tions and generous habits he would have made a larger
figure in the war, having led the South's exit from the Senate.

VI

I do not think that either Hammond or Chestnut, the Senators from
South Carolina, both men of parts, had at bottom much belief in the
practicability of the Confederate movement. Neither had the Senators
from Arkansas and Alabama, nor Brown, of Mississippi, the colleague of
Jefferson Davis. Mason, of Virginia, a dogged old donkey, and Iverson,
of Georgia, another, were the kind of men whom Wigfall dominated.

One of the least confident of those who looked on and afterward fell in
line was the Vice President, John C. Breckenridge, of Kentucky. He
was the Beau Sabreur among statesmen as Albert Sidney Johnston, among
soldiers. Never man handsomer in person or more winning in manners.
Sprung from a race of political aristocrats, he was born to early
and shining success in public life. Of moderate opinions, winning and
prudent, wherever he appeared he carried his audience with him. He had
been elected on the ticket with Buchanan to the second office under
the Government, when he was but five and thirty years of age. There was
nothing for him to gain from a division of the Union; the Presidency,
perhaps, if the Union continued undivided. But he could not resist the
onrush of disunionism, went with the South, which he served first in the
field and later as Confederate Secretary of War, and after a few years
of self-imposed exile in Europe returned to Kentucky to die at four and
fifty, a defeated and disappointed old man.

The adjoining state of Tennessee was represented in the Senate by one of
the most problematic characters in American history. With my father, who
remained his friend through life, he had entered the state legislature
in 1835, and having served ten years in the lower House of Congress, and
four years as governor of Tennessee he came back in 1857 to the National
Capital, a member of the Upper House. He was Andrew Johnson.

I knew him from my childhood. Thrice that I can recall I saw him weep;
never did I see him laugh. Life had been very serious, albeit very
successful, to him. Of unknown parentage, the wife he had married before
he was one and twenty had taught him to read. Yet at six and twenty
he was in the Tennessee General Assembly and at four and thirty in
Congress.

There was from first to last not a little about him to baffle
conjecture. I should call him a cross between