hose who have
intimately known the official and personal life of our Presidents can
not fail to remember how few have left the office as happy men as when
they entered it, how darkly the shadows gathered around the setting sun,
and how eagerly the multitude would turn to gaze upon another orb just
rising to take its place in the political firmament.

Worn by incessant fatigue, broken in fortune, debarred by public
opinion, prejudice, or tradition, from future employment, the wisest and
best who have filled that office have retired to private life, to
remember rather the failure of their hopes than the success of their
efforts. He must, indeed, be a self-confident man who could hope to fill
the chair of Washington with satisfaction to himself, with the assurance
of receiving on his retirement the meed awarded by the people to that
great man, that he had "lived enough for life and for glory," or even of
feeling that the sacrifice of self had been compensated by the service
rendered to his country.

The following facts were presented in a letter written several years ago
by the Hon. C. C. Clay, of Alabama, who was one of my most intimate
associates in the Senate, with reference to certain misstatements to
which his attention had been called by one of my friends:

"The import is, that Mr. Davis, disappointed and chagrined at
not receiving the nomination of the Democratic party for
President of the United States in 1860, took the lead on the
assembling of Congress in December, 1860, in a 'conspiracy' of
Southern Senators 'which planned the secession of the Southern
States from the Union,' and 'on the night of January 5, 1861,...
framed the scheme of revolution which was implicitly and
promptly followed at the South.' In other words, that Southern
Senators (and, chief among them, Jefferson Davis), then and
there, instigated and induced the Southern States to secede.

"I am quite sure that Mr. Davis neither expected nor desired the
nomination for the Presidency of the United States in 1860. He
never evinced any such aspiration, by word or sign, to me--with
whom he was, I believe, as intimate and confidential as with any
person outside of his own family. On the contrary, he requested
the delegation from Mississippi not to permit the use of his
name before the Convention. And, after the nomination of both
Douglas and Breckinridge, he conferred with them,