sembled at his house to escort him to the State House. "No," said he, " gentlemen, if I am to be shot at, I want no man to be in the way of the bullet." He walked alone, and with his usual deliberation, through the streets to his official apartments on Capitol Hill. Another similar story is related: He was announced to speak on the exciting questions of the day, and loud threats were uttered that, if he dared to appear, he should not leave the hall alive. At the appointed hour he ascended the platform, and advancing to the desk laid his pistol upon it. He then addressed the audience, it is said, in the following language: "Fellow-citizens, it is proper, when freemen assemble for the discussion of important public interests, that every thing should be done decently and in order. I have been informed that part of the business to be transacted on the present occasion is the assassination of the individual who now has the honor of addressing you. I beg respectfully to propose this be the first business in order. Therefore, if any man has come here to-night for the purpose indicated, I do not say to him, let him speak, but let him shoot." Here he paused, with his right hand on his pistol, and the other holding open his coat, while he blandly surveyed the assembly. After a pause of half a minute, he resumed: "Gentlemen, it appears that I have been misinformed. I will now proceed to address you on the subject that has called us together," which he did with all his accustomed boldness and vivacity, not sparing his adversaries, but giving them plenty of pure Ten nessee. A man who sets out in a political career without high birth, fortune, political influence, or commercial interest at his back, determined not to be intimidated, discouraged, or run down by any party, or by all factions in Congress, and triumphs solely by his intellectual power over all impediments, must have the true elements of greatness in his composition. If such a man lends the powers that are in him for objects that are only noble, generous, grand, and good, he will be faithful to himself, and likely to be eminently useful to his country. Such is the character and such the position of President Johnson. Few men in the world have risen to greater fame from the ranks of poverty and misfortune; and none have ever worn their honors with a more becoming dignity, or with greater love for the sacred principles of free government. SERVICES AND SPEECHES. CHAPTER I. THE CONSTITUTIONALITY AND RIGHTFULNESS OF SECESSION. THE purely sectional issue upon which Abraham Lincoln, in November, 1860, was elected President of the United States, though in accordance with the forms of the Constitution, yet seemed to a large majority of the people so hostile to its spirit, and so threatening in its effect upon the peace of the country, that "it produced an excitement in the nation, and especially at the South, which foreboded all that was fearful and terrible in the prospect of the future." To allay this excitement so far as possible, and prevent the withdrawal of the aggrieved States from the Federal Union, all true patriots labored with heart and soul, during the anxious and critical period which intervened between the election of Mr. Lincoln and his inauguration. Among these patriots and statesmen, no one strove with a more earnest and indefatigable zeal to avert the dissolution of the Union and the horrors of civil war than Andrew Johnson. He supported the famous Crittenden compromise, in the hope that its adoption might promote harmony of feeling and quiet the rage of the dark and fearful storm. Born in a slave State, a representative, a governor, and senator from a slave State, his love for his section was only surpassed by his attachment to his country. Soaring above all narrow and local prejudices, he could truly feel and express the poet's inspiring sentiment: Who would sever freedom's shrine? Dear to me the South's fair land, But though national in every pulsation of his moral being, as became a disciple of the immortal Jackson, no one defended with more outspoken boldness the rights of his section, or denounced with more bitter indignation the wicked and treasonable designs of Northern abolitionism. He repeatedly deprecated the introduction of the slavery question into the congressional debates, insisting that its consideration belonged alone to the States where it existed, and refused even the admission of petitions in relation to the initiating subject. In December, 1859, he declared the murderous John Brown raid upon Harper's Ferry to be the natural consequence of abolition doctrines, and permitted no opportunity to escape of lashing and denouncing the advocates of a "higher law" than that of the Constitution. He had, however, the sagacity to see that the best protection for Southern rights and Southern property was beneath the folds of the Federal flag; that the surest way to punish the Northern agitators and nullifiers for their "personal-liberty bills" and similar insolent encroachments, was to fight them inside of the Union, and never to yield a single inch of the joint and common revolutionary inheritance. He entreated his fellow-senators of the South to remain in their places, assuring them that, if they thus remained firm and unshaken, Mr. Lincoln could not even organize his administration unless by their permission; and much less could he or his party do any direct injury to the Southern interests. With prophetic vision, he told them that secession would be the death of negro slavery, that in the blast of a sectional conflict it would be swept away with the besom of destruction. Alas! if his counsels and warnings had been heeded, how much of blood and sorrow, how much of woe and desolation, would have been spared from the record of these last sad years! These opinions of Mr. Johnson are given at length, and with signal ability, in a speech de |