of the West with relief to Major Anderson at Fort Sumter, hoping even that effort to uphold the national honor would end with old "Fuss and Feathers;" he was to the end unconditionally opposed to any thing like coercion, even the very name of coercion, and as strongly and definitely favored peaceful separation, which in itself would have been impossible, besides being the most utter folly, if a dissolution of the Union was necessary; he opposed the very idea of a war for the perpetuation of the Union, and believing it should be cherished by all, did not consider it worth the price of blood; his doctrine of strict construction of the Constitution he never ceased with great unreasonableness to apply to all the acts of Mr. Lincoln's Administration, when a state of war rendered it inapplicable; he favored every degree of tolerance and concession on the part of the North, and asked of the South only a little patience and time; his warm defense and support of the doctrine of State Rights, and attachment to Southern manners and Southern politicians gave him almost a decided preference for their institutions; still on the authority of Judge Minot, and his own early utterances, Pierce was not a pro-slavery Democrat, and did not sympathize with the "Southern institution " any more than other fair Northern man; but placing Constitutional obligations above sectional preferences, and believing that the spirit of concession which actuated the framers of the Constitution was still the only spirit that would save the country, acted always consistently upon this belief.

It may here be remarked, however, that at this day this claim as to General Pierce's pro-slavery or non-pro-slavery position amounts to but little, as it is well known and not controverted, that many of the Democratic leaders, at least in the North, were always pro-slavery men, at any rate so far as the "institution" of this country then existing in the South was concerned. Several of the old party managers have recently so asserted to me, although this imputation was to a great extent resisted while slavery lived. This fact was always well known in the South, although little talked of, and was relied upon until the end of Mr. Pierce's Administration. Not till then did Southern men see that they would mainly have to fight their own battles. With the mass of the Democrats at the North the Union was worth more than slavery, however little the negro might deserve consideration.

Concession to the South, as he believed for the sake of the Union, became a real passion with General Pierce toward the close of Mr. Buchanan's Administration; he would have been glad to have a Southern President, even Jefferson Davis, as Mr. Buchanan's successor; he believed the war which followed unnecessary and cruel and unjust to the South, and as the natural consequence of the acts of the extreme men of his own section, and in this opinion he remained. He neither approved nor supported any act of Mr. Lincoln's Administration. If the war could have been prevented and the Union saved, he would have been willing to guarantee the South

eternal security from disturbance about slavery, yet he never deplored the overthrow of slavery. He constantly fretted about infringements and neglect of the Constitution by the National Administration, but showed little concern on account of the course of the South; he deeply sympathized with the suspected enemies of the cause of the Union on the border, who were arrested and deprived of their liberty; his own case with Mr. Seward and at his own home gave him an additional incentive to this feeling; his letter to Milton Latham shows, perhaps, a grain of desire to add what he could casually to the general disturbances of the times; the foregoing letter, dated March 21, 1862, marked "private," and showing too clearly how little he cared for the prejudices (as he would term them) of his section, then "lost to virtue," may be read with surprise even now; he claimed some hope or fear of being nominated at Chicago in 1864, but warmly supported McClellan; and to the end swerved but little from the principles on which he started in politics, and never for a moment broke his connection with or faith in the men of the South who carried him into the President's Chair and supported his official conduct, and who never afterwards neglected to render him and his memory after him the praise said to be due for such services and confidence.

There is no evidence that General Pierce ever saw, in the light of regret, the turn his own course, as President, gave to public affairs. If he was above all others the Constitutional President, being so did not bring peace and harmony to the country, but

rather spread and fixed the elements of revolution and war. Having never appeared as a statesman before his election, his Presidency did not elevate him to that rank. His failure to fulfill the promises of his inaugural and first message furnishes a sufficient pretext for this assertion, and his last messages demolish any claim to genuine statesmanship which it could be desired to erect here to his memory. His judgment had been at fault; his predictions as to the war and its results failed; his subsequent predictions failed; his own ability and resources had failed to give the direction of stable peace which he most desired when he was at the head of affairs with a harmonious Cabinet, or to effect in the least the evil course of events, as he claimed, subsequently; and thus with a merely nominal influence in his own party, with less desire for worldly or political consideration he passed on to the end, before he was able to catch a glimpse of fraternal hands obliterating the "bloody chasm" in a better, freer, and more progressive Union.

CHAPTER XXIII.

FRANKLIN PIERCE-THE MAN-HIS QUALITIES AND CAREER-HIS PRIVATE CHARACTER-A SOLITARY VICEMRS. PIERCE AND THE WHITE HOUSE - HOME IN CONCORD-ON EARTII-THE END.

N the winter of 1863 Mrs. Pierce died, but she

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had been so long an invalid that this event made little change in the life of her husband. In a true, manly way, with earnest and gentle devotion, he had clung to her to the last, and now he quietly continued on the road they had been accustomed to walk together. During the summers he spent much of his time down at Rye Beech on the Atlantic coast. He had a house down there, and Mrs. Willard Williams, his old housekeeper, kept it for him; and there he entertained his old political friends in a sumptuous style, and to his own hurt in more ways than one. His life had been marked by many admirable traits, and, may be, some great ones, and in most respects he sustained himself to the close.

His personal friends were not very numerous, nor did he put great stress upon what is commonly known as friendship. Among men, he was most attached to Nathaniel Hawthorne. His description of Hawthorne's journey to death is one of the most tender and beautiful things of its kind ever written by the pen of a