Mr. Raymond was bitterly disappointed. Few members had ever entered the House with greater personal prestige or with stronger assurance of success. He had come with a high ambition, an ambition justified by his talent and training. He had come with the expectation of a Congressional career as successful as that already achieved in his editorial life. But he met a defeat which hardly fell short of a disaster. He had made a good reply to Mr. Stevens, had indeed gained much credit by it, and when he returned home for the holidays he had reason to believe that he had made a brilliant beginning in the parliamentary field. But the speech of Mr. Shellabarger had destroyed his argument, and had given a rallying-point for the Republicans, so incontestably strong as to hold the entire party in allegiance to principle rather than in allegiance to the Administration. If any thing had been needed to complete Mr. Raymond's discomfiture after the speech of Mr. Shellabarger, it was supplied in the speech of Mr. Voorhees. He had been ranked among the most virulent opponents of Mr. Lincoln's Administration, had been bitterly denunciatory of the war policy of the Government, and was regarded as a leader of that section of the Democratic party to which the most odious epithets of disloyalty had been popularly applied. Mr. Raymond, in speaking of the defeat, always said that the Democrats had destroyed Johnson by their support, and that he could have effected a serious division in the ranks of Republican members if he could have had the benefit of the hostility of Mr. Voorhees and other anti-war Democrats. Three weeks after Mr. Shellabarger's reply Mr. Raymond made a rejoinder. He struggled hard to recover the ground which he had obviously lost, but he did not succeed in changing his status in the House, or in securing recruits for the Administration from the ranks of his fellow Republicans. To fail in that was to fail in every thing. That he made a clever speech was not denied, for every intellectual effort of Mr. Raymond exhibited cleverness. That he made the most of a weak cause, and to some extent influenced public opinion, must also be freely conceded. But his most partial friends were compelled to admit that he had absolutely failed to influence Republican action in Congress, and had only succeeded in making himself an apparent ally of the Democratic party-a position in every way unwelcome and distasteful to Mr. Raymond. His closing speech was marked by many pointed interruptions from Mr. Shellabarger and was answered at some length by Mr. Stevens. But nothing, beyond a few keen thrusts and parries and some sharp wit at Mr. Raymond's expense, was added to the debate. Mr. Raymond never rallied from the defeat of January 9th. His talents were acknowledged; his courteous manners, his wide intelligence, his generous hospitality, gave him a large popularity; but his alliance with President Johnson was fatal to his political fortunes. He had placed himself in a position from which he could not with grace retreat, and to go forward in which was still further to blight his hopes of promotion in his party. It was an extremely mortifying fact to Mr. Raymond that with the power of the Administration behind him he could on a test question secure the support of only one Republican member, and he a colleague who was bound to him. by ties of personal friendship. The fate which befell Mr. Raymond, apart from the essential weakness of the issue on which he staked his success, is not uncommon to men who enter Congress with great reputation already attained. So much is expected of them that their efforts on the floor are almost sure to fall below the standard set up for them by their hearers. By natural re-action they receive, in consequence, less credit than is their due. Except in a few marked instances the House has always been led by men whose reputation has been acquired in its service. Entering unheralded, free from the requirements which expectation imposes, a clever man is sure to receive more credit than is really his due when he is so fortunate as to arrest the attention of members in his first speech. Thenceforward, if he be discreet enough to move slowly and modestly, he acquires a secure standing and may reach the highest honors which the House can confer. If, ambitious of a career, Mr. Raymond had been elected to Congress when he was chosen to the New-York Legislature at twentynine years of age, or five years later when he was made Lieutenantgovernor of his State, he might have attained a great parliamentary fame. It has long been a tradition of the House that no man becomes its leader who does not enter it before he is forty. Like most sweeping affirmations this has its exceptions, but the list of young men who have been advanced to prominent positions in the body is so large that it may well be assumed as the rule of promotion. Mr. Raymond was nearly forty-six when he made his first speech in the House. While he still exhibited the intellectual acuteness and alertness which had always been his characteristics, there was apparent in his face the mental weariness which had come from the prolonged and exacting labor of his profession. His parliamentary failure was a keen disappointment to him, and was not improbably one among many causes which cut short a brilliant and useful life. He died in 1869, in the forty-ninth year of his age. This first debate on reconstruction developed the fact that the Democrats in Congress would endeavor to regain the ground they had lost by their hostility to Mr. Lincoln's Administration during the war. The extreme members of that party, while the war was flagrant, adhered to many dogmas which were considered unpatriotic and to none more so than the declaration that even in case of secession "there is no power in the Constitution to coerce a State." They now united in the declaration, as embodied in the resolution of Mr. Voorhees, that "no State or number of States confederated together can in any manner sunder their connection with the Federal Union." This was intended as a direct and defiant answer to the heretical creed of Mr. Stevens, that the States by their attempted secession were really no longer members of the Union and could not become so until regularly re-admitted by Congress. By antagonizing this declaration the Democrats strove to convince the country that it was the accepted doctrine of their political opponents, and that they were themselves the true and tried friends of the Union. The great majority of the Republican leaders, however, did not at all agree with the theory of Mr. Stevens and the mass of the party were steadily against him. The one signal proof of their dissent from the extreme doctrine was their absolute unwillingness to attempt an amendment to the Constitution by the ratification of three-fourths of the Loyal States only, and their insisting that it must be three-fourths of all the States, North and South. Mr. Stevens deemed this a fatal step for the party, and his extreme opinion had the indorsement of Mr. Sumner; but against both these radical leaders the party was governed by its own conservative instincts. They believed with Mr. Lincoln that the Stevens plan of amendment would always be questioned, and that in so grave a matter as a change in the organic law of the Nation, the process should be unquestionable one that could stand every test and resist every assault. The Republicans, as might well have been expected, did not stand on the defensive in such a controversy with their opponents. They became confidently aggressive. They alleged that when the Union was in danger from secession the Northern Democrats did all in their power to inflame the trouble, urged the Southern leaders to persevere and not yield to the Abolitionists, and even when war was imminent did nothing to allay the danger, but every thing to encourage its authors. Now that war was over, the Democrats insisted on the offending States being instantly re-invested with all the rights of loyalty, without promise and without condition. At the beginning of the war and after its close, therefore, they had been hand in hand. with the offending rebels, practically working at both periods to bring about the result desired by the South. Their policy, in short, seemed to have the interests of the guilty authors of the Rebellion more at heart than the safety of the Union. Their efforts now to clothe the Southern conspirators with fresh power and to take no note of the crimes which had for four years drenched the land in blood, constituted an offense only less grave in the eyes of the Republicans than the aid and comfort given to the Rebellion in the hour of its inception. These were the accusations and criminations which were exchanged between the political parties. They lent acrimony to the impending canvass and increased the mutual hostility of those engaged in the exciting controversy. The Republicans were resolved that their action should neither be misinterpreted by opposing partisans nor misunderstood by the people. They were confident that when their position should be correctly apprehended it would still more strongly confirm their claim to be the special and jealous guardians of the Union of the States of a Union so strongly based that future rebellion would be rendered impossible, the safety and glory of the Republic made perpetual. CHAPTER VII. SENATE DEBATE ON RECONSTRUCTION.-SPEECH OF MR. WILSON.-DENOUNCES THE HUYSEN SUCCEEDS HIM. HE debate on the direct question of Reconstruction did not begin at so early a date in the Senate as in the House, but kindred topics led to the same line of discussion as that in which the House found itself engaged. During the first week of the session Mr. Wilson of Massachusetts had submitted a bill for the protection of freedmen, designed to overthrow and destroy the odious enactments which in many of the Southern States were rapidly reducing the entire negro race to a new form of slavery. Mr. Wilson's bill provided that "all laws, statutes, acts, ordinances, rules and regulations in any of the States lately in rebellion, whereby inequality of civil rights and immunities among the inhabitants |