by the Confederate leaders as almost without a peer as an infantry commander and early rose to the rank of major general. He was mortally wounded in the battle of Cedar Creek and was tenderly nursed in his dying hours by classmates and friends whom he had known at West Point. Kerr, a man of intellect and courage, also from the old North state, died young without rising to distinction. Gibbes, of South Carolina, who fought Upton unsuccessfully as a cadet because he was an abolitionist, fired the first gun at Sumter and saw the last one fired at Appomattox. Huger, of the same state, with a long line of distinguished ancestors, was far from being a disunionist, but he cast his lot with "his people," and after serving them as a staff officer became a successful railroad man and lived beyond three score years. McCreery, a brilliant and ambitious Virginian, was killed at Antietam. He had provoked me, unfortunately for himself, into the only fight I had in my cadet days, ostensibly because of impatient words I had used toward him at artillery drill, but really because I was a Northerner, and he and his friends thought a licking would do me good. Gibbes was his second and Hall was mine. The fight was with bare fists, "rough and tumble" to a finish without a break, according to the local rules. It came off after supper within the hallowed precincts of old Fort Clinton of Revolutionary memory. It was short, sharp, and decisive. But the hardest case of all was that of Riley, one of the handsomest, most engaging, and most popular men of the class. He was the son of General Bennett Riley of the regular army, a noted hero of the Mexican War, originally

from western New York. The youngster, on graduating, was sent to the extreme West, where he served with Earl Van Dorn and other Southern officers, and through some strange fatuity or some fatal friendship he cast his lot with the South and lost as bravely as the best with the comrades and the cause for which he stood.

The man who graduated at the foot of the class was Borland, of Arkansas, the son of a senator of that name. He was a good fellow and a great favorite and had taken seven years to master the course. By reasoning altogether his own, although as poor as Job's turkey, he conceived that "his rights in the territories" might be withheld by a Republican administration, and so he, too, went to fight for the South. A life of obscure employments, followed by an old age of suffering and penury, are his lot among the people he served so faithfully.

Last, but not least, was the grave and austere McFarland, the brightest of them all, who graduated easily head of the class, and from music to quaternions never encountered an art or a science he did not master. With the mind of a Laplace and the skill of a Vauban, he was fitted for any place that fortune might bring, and should have left his mark deeply impressed upon the times in which he lived. But fortune was against him from the first, and his superb equipment as a soldier and scientist was his undoing. It brought him the duty of constructing permanent fortifications and sea-coast defences, which were to assist in making good the blockade and cutting off outside help, without which it was impossible for the Confederacy to succeed. This important but modest service kept him generally far

from the march of contending armies and from the excitement and danger of battle, and thus it continued, not only for the greater part of the war, but until middle life. He died from rheumatism of the heart. He was loved and honored by all, but his hopes had been disappointed and his "white, unstained soldier's plume," with all its inspirations, remained to the end but a dream and a disappointment.

I have always felt that the decade at the end of which my class graduated was the golden age of West Point. This may be because I knew it better than I have ever known it since, but in those days it was eminently the place of "the square deal.” Neither outside pull nor inside intrigue could influence the standing of any man nor change the course of the academic board so much as a hair's breadth. The officers of all grades were the selected men of the army. None but an engineer of the highest rank and attainments had up to that time ever held the position of superintendent, and the discipline was perfect. There was now and then a little harmless hazing and occasionally some that was far too rough, but it was either judiciously ignored or firmly and effectively dealt with by the superintendent without advertising the matter or calling on the War Department for assistance. The fact is that such a call would have been considered as an evidence of incapacity and weakness by an officer of Colonel Delafield's experience and character.

During my time at the Academy and afterward till the first gun of the war was fired, politics ran high. We were boys, but, coming from every Congressional district of the Union, the corps of cadets

was as much a representative body as Congress itself. We all read the newspapers, not only from New York, but from home towns, and all took sides. I was a Douglas Democrat, possibly as much by reason of my Southern ancestry as because "the Little Giant" was from my state and because in debates with his opponents, and especially with Jefferson Davis, he proudly proclaimed that he would neither ask nor grant quarter. My section of the state was always strongly Democratic and it was devoted to Douglas. My own county, Gallatin, gave Mr. Lincoln only sixty-five votes for president and Mr. Douglas all the rest. His doctrine of popular sovereignty seemed to be not only plausible, but consistent with the right of self-government which lay at the base of the American system. I was familiar with the Constitution and its commentaries as taught in our course of law, but I did not perceive that the District of Columbia and the territories were not sovereignties at all, but were under the absolute control of Congress. I was opposed to slavery itself, but I realized that it was under the protection of the law and beyond the power of Congress to regulate or abolish it. I believed in the patriotism of Douglas and in his steadfast devotion to the Union.

It has always seemed to me that Lincoln's biographers, Nicolay and Hay, often went out of their way to belittle Douglas in order to exalt their great Chief, and that this really served to depreciate Lincoln. "Arts of the demagogue," "vicious methods," "quibbling," "success above principle," "plausible but delusive," are among the unkind phrases applied to Douglas in reviewing the points of contact between these two really great men. But Lincoln's

biographers were not always unkind. Indeed, they concede Douglas' great ability, and at times laud him highly, but generally leave the impression that he was actuated by motives less lofty, and that he moved on a moral plane distinctly lower than Lincoln's. They seem to have overlooked the fact that in all the arts of the mere politician their wily Chief had served a full apprenticeship in the trade and that he could easily give Mr. Douglas large odds and beat him at the game. They pass over the great and inestimable service rendered by Douglas to the cause of the Union in his last days with slight or inadequate mention, and make no quotations from his two masterly and decisive speeches following his last personal conference with Lincoln in Washington April 14, 1861. It is hardly too much to say of those speeches that they were decisive of a unified North in "the impending conflict," and that they constituted beyond comparison the greatest individual service rendered to the Union by any public man, not even excepting Mr. Lincoln's, in the crucial days following the attack on Fort Sumter. In their farreaching results they have rarely been equaled and never surpassed by any forensic effort of ancient or modern times.

At Springfield, April 25, 1861, before a joint session of the two houses of the legislature, over which the now venerable Shelby M. Cullom presided, Douglas, in the greatest speech of his life, aroused his large audience to a frenzy of patriotic enthusiasm when at the height of his eloquent appeal for the Union he said:

"When hostile armies are marching under new and odious banners against the government