We have sketched some of the influences
amid which he grew up, inheriting his father's love of country, mindful
of the old patriot's valor in so many conflicts of the Revolution, and
having close before his eyes the example of brothers and relatives, more
than one of whom have bled for America, both at the extremest north and
farthest south; himself, too, in early manhood, serving the Union in its
legislative halls, and, at a maturer age, leading his fellow-citizens,
his brethren, from the widest-sundered states, to redden the same
battle-fields with their kindred blood, to unite their breath into one
shout of victory, and perhaps to sleep, side by side, with the same sod
over them. Such a man, with such hereditary recollections, and such a
personal experience, must not narrow himself to adopt the cause of one
section of his native country against another. He will stand up, as he
has always stood, among the patriots of the whole land. And if the work
of antislavery agitation, which it is undeniable leaves most men who
earnestly engage in it with only half a country in their affections,--if
this work must be done, let others do it.
Those northern men, therefore, who deem the great causes of human welfare
as represented and involved in this present hostility against southern
institutions, and who conceive that the world stands still except so far
as that goes forward,--these, it may be allowed, can scarcely give their
sympathy or their confidence to the subject of this memoir.
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