antislavery sentiment would have been instantly fatal, not only to their present aspirations, but also to their future usefulness and influence. The Northern concept of the slave was that of a "person held to labor or bondage"; but the Southern concept was entirely different and far grosser, namely, of a piece of chattel property, like a horse, or cow, or table, or sofa. Hence the slaveholder regarded the abolitionist as little better than a highway robber, and all the native Anglo-Saxon sensitiveness concerning "rights of property" was aroused at the mere hint of emancipation. In this extreme irritability, this genuine hyperæsthesia of the proslavery conscience, it was no less necessary to be wise as serpents than to be harmless as doves. It is a gentle hand that must be set to a festering wound. No wonder, then, that the candidates had to lay their words with scrupulous exactness in the balance, and that neither could quite escape the charge, though both perhaps the guilt, of insincerity. At length the delicate egg-dance was accomplished, the polls were closed, and the eloquence of Rollins, so often borne down by overweighty odds, was this time clearly triumphant. The same day witnessed the consummation of Democratic folly in the election of Mr. Lincoln by a clear majority of fifty-seven in the Electoral College, but by a popular plurality only of 480,195 over and against a total majority of 944, 149! No Southern interest was yet in danger, for neither of the other branches of Government, legislative and judicial, could pass into Republican hands before the last days of Mr. Lincoln's administration. Nevertheless, the Southern leaders deliberately threw away their vantage-they descended from the hills to fight on the plain. The abstract right of secession was too

dear not to be exercised; since man has the right to shear the wolf plainly it is also his duty to shear it! It was a sad, proud privilege conceded to South Carolina, to start the race toward ruin by the "ordinance of secession," passed December 20, 1860. Her six light-hearted sisters followed in quick succession, and four others, less frivolous, with reluctant step at last joined their company, being oppositely electrified by the call of President Lincoln for 75,000 volunteers.

Such was the status of affairs when in July, 1861, Mr. Rollins took his seat at the called session of the Thirty-seventh Congress. He lost no time in defining and declaring his attitude, which he maintained firmly and consistently through four years, the most trying and arduous in the history of the Republic. Difficult indeed was the position of every legislator, but for none more difficult than for the Columbia statesman. His feet stood in slippery places that took hold of the ways of death. The constituency that he represented was indeed loyal to the general Government and opposed to secession; but the right to coerce a seceding State was conscientiously questioned by many who loved the Union perhaps not less than some in New England, who hailed the secession of South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida with a chorus of thanksgiving, shouting: "The Lord reigneth, let the earth rejoice. The Covenant with Death is annulled; the Agreement with Hell is broken to pieces." It was indeed the middle and western States that were especially ready to expend blood and treasure in defense of national unity, as their high percentage of enlistment of soldiers, considerably higher than in the northeastern States, clearly shows. Even Missouri, though thousands of her sons cast their lots with the Confederacy, yet swelled the ranks of the Federal armies with 109,111 fighting men, a number scarcely less in proportion to white population than was furnished, with the help of $53,000,000 in bounties, by ultrapatriotic New England. Of these only 1031 are reported as held to service on draft, while only 1638 furnished substitutes or paid commission. The war record of Missouri is indeed as creditable as that of Massachusetts, let her defamers say what they will. It was no reproach to the constituency of Mr. Rollins that many of them believed in State sovereignty and the right of secession; or if reproach it was, least of all men could the New England extremist

level it at them. For no new logical maxim had been propounded, no new principle of interpretation had been discovered, since the Hartford Convention (1814), when New England showed herself ready to "adopt the furthest stretch of State sovereignty, as stated in the Kentucky Resolutions." But to the North and East the war was known only as a distant, however harsh and painful, echo; while the very air of Missouri shook with the uproar. No material interest of theirs was in any wise endangered by any issue of the war; but even a blind man might see that the success of the national arms must at least gravely imperil half the fortune of the slaveholder. Add to this, that the insult, injury, oppression, atrocious outrage, and murderous violence to which a helpless populace, whose utmost offense was a certain human "sympathy" with friends and relatives, were subjected at the hands of an alien invading soldiery, often passed the bounds both of description and of endurance, and it will appear that if the loyalty of the Northern abolitionist was a human virtue, the loyalty of a border slaveholder was a virtue almost divine. Such a slaveholder, loyal under the most exasperating conditions, was James Sidney Rollins. He lent the general Government a whole-hearted, vigorous, and courageous support, voting for all war measures and defending them in speeches of earnest and impressive eloquence.

At this point it may be well to characterize more fully than has thus far been done the position of Mr. Rollins in the great national crisis. He was, above all things else, sincerely and passionately a Union man. His Unionism was primarily an emotion of the heart, and only in second line a theory of the head. The idea of a mighty people, one and indivisible, "lapped in universal law," sublime in strength beyond all fear of attack, glorious in all the arts of peace, happy in all the blessings of prosperity, its will an ordinance, its voice an oracle, its home the broad and fertile bosom of a continent, traversed up and down this way and that everywhither by the streams of commerce filling every artificial as well as every natural channel—this splendid imagination enthralled his fancy and engrossed his affections. It possessed his mind while he was yet a youth, nor relaxed its hold in his declining years. He found a subtile music like that of the spheres in the columns that told of our progress in material greatness, and the numbers of the statistician.

were to him scarcely less harmonious than the numbers of the poet. On the other hand, the vision of a dismembered nation, of two hos tile republics or a score of petty snarling principalities, of the tides of internal commerce broken and foaming against the walls of custom-houses-this hateful apparition repelled and dismayed him. No amount of logic could reconcile him to it. The metaphysical refinements and grammatical subtleties by which Calhoun might confound even Webster rebounded harmless from his practical intelligence-they were for him but the insanity of dialectic. The act of acceding to might involve the right to secede from in a country school match, but not in a continental Republic. It could never have been the mind of the fathers to suspend the destinies of the nation on the construction of a prepositive particle. Such broad and common-sense generalizations were enough for Rollins; but they were reënforced by his studies of classic history, which showed him how frail were the leagues and confederacies among the independent Greek States, and how easily they went down before the first shock of Roman power. Hence it was that he regarded Disunionists at the South and Disunionists at the North, Toombs and Phillips, Calhoun and Garrison, with equal abhorrence. As he scouted the metaphysical fanaticism that possessed the one, so he disowned the moral fanaticism that ruled the other. With slavery as an institution of society, as an element of civilization, he had little sympathy. He honored free labor, and his preference was to see all labor free. He never escaped nor perhaps was solicitous to escape the imputation of being at heart an Emancipationist. A large slaveholder himself, however, and a kind master, he did not perhaps recognize in slavery all its potencies for evil, and he yielded no large place to sentiment in his practical treatment of the matter. With him the supreme question was, "How preserve the Union?" While the extreme North shouted, "Human freedom first and Union afterwards," and the extreme South answered, "State sovereignty first and Union afterwards," the voice of Rollins was, "Union first and all other things afterwards." He would save the Union with slavery, he would save the Union without slavery; with or without, in any case, he would save the Union. Such was the end that he proposed, and in the pursuit of this end he was perfectly consistent, though, to be sure, not always uniform in his recommendations of means to

attain it. Such uniformity, however, is to be neither desired nor commended. The most practicable way is not always a straight one: the path that winds along the side of a mountain may yet lead us safely and most easily to the top.

But while Mr. Rollins was beyond many hearty and efficient in his support of the Administration in its war policy, in its determination to suppress the Rebellion at any sacrifice of men and money, he was by no means blind or indiscriminate. He recognized clearly that there are some things more precious than blood, more costly than treasure; and he well knew from history how often the necessity of the nation has been the opportunity of the tyrant. While pledging his own State to the last drop of blood, to the last ounce of treasure, in defense of the Union, the pride of mankind, the hope of humanity, he did not forget that the rights of American citizenship are sacred and inviolable. Accordingly, when the zeal, without knowledge, of Colfax proposed to expel Mr. Long of Ohio for the utterance of treasonable sentiments in the House of Representatives, Mr. Rollins sprang forward to the defense of the "Freedom of Speech" in a remonstrance equally lofty in patriotism and impassioned in eloquence. It was a brave and magnanimous act, especially in a man whose constituents were currently reported as disloyal. Again, when the policy of enlisting negroes in the Federal ranks was first promulgated, Mr. Rollins, who, however immovably set on extinguishing the insurrection, however determined at every hazard to fly the Stars and Stripes, though in tatters, over every inch of Southern soil, could not forget that he was himself a Southron, and who would not without need offend the prejudices nor wound the feelings of his brethren Mr. Rollins arose in the House and entered his strenuous protest. We all remember with what an outburst of indignant declamation "that old man eloquent," the immortal Chatham, greeted the proposal to employ Indians in warfare "against our brethren in America, endeared to us by every tie that can sanctify humanity." In like manner Mr. Rollins maintained that it was both needless and impolitic thus to irritate to incurable resentment the minds of the Southrons by an attempt to overrun them with a hireling soldiery of their own slaves and racial inferiors. This protest is particularly worthy of note as containing a distinct announcement of his own long-cherished hope of a complete emancipation. What

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