world. I shall have occasion
hereafter to recur to it.

On the 18th of December I reported, from the joint committee on
the library, an amendment to an appropriation bill providing for
the construction of a statue to the memory of General Lafayette,
in the following words:

"That the president _pro tempore_ of the Senate and the speaker of
the House of Representative do appoint a joint committee of three
Senators and three Representatives, with authority to contract for
and erect a statue to the memory of General Lafayette and his
compatriots; and said statue shall be placed in a suitable public
reservation in the city of Washington, to be designated by said
joint committee."

The amendment was agreed to by both Houses. The result was the
erection, on the southeast corner of Lafayette Square in Washington,
of the most beautiful and artistic bronze monument in that city.

A somewhat sharp and combative controversy had taken place in the
newspapers between General Sherman and Jefferson Davis, in regard
to the position of the latter on the rights of the Confederate
states in the spring of 1865. General Sherman, in a letter to me
dated December 4, 1884, published in the "Sherman Letters," narrated
his remarks at a meeting of the Frank Blair Post, G. A. R., No. 1,
in St. Louis, in which he said that he had noticed the tendency to
gloss over old names and facts by speaking of the Rebellion as a
war of secession, while in fact it was a conspiracy up to the firing
on Fort Sumter, and a rebellion afterwards. He described the
conspiracy between Slidell, Benjamin and Davis, and the seizure of
the United States arsenal at Baton Rouge, and other acts of war,
and then said:

"I had seen a letter of Mr. Davis showing that he was not sincere
in his doctrine of secession, for when some of the states of the
Confederacy, in 1865, talked of 'a separate state action,' another
name for 'secession,' he stated that he, as president of the
Confederacy, would resist it, even if he had to turn Lee's army
against it. I did see such a letter, or its copy, in a captured
letter book at Raleigh, just about as the war was closing."

Davis called for the production of the identical letter. General
Sherman said he could not enter into a statement of the controversy,
but he believed the truth of his statement could be established,
and that he would collect evidence to make good his statement. I
replied to his letter as follows:

"Unite