Memorial addresses on the life and character of Benjamin Harvey Hill (a senator from Georgia), delivered in the Senate and House of representatives, Forty-seventh Congress, second session, January 25, 1883

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MEMORIAL ADDRESSES
LIFE AND CHARACTER

/BENJA/VLIN

HARVEY
y

(A SENATOR FROM GEORGIA ),

DBL1VBBBD IK THB

SENATE AND HOUSE OF REPEESENTATIVES,

POETY-SBTETTTH CONGRESS, SECOND SESSION,
JANUARY 1)5, 1883.

WASHINGTON:
GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE.
1883.

JOINT RESOLUTION to print certain eulogies delivered in Congress upen the late Benjamin H. Hill.
Be it resolved In/ th-e Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That there be printed twelve thousand copies of the eulogies delivered in Congress upon the late Benjamin H. Hill, a Sena tor from the State of Georgia, of which four thousand shall be for the use of the Senate, and eight thousand for the use of the House of Eepresentatives; and the Secretary of the Treasury be, and he is hereby, directed to have printed a portrait of said Benjamin H. Hill to accompany each copy of said eulogies; and for the purpose of defraying the expense of engraving and print ing the said portrait, the sum of six hundred dollars, or so much thereof as may be necessary, be, and the same is hereby, appropriated out of any money in the Treasury not otherwise appropriated.
Approved February 23, 1883.

ANNOUNCEMENT
OF THE
DEATH OF BENJAMIN HARVEY HILL,
A SENATOR FROM GEORGIA,

IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES, Monday, December 4, 1882.

Rev. J. J. BULLOCK, D. Dv Chaplain to the Senate, offered the

following

PKAYER :

Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, it ever becomes us to ap proach Thee with the voice of gratitude and praise, for Thou art good, O Lord, and Thou doest good to all, and Thy tender mercies are over all Thy works. We thank Thee for all the goodness and mercy which have crowned our past lives. Especially would we offer up our humble and hearty thanks unto Thee for Thy watch ful providence over us during the period of our separation, and that we are permitted to meet together again under circumstances of great mercy in the enjoyment of health, of reason, and of every blessing.
Defend and deliver us from all evil. Guide us in the way of wisdom, of truth, and of righteousness. May we have peace in all our borders and prosperity in all our habitations.
Bless our rulers, the President of the United States, the Presi dent of the Senate, the Senators and Representatives in Congress,

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LIFE AND CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN H. HILL.

and all others in authority. Guide and assist them to discharge aright the duties and responsibilities which devolve upon them as the rulers of this great country. Fill our land with the knowl edge of Thy truth and with the fruits of righteousness. May we long live a united, happy, and prosperous people.
God be merciful unto us and bless us, and cause His face to shine upon us, and give us pardon and peace and eternal life. -Through Jesus Christ, our Redeemer. Amen.

Mr. BKOWN. Mr. President, it becomes my most painful duty, in this official form, to announce to the Senate the death of my late colleague, Hon. BENJAMIN H. HILL. That patriotic citizen, grand orator, able statesmen, and Christian gentleman died at his residence, in the city of Atlanta, on the 16th day of August last. The intelligence of the death of Senator Hill was received with profound regret throughout the whole country. But the people of Georgia, whom he had so ably served and who had so long de lighted to honor him, were the greatest sufferers. Grief-stricken, they bowed their heads in sorrow, and will long mourn their
irreparable loss. But, Mr. President, having performed the melancholy duty of
announcing the death of my late colleague to the Senate, the pro prieties of the occasion will not, at present, permit a farther exten sion of these remarks. At a future day I shall ask a suspension of the public business, that the Senate, in connection with the House of Representatives, may pay fitting tribute to the character, the virtues, the ability, and the services of the deceased Senator.
I now offer the following resolutions, and move their immediate
consideration:
Resolved, That the Senate has heardwith profound sorrow of the death of Hon. BENJAMIN H. HILL, a Senator from the State of Georgia.
Resolved, That the Secretary communicate these proceedings to the House of Representatives.
Resolved, As a token of respect to the memory of the deceased, that the Sen ate do now adjourn.
The resolutions were agreed to unanimously; and (at two oclock and forty-five minutes p. m.) the Senate adjourned.

ADDEESSES
ON THE
DEATH OF BENJAMIN HARVEY HILL,
A SENATOK FROM GEOK&IA.
DELIVERED IN THE SENATE Thursday, January 25, 1883.
The PKESIDENT pro tempore. This day having been set apart for services in honor of the memory of our late brother BENJAMIN H. HILL, the usual morning business will be dispensed with.
Mr. BROWN. I submit the resolutions which I send to the Chair, and I ask for their immediate consideration.
The PEESIDENT pro tempore. The resolutions will be read. The Acting Secretary read the resolutions, as follows :
Resolved, That earnestly desiring to show every possible mark of respect to the memory of the Hon. BENJAMIN H. HILL, late a Senator of the United States from the State of Georgia, and to manifest the high estimate in which his eminent public services and distinguished patriotism are held, the busi ness of the Senate be now suspended, that the friends and late associates of Senator HILL may pay fitting tribute to Ms high character, his public serv ices, and his private virtues.
Resolved, That in the death of Senator HILL the country has sustained a loss which has been felt and deplored to the upmost limits of the Union.
Beaolted, That the Secretary of the Senate communicate these resolutions to the House of Representatives.
Resolved, That as an additional mark of respect to the memory of the de - ceased the Senate do now adjourn.
r,J

LIFE AND CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN B. HILL.
Address of Mr. BROWN, of Georgia.
Mr. PBESIDENT: BENJAMIN HAKVUY HILL, whose life, charac ter, and distinguished services are the subject of our present con sideration, was born at Hillsborough, in Jasper County, Georgia, on the 14th day of September, 1823. His father, Mr. John Hill, was a gentleman of limited means, without a liberal education. But he was a man of spotless character, of very strong common sense, and a great deal of will power, who always exerted an ex tensive influence in his neighborhood and section.
The mother of the distinguished statesman, whose maiden name was Parham, was a lady of very fine traits of character, whose pre cepts and example exerted a most salutary and powerful influence over her children. Mr. and Mrs. Hill were devoted and consist ent members of the Methodist Church. They lived and died in the faith, and were eminently useful in their day and generation.
"When the subject of this sketch was about ten years old his father moved from Hillsborough to the, neighborhood called Long Cane, in Troup County, Georgia, which was his home until the day of his death. Mr. Hill not only trained his children to habits of morality and Christian virtue, but he caused them to labor with their hands and earn their bread by the sweat of their brow. Being a sober, industrious, and persevering man, he accumulated prior to his death a considerable property, and was able to give to each of his nine children something quite respectable to start life with. His son Benjamin was obedient and faithful to his parents ; he labored hard to aid his father. While he was quite industrious, he was noted as a very bright and promising youth. When he reached the age of 18 years he was very anxious to improve the education which he had been able to obtain in the country by going through a course in the University of Georgia. But as the family was large his father felt that he had not the means to spare, and do justice to the other children, which were necessary to complete the collegiate course of his son. After a family consultation it was agreed by the mother and by a good and faithful aunt that they, out of the

ADDRESS OF MR. BROWN, OF GEORGIA.

7

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small means they had accumulated, would furnish one-half the

amount, the father furnishing the other half. Under this arrange

ment the gifted son was enabled to enter the State University.

Before he left home he promised his mother, if the means could

be raised to enable him to complete his collegiate course, that he

would take the first honor in his class.

In the university the young student was industrious, attentive,

and energetic. His progress was rapid, and his mental develop

ment very gratifying to his numerous friends in the university and

elsewhere, who watched his progress and the development of his

genius with great pride and gratification. When the commence

ment came at the end of the senior year, the faculty unanimously

awarded the first honor to young HILL, He also took all the

honors of the literary society to which he belonged. And in a famil

iar letter to a friend he said, within the last few years, that was the

proudest day of his life, and that nothing ever afforded him more

gratification than it did to write to his mother the news that filled

his heart with so much joy.

Soon after the close of his collegiate career Mr. HILL was mar

ried to Miss Caroline Holt, of Athens, Georgia, a young lady be

longing to one of Georgias oldest and most honored families ; of

good fortune, great amiability, beauty, and accomplishments. The

happy and brilliant young couple settled in La Grange, in Troup

County, where Mr. HILL, who had already studied law and been

admitted to the bar, commenced the practice of his profession.

From the very commencement, the tact, research, and ability with

which he conducted his earliest cases gave bright promise of his

future eminence. He grew rapidly at the bar until he was soon

employed in every important case in his county, and his professional

fame spread into the adjoining counties of the State and he became

the center figure at the bar in the courts of his circuit.

In connection with his legal practice Mr. HILL purchased a

valuable plantation, and with the slaves that he obtained by his

wife and by inheritance from his father, and purchased from time

to time out of his incomes, he conducted the business of planting

on an extensive and profitable scale.

8

LIFE AND CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN H. HILL.

Mr. HILL started life an ardent Whig; and it could not be ex pected that a young lawyer of his brilliant talents could long keep out of politics. In 1851 he was elected to the house of represent atives of the legislature of Georgia, where he soon rose to the position of one of the ablest debaters and most influential members of that body. After the legislature adjourned he resumed the practice of his profession with great skill and energy.
The old Whig party having in the mean time been dissolved in Georgia, Mr. HILL in 1855 became a member of what was known as the American party, and was nominated by that party as their candidate for Congress, in opposition to Hon. Hiram Warner, the Democratic nominee. The race was an exciting one. Judge War ner was one of the ablest and most profound men of the State, though not a distinguished orator. Mr. HILL canvassed the dis trict, and usually had the advantage everywhere in the popular applause. He was defeated, however, Judge Warner securing a small majority.
In 1856 Mr. HILL was a candidate for elector for the State at large on the Fillmore ticket. He canvassed the State with great energy, ability, and eloquence. From the day on which he made his first grand effort in support of his candidate must be dated his recognition as the leader of his party in Georgia. During the campaign he met the leading Democratic speakers at various points. He had an animated discussion with Mr. Stephens at Lexington, and with General Toombs at Washington, Georgia. His most ar dent admirers were entirely content with the ability he displayed in these contests with his distinguished opponents.
From that time forward his influence with his party was un bounded. They not only trusted and followed him but he con trolled them absolutely.
In 1857 the author of this sketch was nominated by the Demo cratic party of Georgia as their candidate for governor, and Mr. HILL was nominated by the American party for the same position. We were both young and ardent. I was 36 years of age, he 34. We had never met till the day of our first joint discussion, when we were leading our respective parties ..as opposing candidates. The

ADDRESS OF MB. SHOWN, OF GEORGIA.

9

contest was energetic and exciting. Mr. HILL, displayed great powers of eloquence in the debates, and was an exceedingly inter esting and formidable competitor. The contest ended in the elec
tion of the Democratic candidate. Mr. HILL then stood among the very first men of the country
as a political debater, and occupied a very high rank as a lawyer and as an advocate at the bar.
In 1859 he was elected by his party to the senate of Georgia. He exhibited great power in the debates of the session, and was without a rival the leader of his party in the legislature.
In 1860 he was again a candidate for Presidential elector, and canvassed the State for Bell and Everett for President and VicePresident. His speeches were exceedingly able and brilliant.
The election of Mr. Lincoln to the Presidency, as the South regarded it, upon a strictly sectional platform, brought about the overwhelming discontent in that section which resulted in the se cession of the Southern States and the unfortunate civil war. When a convention.to consider this question was called in Georgia, Mr. HILL was with great unanimity elected a member of it from the county of Troup. He was an avowed Union man, and in conjunc tion with Alexander H. Stephens, Herschell V. Johnson, Linton Stephens, and some others, leading men of Georgia, he opposed . secession ably and earnestly until the final passage of the resolution that it was the right and duty of Georgia to secede. When the ordinance was passed he signed it, taking position, as did the other distinguished gentlemen whose names I have mentioned, that as a Georgian he owed his allegiance first to the State of his nativity, of his manhood, and of his home; that her people were his people, and her fete should be his fate.
-After the State had seceded, Mr. HILL was chosen one of the delegates to the Confederate convention at Montgomery, Alabama. In that convention he took an able and distinguished part. Soon after the convention adjourned, when the time came to elect Con federate senators, he was chosen for the long term, and took his seat in the Confederate senate,which he occupied till the end of the war. He was made chairman of the judiciary committee, and had the confidence of President Davis to the fullest extent, and was

10

LIFE AND CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN H. SILL.

regarded the ablest supporter of Mr. Daviss policy in the senate. And when the cause was waning, and our people were deeply de pressed, Mr. HILL left the senate and went upon the stump, and was making an able effort to arouse the spirits of the people of Georgia and of the Confederacy to renewed resistance when General Lee surrendered.
Soon after the Confederacy failed, when many of those who had been considered the leaders were arrested, Mr. HILL was among the number. While President Davis was consigned to a cell in Fortress Monroe, and Vice-President Stephens to one in Fort Warren, and the author of this sketch, with a number of distin guished Confederates, was incarcerated in the Carroll Prison in this city, Mr. HILL was assigned to quarters in Fort Lafayette, in New York harbor.
After the release of Mr. HILL from prison, he returned to Georgia and resumed the practice of his profession with great energy and splendid success. He pursued his profession, taking little part in politics, until after the passage of the reconstruction acts in March, 1867, when it was again the misfortune of the author of this sketch to differ with his former opponent.
After our resources were exhausted and our armies had surren dered, I thought I saw that we were in the power and at the mercy of a conquering Government, and I advised the people of Georgia to acquiesce promptly in the terms dictated by Congress; to take part in the convention which was called by the military command er in charge of the district embracing the State of Georgia; to send our best men as members; to secure the best constitution pos sible, and under it try to live a peaceable life and labor to restore prosperity at the earliest day within our power. A majority of the white people of Georgia differed with me on that point Mr. HILL among them. He believed by an able and bold opposition to the measures prescribed by Congress, and by resistance to them in every manner not forcible, the people of the Northern and Western States would condemn the action of Congress, restore the Democratic party to power, and we would be saved much of the humiliation we had been exposed to by acts of Congress which were regarded by our people as illiberal and unjust. ^

ADDRESS OF MB. BROWN, OF GEORGIA.

11

When Mr. HILL espoused the cause on this line, he did it with all the ability, earnestness, energy, and enthusiasm of his nature. He attended the first Democratic convention held in Georgia, and was the leading spirit and director of it. In the face of the mili tary, with undaunted spirit, he made what was known as his " Davis Hall speech," in the city of Atlanta, which, as a masterpiece of de nunciation, philippic, and invective, has scarcely ever been equaled, except in what were known as his "Bush-arbor speech" and his " Notes on the Situation." The magic power of his declamation and of his denunciation were overwhelming and terrific. Probably no one of the masters of elocution who has lived on this continent has surpassed it.
As the author of this sketch had affiliated with the reconstruc tion party, his course shared liberally in the overwhelming and terrific denunciation of the great orator. Reference to the replies which were made to these vigorous assaults is not appropriate to this occasion. The period was a stormy one. The debates were bitter and even vindictive on both sides. It was a time of mad ness. Social relations were sundered in many cases, and there was for a time an upheaval of the very foundations of society. During this extraordinary period, when the whole political fabric of the State seemed to rock amid the throes of dissolution, no one figured so grandly as Mr. HILL, and no one was so idolized as he.
But the people of the South were doomed to an unconditional surrender. We were compelled to accept the reconstruction meas ures. When we rejected the fourteenth Constitutional amendment, the fifteenth was proposed, and we were afterward compelled to ac cept both before we could be readmitted to representation in the Congress of the United States.
After the reconstruction of the States was completed under the plan dictated by Congress, and the Constitutional amendments were adopted and incorporated into and became part of that instrument, it was discovered by all that both the Congress and the courts would unquestionably sustain those new provisions of the Constitution as part of the fundamental law of this country, and that the Govern ment would be administered accordingly.
In this state of things, in the fall of 1870 Mr. HILL became

12

LIFE AND CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN H. SILL.

fully convinced of the fact that further resistance was useless. And while he believed he had saved much to the State by the course he had pursued in rallying and holding the people together and re organizing the Democracy upon a firm basis, he did not hesitate to advise the people of Georgia to cease further resistance to what was then an accomplished fact.
Seeing that further resistance was fruitless, he considered it would be criminal to continue to throw obstacles in the way of the Government. This announcement on his part exposed him for a time to severe criticism by those who did not understand his mo tives. But he was as firm and lion-like in maintaining the stand he then took as he had been in the terrible resistance which he made to the reconstruction measures as long as he entertained any hope that resistance might be successful. From this time forward Mr. HILL renewed his allegiance to the Government to the fullest extent, and did all in his power to produce quiet and contentment, which he saw were necessary to a return of peace and prosperity to our people.
During the period that intervened, for the next two or three years, he pursued his law practice with his usual ability and suc cess, and also again embarked in a large planting business in Southwestern Georgia.
But the people of Georgia were not content that he should re main a private citizen. They desired the benefit of his superb talents in the national councils; and on the death of Hon. Gar net McMillan, who was a member of the House of Representatives from the ninth district of Georgia, Mr. HILL, by an overwhelm ing majority, was elected to fill the vacancy; and he took his seat in the House. His course there is familiar to most if not all who hear me. Some splendid exhibitions of his oratorical powers in that body soon gave him an extensive national reputation. His celebrated discussion with the distinguished Representative from Maine, Mr. Blaine, was one of the most memorable that has ever occurred in the House of Representatives. Each of the able an tagonists sustained his cause in a manner entirely satisfactory to his friends. Heated, earnest, and almost vituperative as the de bate was between them, they learned to know each others ability

ADDRESS OF MB. BBOWN, OF GEORGIA.

13

and worth and were mutually benefited. Each was soon called by his State to occupy a seat in this Chamber; and as their acquaint ance was prolonged, it grew first into friendship and then into an earnest admiration of each other. The letter of condolence sent by Mr. Blaine on the death of Mr. HILL did honor alike to his head and his heart, and was highly appreciated by the numerous friends of the deceased Senator.
As to the course of Senator HILL in this body and the splendid triumphs of his eloquence and his genius which have been here ex hibited I need not speak. They are well known to the Senate, and will long be remembered by his friends, his compeers, and an appreciative public.
As I have been compelled, in order to give correctly an outline of the life and career of the great Senator, to make a passing refer ence to the early antagonism and at one time bitterness that ex isted between us, it affords me great pleasure to state that in later life, when we knew each other better and were frequently thrown together, in times less stormy and less revolutionary, when it be came our duty to consult together to determine what was most for the public good and what would soonest restore prosperity to our State and our section, our relations were changed.
I had retired from public life and had no expectation that I should ever enter it again. But I was unwilling that Mr. HILLS splendid talents should be confined simply to the practice of his profession, and I desired to see him in the councils of the Union.
When he ran for the House of Representatives, though not in his district, I had a host of friends there who sustained him. When he became a candidate for the Senate my friends held the balance of power ; and while I had great regard for the gentleman who then occupied the seat, I felt that Mr. HILL could do more to serve the State in that capacity than the incumbent. And when Governor Smith retired from the contest on the day of election my friends gave Mr. HILL their cordial support.
At a later period, when I was called unexpectedly back into the service of my State and took my seat in this Chamber, he met me with the cordiality which our relations then justified. During our

14

LIFE AND CHARACTER OF KENJAMIN H. HILL.

service together that cordiality ripened into intimate and confi dential friendship. He frequently said to me, " I regret that we had not sooner known each other better. I regret that we were thrown, when young and ardent, into the positions of antagonism which we then occupied." One of the last letters I received from him before the sad event which shocked the Union was full of con fidence and cordial friendship. Referring to the past, he said, " Who would then have thought that you were during my lifetime to become my most trusted and confidential friend?" No one felt more keenly than I did his loss, and no one shed tears of more sin cere regret. A great man has fallen. The whole country feels the shock. As a citizen he was patriotic, trusted, and beloved; as a kind and indulgent husband and father few persons can justly
be compared to him. Mr. HILLS love for his mother, and the veneration with which
he cherished her memory after her death, were beautiful and touch ing. It was his habit when at home to go every day into his par lor where her portrait hung, and to look tenderly in her face, and to bow to her on retiring. A day or two before his death, when he was too feeble to support himself without assistance, he re quested his attendants to carry him into the parlor, that he might take a last look at the likeness of the face that was so dear to him. On approaching the likeness he was visibly affected. He gazed lovingly upon the form, and as his heart heaved with emotion and his eyes filled with tears he said: " I shall soon be with her again." Then, bowing most reverently and affectionately, he was borne from the parlor, never more in this world to look upon the
form so tenderly cherished by him. But, Senators, this sketch would be incomplete without a refer
ence to the religious character of Georgias great statesman. As I have already premised, his father and mother were earnest, devout, and consistent members of the Methodist Church. At fourteen years of age BENJAMIN H. HILL became a member of that church. He was faithful and zealous, and lived a very exemplary life. During the period of his youth and early manhood he was noted for his religious devotion and his piety. For years after his happy

ADDRESS OF MR. BROWN, OF GEORGIA.

15

marriage with his lovely wife he and his family surrounded the altar daily together in prayer and devotion.
At a later period of life, when he became more engrossed with the courts and absorbed in politics and other public duties, he was thrown much away from his home, and his mind was diverted to other objects, which made heavy drafts upon his time and attention. And during this most active period of his public career he was less at tentive to his religious duties, which was afterwards to him a source of great regret. But when the disease which finally terminated in his untimely death had seized upon him, its inroads were slow, and his sufferings were very great. During this long and trying period his mind reverted back to the family altar, to his church rela tions, and to his religious privileges and duties. He calmly sur veyed the situation and reviewed his life, and his faith became still more firmly anchored within the veil. He met his sufferings with a patience and Christian fortitude that in its lessons and teach ings were absolutely sublime.
While his sufferings were intense and his pain often excruciating he never murmured, but said, " Let Gods will be done, not mine." Nothing pleased him better than the conversation of ministers of the Gospel on religious subjects. He spoke of the atonement made by our Saviour, of its efficiency, and of the hope that he enter tained. He delighted to dwell on these subjects. While he suf fered from day to day and from night to night nothing disturbed his equanimity, nothing for a moment brought a murmur to his lips. Brilliant and surpassing as had been many of the triumphs of his life, his Christian resignation and fortitude and his triumph in death were much more brilliant, much more sublime.
When his powers of speech had failed and his once eloquent tongue had ceased to articulate and he was gently and peacefully sinking into the embrace of death that good man, Rev. C. A. Evans, pastor of his church, visited him, and approaching him with great gentleness and kindness spoke words of consolation. The dying Senator, with a heart full of love and his countenance beaming with heavenly visions, after struggling with the impedi ment that bound his tongue in silence, uttered audibly his last sen tence: "Almost home."

16

LIFE AND CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN H, SILL.

Thus quietly and peacefully passed away one whose memory we all affectionately cherish.
But, Senators, our late companion is not dead. He has passed behind the veil, and his form is no longer seen by us. His body sleeps in the grave, but his immortal spirit rests in the paradise of God.
Mr. President, in the demise of Senator HILL the whole Union has sustained a severe loss. But the affliction of the people of Georgia is greater than any other can be; they knew him; they loved him; they honored and trusted him; they almost idolized him. And when it was announced that BENJAMIN H. HILL was no more they bowed their heads in sorrow, and will long mourn their irreparable loss.
But, Mr. President, Senator HILL possessed intellectual qualities of the highest order. His genius was acknowledged by all. In debate he was surpassingly grand and convincing. As a logician he had few equals; as an impassioned orator he had no superior; as a lawyer he occupied the first rank; as an advocate at the bar he was absolutely overwhelming; as an American Senator he was the peer of any one.
When I reflect upon the great oratorical powers of Senator HILL, the splendor of his genius, the simplicity of his heart, and the pa triotic impulses of his nature, as I had learned in later life to know them, I conclude that the day is not distant when some great American poet, burning with patriotic zeal as well as poetic fire, will weave into verse, a tribute to his memory as glowing and as just, as the immortal English bard, paid the great Irish orator, when Byron sang:

Kver glorious Grattan! the best of the good! So simple in heart, so sublime in the rest;
With all which Demosthenes wanted endned, And his rival or victor in all he possessed.

ADDRESS OF MB. INGALLS, OF KANSAS,

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Address of Mr. INGALLS, of Kansas.
BEN. HILL .has gone to the undiscovered country. Whether his journey thither was but one step across an imper ceptible frontier, or whether an interminable ocean, black, unfluc tuating, and voiceless, stretches between these earthly coasts and those invisible shores we do not know. Whether on that August morning after death he saw a more glorious sun rise with unimaginable splendor above a celestial hori zon, or whether his apathetic and unconscious ashes still sleep in cold obstruction and insensible oblivion we do not know. Whether his strong and subtle energies found instant exercise in another foruin, whether his dextrous and disciplined faculties are now contending in a higher senate than ours for supremacy, or whether his powers were dissipated and dispersed with his parting breath we do not know. Whether his passions, ambitions, and affections still sway, at tract, and impel, whether he yet remembers us as we remember him we do not know. These are the unsolved, the insoluble problems of mortal life and human destiny, which prompted the troubled patriarch to ask that momentous question for which the centuries have given no answer "If a man die shall he live again?" Every man is the center of a circle whose fatal circumference he cannot pass. Within its narrow confines he is potential, beyond it he perishes; and if immortality be a splendid but delusive dream, if the incompleteness of every career, even the longest and most fortunate, be not supplemented and perfected after its termination here, then he who dreads to die should fear to live, for life is a tragedy more desolate and inexplicable than death. Of all the dead whose obsequies we have paused to solemnize in this Chamber I recall no one whose untimely fate seems so lament able, and yet so rich in prophecy of eternal life, as that of Senator HILL. He had reached the meridian of his years. He stood upon the high plateau of middle life, in that serene atmosphere where
2H

18

LIFE AND CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN S. HILL.

temptation no longer assails, where the clamorous passions no more distract, and where the conditions are most favorable for noble and enduring achievement. His upward path had been through stormy adversity and contention such as infrequently falls to the lot of men. Though not without the tendency to meditation, reverie, and intro spection which accompanies genius, his temperament was palestric. He was competitive and unpeaceful. He was born a polemic and controversialist, intellectually pugnacious and combative, so that he was impelled to defend any position that might be assailed or to attack any position that might be intrenched, not because the de fense or the assault were essential, but because the positions were maintained and that those who held them became by that fact alone his adversaries. This tendency of his nature made his orbit erratic. He was meteoric rather than planetary, and flashed with irregular splendor rather than shone with steady and penetrating rays. His advocacy of any cause was fearless to the verge of te merity. He appeared to be indifferent to applause or censure for their own sake. He accepted intrepidly any conclusions that he reached, without inquiring whether they were politic or expedient.
To such a spirit partisanship was unavoidable, but with Senator HILL it did not degenerate into bigotry. He was capable of broad generosity, and extended to his opponents the same unreserved candor which he demanded for himself. His oratory was impetu ous and devoid of artifice. He was not a posturer nor phrase monger. He was too intense, too earnest, to employ the cheap and paltry decorations of discourse. He never reconnoitered a hostile position nor approached it by stealthy parallels. He could not lay siege to an enemy, nor beleaguer him, nor open trenches, and sap and mine. His method was the charge and the onset. He was the Murat of senatorial debate. Not many men of this generation have been better equipped for parliamentary warfare than he, with his commanding presence, his sinewy diction, his confident and im perturbable self-control.
But in the maturity of his powers and his fame, with unmeasured opportunities for achievement apparently before him, with great designs unaccomplished, surrounded by the proud and affectionate

ADDRESS OF MB. VEST, OF MISSOUSI.

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solicitude of a great constituency, the pallid messenger with the inverted torch beckoned him to depart. There are few scenes in history more tragic than that protracted combat with death. No man had greater inducements to live. But in the long struggle against the inexorable advances of an insidious and mortal malady he did not falter nor repine. He retreated with the aspect of a vic tor ; and though he succumbed, he seemed to conquer. His sun went down at noon, but it sank amid the prophetic splendors of an eternal dawn.
With more than a heros courage, with more than a martyrs fortitude, he waited the approach of the inevitable hour and went to the undiscovered country.

Address of Mr. VEST of Missouri.
Mr. President, in November, 1861,1 first met Mr. HILL in the provisional congress of the Confederate States.
The Confederacy was just entering upon its brief and stormy ex istence. Its capital had recently been removed from Montgomery to Richmond, and Jefferson Davis by a majority of only one vote in the provisional congress had been elected president over Robert Toombs.
Surrounded by unexampled difficulties, moral and physical, iso lated and alone, with the prejudices of the entire civilized world against them, and confronted in battle with overwhelming odds, the Confederate congress was called upon to meet not only the ordi nary questions ,and emergencies attending the formation of a new government, but to grapple also with the exigencies and demands of a great war, a war not for conquest or policy, but for existence.
Mr. HILL had earnestly opposed secession up to the last mo ment, but finding that the people of Georgia were determined to separate from the Union, he surrendered his personal opinion, and pledged himself fully and unreservedly to the cause of the Confederacy.
Opposed to secession, with habits of thought and education ut terly averse to revolution, the strange vicissitudes of this stormy

20

LIFE AND CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN H. BILL.

period soon found him the leader of the administration party in the Confederate congress.
Within the limits of an address like this it would neither be possible nor proper for me to attempt an analysis of the causes which placed Mr. HILL in this position; but chief among them was the fact that having once pledged himself to the Confederacy he could see no hope of success except in supporting the president chosen by the people; and having so declared himself, his great ability naturally made him the exponent and defender of the pol icy of the administration.
Although surrounded by difficulties and dangers almost without parallel, and confronted by a common peril, it was very soon evi dent that personal rivalry, the attrition of diverse opinion, and the fierce passions of a revolutionary era had built up most determined opposition to Mr. Davis among the leaders of the South.
That the president of the Confederate States was loyal to the people he led, in every fiber of his nature, cannot be doubted save by the blindest prejudice; and this being granted, whether he was mistaken in the conduct of the war or in the policy of his admin istration should be a sealed book to all those who sympathized and suffered with him. It is enough to say now that never was any public man assailed by opponents so formidable as those who afrtacked the president of the Confederate States.
Toombs, the Mirabean of the revolution; Yancey, whose lips were touched with fire, now the honey of persuasion and then the venom of invective; Wigfall, brilliant, aggressive, and relentless this was the great triumvirate which assailed Mr. Daviss adminis tration. No power of description can do justice to the ability, elo quence, or bitterness of the debates in which Mr. HILL, singlehanded but undaunted, met his great opponents. As the war pro gressed and the fortunes of the Confederacy became each year more desperate, the bitterness and violence of this parliamentary conflict increased, until scenes of actual personal collision occurred on the floor of the Confederate senate.
The participants have passed beyond this worlds judgment, and the issues -which stirred those fierce passions are dead with the gov-

ADDRESS OF MS. VEST, OF MISSOURI.

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ernment they affected, but the few who heard these debates can never forget the matchless eloquence and logic that mingled with the roar of hostile guns around the beleaguered capital of the Con federacy.
Reluctant to embrace the Confederate cause, Mr. HILL was the last to leave it, and I well remember that on my way from Rich mond, after preparations had been made to abandon the capital, and it was well kuown that the cause was lost, I met him in Columbus, Georgia, engaged in the task of rallying the people of his State in what was then a hopeless struggle. When I told him of recent events, of which he had not heard, he said, "All then is over, and it only remains for me to share the fate of the people of Georgia."
How well he redeemed this pledge the hearts of his people will answer. Thrown into prison, stripped of all except life, his courage never failed, and in the darkest hour, when the wolves were tear ing the victims of the war as the coyote the wounded deer, his elo quent voice was never for one instant silent until Georgia, torn and bleeding but yet splendid and beautiful, once more stood erect in the sisterhood of sovereign States. Nor did he ever under any tempta tion so far forget his manhood and honor as to
Crook the pregnant lunges of the knee Where, thrift may follow fawning.
Accepting fully and without reservation all the legitimate conse quences of defeat, and resolutely turning to the future with its duties and obligations, he still retained his self-respect, and never did he
Bend low, and in a bondsmans key, With bated breath, and whispering humbleness. Say this Fair sir, you spit on me on Wednesday last; You spurnd me aneh a day; another time You calld me dog; and for these courtesies Ill lend you thus much moneys.
I knew Mr. HILL well, and under circumstances which enabled me to judge accurately his attributes and qualities. Like all men of great intellect, he was often accused of inconsistency because he absolutely refused to be governed by the routine thought of others, and had always the courage to change an opinion if he believed it

22

LIFE AND CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN ff. SILL.

erroneous. His courage, indeed; both of conviction and expression, was not excelled by that of any man, and his fortitude under the greatest misfortunes extorted the admiration of even his enemies.
In an age when calumny and slander are the ordinary weapons of political warfare, and personal scandal the most delicate morsel for the public appetite, Mr. HILL was not exempt from the attacks of the foul and loathsome creatures who crawl about the footsteps of every public man, but he bore himself always with a dignity which commanded the respect of all.
And what can be said of the heroism, the uncomplaining and un faltering courage, with which he met the irony of fate that brought him the torture of a lingering death in the destruction of that tongue . and voice which had so often awakened with their eloquence the echoes of this Hall!
In all public and private history there is no sadder page than this, and from it we turn away in silent awe and reverence.
In his political opinions Mr. HILL was governed by the teaching of Madison, and no one who heard his speech in the Senate on May 10, 1879, the greatest speech in my judgment delivered here within the last quarter of a century, will, ever forget his tribute to the statesman who can be justly termed the father of the Constitution. Said Mr. HILL :
Sir, I want to say here now and I feel it a privilege that I can say it I be lieve all the angry discussion, all the troubles that have come upon this coun try, have sprung from the failure of the people to comprehend the one great fact that the Government under which we live has no model; it is partly national and partly Federal; an idea which was to the Greeks a stumbling block, and to the Bomans foolishness, and to the Republican, party an insurmountable paradox, but to the patriots of this country it is the power of liberty unto the salvation of the people. And if the people of this country would realize that fact, all these crazy wranglings as to whether we live nndera Federal or a national Government would cease; they would understand that we live under both; that it is a composite Government; that it was intended by the framers that the Union shall be faithful in defense of the States, that the States shall be harmonious in support of the Union, and that the Union and the States shall be faithful and harmonious in the support and the maintenance of the rights and the liberty of the people.
Mr. HILL was not only an orator, but a lawyer in the front of his profession. His mind was broad yet analytical; and he was

ADDSMSS OF MB. MORGAN, OF ALABAMA.

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averse to all radical and revolutionary methods. In my conception of his intellect and eloquence I always associate him with Virgniaud, the leader of the French Girondists. While neither will stand in history with the greatest party leaders, yet as orators and parlia mentary debaters they are entitled to places in the first rank.
Ended are his conflicts, his triumphs, and defeats. The strong, aggressive intellect is at rest. The clarion voice which could " wield at will the fierce democracy " is hushed forever.
Out upon the shoreless ocean his bark has drifted; but it has not carried away all of the life that has ended. Never to mortal hands was given a legacy more precious than that left to the peo ple of Georgia in the memory of her great son who gave his life to her service and his latest prayer to her honor and welfare.
Orator, statesman, patriot, farewell! Let Georgia guard well thy grave; for in her soil rest not the ashes of one whose life has done more to illustrate her manhood, whose genius has added such glory to her name.

Address of Mr. MORGAN, of Alabama.
Mr. PRESIDENT : Alabama, the eldest daughter of Georgia, ap proaches this sad occasion with a proud but stricken spirit. I will utter no word in praise of the late Senator that all the people of that State and of the South will not sanction with heartfelt re sponses.
This is an occasion when the pure serenity of truth need not be clouded with undeserved eulogy of" the dead. It would be aii injustice to the sincerity of his character, which his own history and example would condemn., to speak of the deceased Senator in terms that would be misleading.
A strong and rugged character such as belonged to BENJAMIN H. HILL cannot be correctly portrayed in the soft light of adula tion or by mere smoothness of expression or in speech tem pered with hesitancy and caution. He was a bold, daring, and powerful man in his intellectual and physical organism, and his convictions when they were settled after due consideration were

24

LIFE AND CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN H. HILL.

always the guide to his action and the measure of his duty. He thought much, and examined with carefulness every important question that engaged his attention.
When he was in error he was dangerous because of the fertility of his resources in argument, his zeal and firmness, his tact in de bate, and the aggressive energy of his mind. When he was right he was almost invincible.
These qualities naturally fitted him for the highest range of achievements as an advocate and leader; but such was his independ ence of all control by the thoughts of others that he sometimes sacrificed the leadership of men whom he could have controlled had he made concessions that were not of vital consequence to him or to them.
The people often made concessions to him to avoid controversy with one whom they greatly admired and were attached to with affectionate regard. The following of the people under his leader ship did not always result from their approval of his views, even on great questions.
He was, in the American sense, a great popular orator, whose powers were best adapted to great questions and important occa sions in which the rights and liberties of the people were concerned or the honor of the country was at stake. In such discussions he sometimes rose to astonishing heights of sublimity of thought and speech, which carried his audience with him until they seemed to lose control of themselves. He had no faculty of imitation, and his style of oratory was all his own. He had no model in rhetoric or logic that he was willing to copy. He seemed to have no thoughts that were his merely by adoption ; they were the offspring of his own mind. His eloquence was little more than a fervid statement of the facts or reasoning which had brought his mind to the conclusions which he was supporting; but it was so intense as to become almost irresistible.
When speaking to the people, in the period just preceding the war, when the argument was closed and a resort to other methods of defense had become a necessity, as they viewed the situation, he turned their thoughts to the duties and dangers of the people

ADDRESS Of MB. MORGAN, OF ALABAMA.

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of the South and of their posterity. He reviewed with pathetic ferver their fidelity to the Constitution and the Union in all former times of danger and trial in the second war of Inde pendence with Great Britain; in the wars with the Indians, who were supported by British and Spanish emissaries, and inspired by the savage eloquence of Tecumseh; and in the war with Mexico; and, feeling that they were threatened with servile insurrection and ultimate degradation and the loss of all protection under the Con stitution, he urged them to their duty with such power that
Each ravished bosom felt the high alarms, And all their burning pulses beat to arms.
Mr. HILL was a lawyer of great ability, but his self-reliant habits of reasoning led him to seek for arguments rather than for precedents to support the cause he was advocating. The specialjury system of Georgia was productive of great alertness and skill in forensic discussion among the lawyers of Georgia, and in these he excelled. Senators will remember how much he relied on this faculty even in the discussion of questions of the most intricate character. He always spoke extemporaneously, and seldom made any use even of notes of reference to authorities.
In the strenuous controversy of high debate he was sometimes severe, but never with willful injustice to those opposed to him.
The only soil of his fair virtues gloss Was a sharp wit, matchd with too blunt a will; Whose edge none spurned that came within his power.
His political career was shaped by the events of the most dimcult and momentous period in American history. The success of the rebellion of 1776 by the strength of the Union it established made the success of the rebellion of 1860 impossible. But the questions that were left open after the first rebellion to rankle in the bosoms of the people made the second rebellion and the war that followed it unavoidable.
Mr. HILL, in common with other men of that period, under stood that the third generation of American citizens were forced to settle by arms the questions that the first generation could not settle in the beginning without giving up all hope of uniting the

26

LIFE AND CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN H. HILL.

States in a Federal Grovernment under the new Constitution. He, like .many others, was compelled by a sense of duty to change his attitude on questions of policy to meet the dangers as they arose and drifted with the current of events. His feted duty and pur pose forced him into resistance to the inevitable, but the least de structive measure of resistance was what he always sought to adopt. Under such circumstances he was then, and more re cently, charged with reckless inconsistency.
That was not a just criticism either of his character or his con duct. He was so far free from that weakness which is dignified with the title of pride of opinion that he did not hesitate to aban don his opinions and to disprove their soundness when subsequent reflection satisfied him of the error. It was this trait that gave color to the idea that he was vacillating in his political convic tions.
If he were here and I could render to him in person the justice which he would most appreciate, as I render to his memory what I believe to be most true, I would say of his course in the begin ning of the civil war and during the discussion of the events that led to it that no man then living was more sincerely devoted to the American Union than he was; no man gave up the hope of its perpetuity with more intense sorrow than he did; no man more firmly believed than he did that the Southern States had just grounds for their secession; no man deplored more sincerely than he did that secession and war were made inevitable by the very provisions of the Constitution that men were sworn to sup port, and that could not in fact be supported in its provisions re lating to slavery except by the power of the sword as against the will of a great majority of the American people; and when the crisis came no man was firmer than Mr. HILL in supporting with his vote in the convention of Georgia the ordinance of secession, against which he had entered his protest, but to which he gave his assent when his brethren had resolved that it was the only remedy left open to them.
This is the true history of his motives and feelings in that time of severe trial, which so honorably explain his conduct. In the

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light of these facts there is a moral heroism in his course which raises his fame even to a higher eminence than that which is so freely accorded to him for his acknowledged abilities. His fidelity to the Confederate States could not have been greater if he had been the sole responsible author of the secession of each of the States, His devotion to that cause after he had espoused it, and to the people after they were involved in war, appeals to their hearts for a tribute, which they freely render-to his memory, far exceeding eulogy and praise, the tribute of gratitude enriched by love. None but the truest of men could have won this high dis tinction from the people of the South. He has won it worthily, and it will continue to bloom amid the leaves of the chaplet with which they have crowned him for immortality.
The people of the South withdrew from the Union because they believed that the Government of the United States had no longer the will or the power to protect their constitutional rights. They went out by the separate and independent action of each of the eleven seceding States. Their union into a confederacy was itself a great task upon the statesmanship of the leading men of the South. Along with this task came the instant and inevitable work of preparing for a great war.
In all these high duties Mr. HILL was an active and leading participant as a representative of the State of Georgia.
The condition of these eleven States was perilous in the ex treme, and required the highest order of capacity for government to direct them through these dangerous straits. The individual States had armies in the field engaged in .conflicts of arms before the Confederacy could be organized under a provisional govern ment.
Then immediately came the great struggle, in which all the people of all races, with only a few individual exceptions, were united for weal or for woe. There was nothing on which the Con federacy could rely for success except the devotion of the people to the cause which united them. Nothing was organized, and the material of war consisted only of resolute men. Without a mili tary chest, or arms, munitions, equipments, transportation, or sup-

28

LIFE AND CSARACTEB OF BENJAMIN S. HILL.

plies, the military resources of the Confederacy consisted of ten millions of people, of whom more than a third were slaves whose ^release from bondage depended on the success of the arms of the United States.
This population could not furnish and keep in the field more than a half million of men even for a short campaign. Its total arms-bearing strength could not exceed a million of men, within the extreme limits of military levies, during the whole period of a four years war. Their arms and ordnance stores, munitions, pro visions, and transportation were to be dug from the mines and the fields, and hewn from the forests, and constructed from the native material. They had to raise the cotton and wool for clothing their armies, and to build factories to convert them into cloth. There was not a thousand thoroughly educated soldiers in these eleven States. They had little money and no credit abroad. They were shut in on land and sea by great armies and navies. They had no fleet and no commerce. They had not the genuine sympathy of any nation in the world.
Their adversaries were men of their own blood; powerful, war like, rich, determined; aroused with enthusiastic zeal for the Union and the supremacy of its laws; supplied with every re source of warfare, and supported by the sympathy and assistance of many other great nations, whose people recruited their armies. They could put in the field as many soldiers as the confederacy could possibly muster, and still have a reserve of population of 20,000,000 from which to draw other armies.
This brief view of- the situation will sufficiently show the gen eral outline of the labors that Mr. HILL and his colleagues in the Confederate congress were called to perform. They courageously took up the task, which seemed too great for human endeavor.
Their debates are not published, but the tradition that has reached us is that they were never excelled in ability and majestic eloquence. It may be better that they have faded from human recollection.
There was little of personal rivalry in the Confederate congress. The weight of responsibility resting upon all alike kept each in dividual equal upon the common plane of duty. It was the per-

ADDRESS OF MR. MORGAN, OF ALABAMA.

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formance of duty, and not daring enterprise or moving eloquence, that was the test of a mans devotion to the common cause and of his ability to serve it in that congress.
According to this standard Mr. HILL was honorably distin guished among his colleagues, and was applauded by the people. The regard of the people for him far exceeded mere admiration. There was a strong bond of affection between them. All the sym pathies of his high nature, were aroused by their sufferings, and grew into homage for their virtues as he witnessed their fortitude andpatience in the terrible trials of the war. He saw that their wealth was freely given to the Confederacy; that they fed and clothed the army without the hope of compensation; that the poor, the widowed, and the orphaned took refuge and found comfort in their cheerful benevolence; that they gave up their houses for hos pitals, and gathered from the fields and forests the simple remedies for the wounded and sick which took the place of the ordinary hospital supplies and medicines which were denied to them. He saw that the women raised bread in the sun-beaten fields, with plow and hoe, and divided it between their children at home and their husbands and children in the army. He saw the mothers sending their sons forth to recruit the armies as soon as they were able to tear arms, and oftentimes to take the places of fathers and elder brothers who had fallen in battle. He rejoiced in the heroic spirit of the people, and they felt that he was true to them. .
The end came; and with it came the dawn of a new hope, only to spread its wings of light for a moment, and then to fold them again in darkness.
With peace came the promise of restoration to civil liberty as it is proudly impersonated in the character of the American citizen. That promise contained the essential part of all for which the Southern people had fought for four weary and sorrow-burdened years. They gave up the institution which was the provoking cause of the great conflict of arms, and felt assured that there would no longer be occasion or excuse for a denial to them of the equal rights enjoyed by other American citizens. They laid down their arms and gave their paroles upon these express conditions. But

30

LIFE AND CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN H. HILL.

they were grievously disappointed, and, having disarmed, they had no longer the privilege of making honorable sacrifices to vindicate their rights. They brooded in the darkness of a hopeless doom
over a loss that was seemingly irreparable. On such occasions men have often come forward who seem to
have been fitted and prepared beforehand for the work. They ask the confidence of the people, and if they have the faith to give it and the courage to follow they are led by them into a happy de
liverance. Among this class of leaders in the South Mr. HILL was con
spicuous. In the events which followed the surrender of 1865 his courage and eloquence were displayed in their grandest power as a leader of the people. He was maddened with the thought that the surrender of a people who had struggled so gallantly and suf fered so much, but were yet able to have protracted the war in definitely, did not bring to them the rights which were expressly included in the capitulation. With anguish of soul he witnessed the wrongs and humiliation inflicted on them under the policy of the reconstruction of the seceding States, by which they were held subject as vassals under the laws of war when they had been
promised restoration under the laws of peace. When the military power was thus made to supplant the civil
power in Georgia, and the disarmed people were incapable of re sistance, he did not despair. He felt that there was in the Ameri can heart a forum where the plea for justice could still be heard, and he boldly demanded an audience there. Through such assist ance he determined that Georgia should be set free from military despotism and foreign rule. He united the people of Georgia in a crusade against tyranny. They broke their chains, and he led them in a triumphant march to victory. With no other weapon but the freemans ballot they drove out their oppressors.
His strength, when thus called into action, was a sublime ex pression of the depth of feeling and suffering of a great spirit
maddened by a sense of cruel wrong.
As when Alcides * * * felt the envenomd robe, and tore Through pain up by the roots Thessalian pines; And Lichas from the top of (Eta threw Into the Euboic sea

ADDRESS OF ME. MORGAN, OF ALABAMA.

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so did this maddened patriot tear from the bosom of his native State the deep-rooted grafts of military despotism and cast them out from her borders. Neither Garibaldi nor Gambetta were more patriotic or more intrepid than he was, and the nations of the earth have recently mourned at their funerals. This homage was given them because they had lifted up the heads of despairing peoples in times of national calamity, and reinspired them with hope, courage, and self-reliance. And for this cause the South mourns at the obse quies of her patriot son, and embalms his memory with her tears.
It is not appropriate to utter all the praises our hearts would fain bestow upon him. We prefer to leave something unsaid and undone for the present time to signify a tenderness of feeling for our dead who were great and good that does not now admit of complete expression.
I witnessed the burial of BENJAMIN H. HILL in the bosom of his native State. The people were there in observant masses look ing sadly on at the simple cdrtege that escorted his remains to the cemetery. They seemed to feel that he had died much too soon to gather the full wealth of his own fame or to confer on them the full riches of his counsels. They seem to think of him as of a warrior slain by chance when he had put on his armor to win his greatest victories; as an eagle stricken in its boldest flight; as an oak riven with lightning in the fullness of its beauty and strength while spreading its leaves to welcome the summer showers. They were proud that their sorrow was honoring alike to the living and the dead; but they were grieved that the sad occasion had so soon arrived. They believed, and I do, that he had not attained to the fullness of his growth in intellectual power and that he left unfin ished many noble plans for the good of the country.
Mr. HILL was not always wise, yet few were wiser than he. It cannot be said of him that he was always right, but it can be truly said that he was never wrong from willfulness, for lack of courage, or from inattention to the requirements of duty.
Discarding all blind confidence in fate, and deeply sensible of responsibility to God, his noble and just spirit left this brief exist ence for one that is eternal, satisfied with the past and confident of the future.

32

LIFE AND CHASACTES OF BENJAMIN JET. HILL.

Though his work here was not finished, as we view such matters, he was not reluctant to lay down the great charge intrusted to him by a fond constituency; for he believed that the Master had called him to other duties which, as compared with his duties in the Sen ate, would confer on him " a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory," and so assured, he departed hence with rejoicing.

Address of Mr. SHERMAN, of Ohio.
Mr. PRESIDENT: We are often called upon in the midst of our public duties to commemorate the death of an associate who has shared with us in the labor and responsibility of official trust. But it rarely happens that the fatal shaft falls upon a Senator of such physical strength and mental vigor as Senator HILL. He had scarcely yet attained the full measure of national reputation to which his admitted abilities would have raised him. The insidious dis ease which sapped his life not only filled his home, his family, and his State with pain and sorrow, but caused a sigh of sadness and respectful sympathy in every household where his patient suffering and premature death were known.
I am not able to speak of Senator HILL with the fullness of information that his colleagues and personal associates have done. They tell us how he won and held in the highest degree the respect and esteem of his associates, that he has been honored with the con fidence of the people of his native State, and by their suffrages for years has filled with credit many positions of public trust. We knew him as he appeared among us, a ready debater, an ardent but courteous antagonist, strong, earnest, and convincing.
He came into the House of Representatives with a high reputa tion, and both there and in the Senate maintained and advanced it so that when the premonition of death came upon him he stood as high in the respect and confidence of his associates as any mem ber of this body.
He was a native of Georgia, educated in one of her universities, and learned in the practice of law in her courts. He was distinctly

ADDRESS OF MB. SBERUAN, OF OHIO.

33

a type of the Southern mind in its best relations to the affairs of
life. Though his early life was spent under the influences of the insti
tutions of his native State, and though its industries were then con fined mainly to the pursuits of agriculture, yet in his early manhood he appreciated the important position which Georgia holds, as con taining within her bounds the chief elements for manufacturing industries as well as a fruitful soil for agricultural products.
He was, as I understood him, in early life attached to the Whig party, and mainly on account of the well-known position of that party in favor of the protective policy. He sympathized heartily with the present prospects that in Georgia there will be a rapid de velopment of her natural mineral resources, and that the cotton grown on her genial soil and that of the "Sunny South" will be made ready for her Southern looms and spindles.
He had no regrets for the past in the brightening prospects of the future, but looked to his State, often called the "Empire State of the South," as likely to be improved and advanced by the results of the war to a higher plane of wealth, strength, and population.
His hope was that his State would rise with fresh vigor from the misfortune and devastation of war by the building of railroads, the opening of mines of coal and iron, and by the tide of immigration and labor from other States as well as from foreign lands..
Senator HILL, was consistently a Union man before the war. He resisted the secession of his State until after the ordinance of seces sion was passed. While his views of the construction of the Con stitution in later years differed widely from my own, yet I never doubted the sincerity of his opinions. To the questions that grew out of the war I do not feel at liberty even to allude, because on these questions we were widely apart in opinion.
Whatever his views on any subject, he always put them forth with the utmost vigor and clearness of expression. Endowed by nature with an ardent temperament, and cultivated by education in the use of all the gifts of speech, he defended his opinions with consummate ability. Whether in attack or in defense, he was an adversary to command respect in any form of debate. He repre-
3H

34

LIFE AND CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN H. HILL.

sented in a marked degree that first quality of an orator earnest ness. His training in the practice of the law made him familiar, to a wide extent, with precedents and decisions, upon which he drew copiously in his arguments upon questions involving Constitutional law and legislative and judicial power. His speeches were more remarkable for their clear reason than for their rhetorical felicity, and it may be said that the bent of his mind was in the direction of dialectics rather than of literary effort.
As a man of fine natural gifts and high accomplishments, his loss will be felt not only in his own State and neighborhood, but in the councils of the nation; and after more than half a century of a well-spent life his countrymen will recognize, even in its close, the elements of a well-rounded career.

Address of Mr. VOORHEES, of Indiana.
Mr. PRESIDENT: We halt to-day for a few moments in the great journey to say the last farewell words over a new-made grave. A comrade in the battle of life has fallen in this high forum. The skeleton foot of death enters with familiar step the loftiest as well as the humblest stations of human life, and again it has invaded the floor of the Senate. But yesterday a commanding presence moved in our midst which we shall see no more; a voice of pow erful eloquence was heard which is now hushed forever ; a tower ing intellect shed its light on human affairs which now has joined other councils than those of earth. A great and living force has gone out from this body and from every scene of mortal concern.
Others have more fully spoken of Senator HILLS life and pub lic career than will be expected from me, but of his intellectual strength, his will, and his courage I have deep and lasting im pressions. I first met him during the reconstruction of the Southern States which followed the war. As a member of an in vestigating committee appointed by Congress I visited Atlanta, and there met Mr. HILL for the first time. His appearance and bearing strongly attracted my attention. The still intensity of his

ADDRESS OF MB. VOOSHEES, OF INDIANA.

35

pale, strong face, his firm, determined features, and the clear light of his steady, inquiring, and, as it seemed to me then, somewhat distrustful blue eyes, combined to make on my mind the vivid and striking portrait of a remarkable man. I recall vividly now the self-poise, the reserve, the circumspection with which he spoke of public questions, and sought to shelter from hurtful legislation all the interests of his people. He was not then taking pa"rt in na tional politics, and I doubt if such was his intention, but when he was some time afterward elected to the House of Representatives my opinion of his abilities and force was only confirmed when he immediately took a conspicuous leadership in that body.
Of the merits of the heated controversies in which he engaged of course I do not speak in this presence, but that he was the peer of the ajblest whom he met no one will deny. His fame was at once national, and his State only waited for the first opportunity to bestow upon him its highest honor. After Mr. HILL became a member of this body his daily movements and every word he ut tered were marked and scrutinized as those of a leading and im portant actor in public affairs. He had been a representative man under an order of things and an attempted government which had crumbled to the dust, and he could not be less than a representa tive character here. To me it was always a curious and most in teresting study to watch the workings of his brilliant and fertile mind while he grasped the duties and the ideas of the living pres ent, and at the same time with reverent care and devotion pro tected the motives and the memory of a cause into which he had poured the whole ardor of his earlier manhood. His mind was essentially daring and progressive, and he did not seek to cling to principles and methods which had been tried and failed; he simply guarded well the honor of that vast cemetery in which the dead past lies buried.
Standing, as I once heard him say, in the <ashes of desolation, he still looked forward with an unfaltering trust to the dawn of a new day of glory for his section, and of union and progress for the entire country. He was a ready mounted knight, not looking back to past fields of encounter, but prompt to enter the lists when-

36

LIFE AND CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN H, HILL.

ever or wherever opened. He believed with Edmund Burke that statesmanship was the science of circumstances, and he addressed himself with wisdom and courage to the situation in which he found himself placed. This sometimes caused him to be accused of inconsistency by those who forget that the circumstances which govern the conduct of the statesman are themselves inconsistent from day to day. The law of the world is mutation.
History is a never-ending panorama, in which the pictures are never the same. The same grand purposes and fact of progression are there, but the methods of public policy, the ways and means whereby governments are created and sustained, the measures which from time to time best promote, foster, and encourage the welfare of the people, are as variqps as the different conditions of mankind which have called them forth. The principles which have governed one generation may have to be discarded for the safety and pros perity of the next. The wisdom of to-day may be the folly of to morrow in the administrative measures of peace as well as in the tactics and strategy of war.
Senator HILL always appeared as much alive to this great fact as any man I ever met in public life. He was always found on the skirmish line of advanced and advancing ideas, and in the constant encounters which necessarily take place on that line in the field of thought, the lightning as it leaps from the sky is hardly more bril liant or rapid than were the operations of his mind. Indeed, so prolific was his genius when heated by the combat of discussion that it seemed at times to partake of the eccentricity of the light ning as well as of its brilliancy and poorer. But he was never al lured in his most daring flights so far that he could not upon the instant return to meet his adversary at the precise point in issue, It was this quality, in great measure, and the intensity with which he could identify himself with the actual matter in hand, regardless of what the past had demanded of him, which made him the for midable antagonist and the resistless orator at the bar, on the hus tings, and in the halls of legislation.
Sir, a character such as I speak of has never in any age failed to encounter determined opposition and deep-seated hostility. The

ADDRESS OF MB. VOOBHEES, OF INDIANA.

37

overthrown antagonist, the routed adversary, never forget and are often slow to forgive. The impetuous assault in debate, the fierce invective, the merciless sarcasm, leave wounds which seldom alto gether heal. This was doubtless true of the public career of the bold, aggressive Senator whose loss we deplore; and yet to those who knew him well in private life how gentle, considerate, and kind were his words and his ways! A simple circumstance of an accidental character brought about relations between us which re vealed him to me in a light I did not expect, although I had been acquainted with him for years.
I saw the self-absorbed, distant manner melt away into the gen tlest sunshine. I realized that when he gave his confidence at all he gave it entire; that when he trusted he did so without res ervation, and with an unlimited faith. While perhaps " he was lofty and sour to those who loved him not," yet he had, in a boun tiful degree, those elements of nature toward friends which make man "sweet as summer" to his fellow-man. As the world saw him during his active career he was a warrior with his armor on, his lance in rest and his visor down; but away from the scenes of con flict and in the midst of those who came close to him he was the unassuming, generous, confiding friend. At such times he always spoke with singular gentleness and charity of those from whom he differed and with whom his debates had been most heated and de termined ; nor do I think I ever heard him speak with a show of personal resentment of such even as had dealt most harshly and un justly with his name and fame.
Sir, the combination of rare and high qualities of mind and heart
possessed by Senator HILL not only account for the mourning of Georgia over his loss, but also for the fact that his death is re garded in every section as a national calamity. His power for great public usefulness was recognized in every quarter of our vast, expanded country. He had a glorious cause at heart, the construc tion and development of a grand, harmonious future for the whole country, adjusting his own and the kindred States and people of the South to the existing conditions of the present day, and insuring them their full proportion of the honor and the wealth of the na-

38

LIFE AND CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN H. HILL.

tion. What nobler purpose ever animated the human breast ? But in the full meridian splendor of his mental vigor and his ripe ex perience the unfinished task fell from his hands. That summons to which every ear shall hearken and all mortality obey reached him at the zenith of his powers, and with his plans of future work all spread out before him.
When the light of the sun fades away at nightfall we behold the harmonious fulfillment of natures law; but when darkness comes at noonday we are struck with awe at the mysteries of the universe. When eternity beckons to one whose labors are ended here, and who walks wearily under the burden of years, we see him sink down to his rest with resignation to the decrees as they are written; but when death claims the great and strong, in all their pride of power and place, we break forth in grief, and question the ways of Heaven and earth, which are past finding out.

The hand of the reaper Takes the ears that are hoary;
But the voice of the weeper Wails manhood in glory.
How capricious and various are the ways of death! On the first day of the new year there had gathered at the White House a vast assemblage to pay honor to the President of the Republic. Talent, beauty, official distinction, all were there. Heroes of the Army and the Navy, in the brilliant decorations of their rank, made their offi cial obeisance to their Commander-in-Chief; the embassadors of distant courts, blazing in scarlet and gold, paid friendly congratu lations to the Chief Magistrate of the foremost commonwealth on the globe; thoughtful legislators and ermined judges, men of let ters, and professors of science stood in the same presence ; female loveliness lent its enchantment to the scene; soft music charmed all the air; the rich odor of flowers came with every breath, and the lofty old halls and promenades were vocal with exclamations of happy enjoyment. Immediately at my side, in the midst of this radiant throng, stood one who was full of years and of honors. But the spirit of the glass and scythe was hovering even there, and at the touch of its icy hand I saw the venerable man of four-score

ADDRESS OF MB. VOOBHEES, OF INDIANA.

39

sink down like an infant to gentle sleep. Without moan or sigh or pain he passed in an instant from the light, the music, and the perfumes of earth to the world of eternal beauty beyond the sun.
Fortunate man; fortunate in life, and still more fortunate in death! Not a moment in the dark valley or the shadow between the two worlds, he closed his aged eyes upon the joys of time to open them upon the brighter visions of eternity. But how shall the dreadful contrast which flashes on every mind be spoken ? To the dead Senator whom we mourn to-day death came in its most appall ing form, wearing its most cruel and ghastly mien. No circumstance of torture or of horror was omitted from the awful ordeal through which he slowly passed. He sought the aid of science, for life was sweet to him; but after he turned his face homeward, to abide the will of God, as he said, among his own people, the pages of human history in all their wide range present no more striking instance than he did of unquailing, lofty heroism and of sublime submission to the decrees of Providence.
The stoic philosopher of antiquity would have taken refuge in self-murder from the frightful aspect worn by the King of Terrors on which the dying American statesman looked from hour to hour, from day to day, and from month to month with unbroken com posure. A little more than a year ago the world watched around the death-bed of the slowly dying President of the United States, and wondered at his calmness and courage; but to him there was administered daily hope. Not a whisper of earthly hope sustained Senator HILL as he looked long and steadily at his inevitable doom. And yet no murmur, wail, or lament ever escaped his lips; he ut tered no word of grief or disappointment that the end of his pil grimage was so near; no agony of suffering was ever so terrible as to extort a single cry of pain; he never appeared so great, so calm and strong, as face to face with the mighty monarch before whom all must bow. And why was this ? Able, self-reliant, and intrepid as he was, could he, unaided and alone, sustain with unclouded se renity of mind such a conflict with approaching and painful disso lution ? Was there no one with him to soothe and to comfort as he passed through the furnace seven times heated ?

40

LIFE AND CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN H. SILL.

Sir, we learn that Mr. HILLS father was a minister of the Christ ian religion, and that he educated his son in the principles and the practices of his own faith. It is a fact, also, that when the son grew to manhood, and at every period of his brilliant and at times stormy career, this faith abided with him. The good seed sown in the morning may have seemed scorched by the sun, or choked by the thorns and cares of the day, but it never lost root in his mind ; and in his hour of trial it brought forth fruit more than a hundred-fold. It enabled him to realize a home of peace and joy beyond the reach of disease or death; it enabled him to smile amidst his sufferings as martyrs have smiled in flames at the stake. Though of approaching death it might be said,
Black as night, Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell, He shook a dreadful dart,
yet the pale and wasted orator could for himself truthfully exclaim, " Death is swallowed up in victory." His heart could utter, if his tongue could not, that loftiest ptean of human triumph ever chanted on the shores of time :
O Death! where is thy sting f O Grave! where is thy victory t
Sir, it is a deep and never-ending pleasure to know that in the midst of physical wreck, decay, and pain there came to our lost comrade in full abundance, and in compensation for all he endured, those rich and precious consolations which this world can neither give nor take away.
He sleeps well in the soil of his native State. His memory will remain fresh and green in the hearts of his people. Distant and rising generations will point out his name in the books which re cord these times as they would point out one of the brightest stars in the sky. And this is all of earth that remains for him. No more will this great pulsating world, with its high, stern battlecries of conflict, arouse his eager spirit to action. The world moves on without him, as the ocean rolls in unbroken and heed less majesty over the wreck which has gone down in her bosom. Great lives have perished at every step in the eternity of time, but

ADDRESS OF MS. EDMUNDS, OF VERMONT.

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the giant march of events has not faltered nor the progress of the world been defeated.
The duties of the dead Senator are all finished. Even this solemn occasion, with his name on every lip, is nothing to him. His silent dust is alike indifferent to praise or blame, and his im mortal presence has passed far beyond the call of human voices. But to us, the living, who stand where he so lately stood, this hour is freighted with interest and admonition. We are walking with unerring steps to the grave, and each setting sun finds us nearer to the realms of rest. The fleetness of time, our brief and feeble grasp upon the affairs of earth, the certainty of death, and the magnitude of eternity all crowd upon the mind at such a mo ment as this. They warn us to be in readiness, for no one knows in the great lottery of life and death on whose cold, dead, pathetic face we may next look in this narrow circle. They call upon us to think and speak and live in charity with each other, for the last hours that must come to all will be sweetened by recollections of such forbearance and grace in our own lives as we invoke for ourselves from that merciful Father into whose presence we hasten.

Address of Mr. EDMUNDS, of Vermont.
Mr. PRESIDENT : Others more nearly connected with the late Senator by ties of location, political sympathy, and personal in timacy have spoken of him as only those so situated can well do.
I will speak of him chiefly as he appeared to me in his public career. He was, I think, of the very highest order of intellectual strength, both in his perceptive and reflective faculties. He was able to perceive with clearness the relations of public questions, and the remote, but not less certain, effects of occurring events, when to many others the horizon was entirely clouded and in definite, or clothed with a distorted and illusory promise. A Whig and American down to the time of the attempted se cession of the Southern States in 1861, he foresaw something of the future and opposed with earnestness and power in the

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LIFE AND CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN S, HILL.

conventions of his native State the movement for secession. But when it was resolved upon and undertaken, he gave himself up to what he considered his duty to his State, and was thenceforth among the foremost in sustaining the Southern cause.
The notion of fidelity to ones own State, whether her course be thought wise and right or not, is almost a natural instinct; and whether it be defensible on broad grounds or not, who does not sympathize with it? Even in this body, whose members are Senators of the United States, and are not, in a constitutional sense, any more representatives of the particular States that elected them than of all the other States and the people, it is extremely difficult to free ourselves from the feeling that we are the repre sentatives of particular States merely, and that we are bound to defend and promote the interests of their- inhabitants without re sponsibility for the effect of what we do upon the people of other States. Is it not clear that the fundamental unity of all the States, as well as the security of the rights of each, will be much more secure, and the National Government much better admin istered, if we remember that our obligations and our solicitudes should be bounded by no arrangements of political geography ? So thinking, I look with large interest and sympathy upon the scenes and events in which the late Senator from Georgia bore so conspicuous a part, and upon the affection and confidence that the great mass of the people of that State felt toward him. And, dif fering widely from him in respect of very many of his acts and opinions, I felt deeply for him, for his family, and for his people in the calamity that came upon him. And how much more ten der our sympathy and admiration grew when we saw him bearing the greatest of human suffering with the calmness of manly forti tude and the supreme happiness of Christian faith, and when we saw that all the evils of.this weary life were powerless to affect his soul, that rose " over pain to victory."
Such events as we now commemorate, interesting and solemn as they are and must be to each one of us, are the most common and the most certain of all. The life of man, did it end with this earthly career, would be the most miserable of phantasms; but to those who

ADDRESS OF MB. JONES, OF FLORIDA.

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see with the eye of faith beyond the narrow border of our mortal life "the yoke is easy and the burden light." On this great stage of government the actors appear and act their parts and disappear to come again no more, but the grand drama goes on without inter ruption. When the greatest and apparently the most important administrators of government suddenly depart there always comes forward from the body of an intelligent people some one to fill the vacant place and who is equal to the emergency of the time. While, then, we are touched with the suddenness of these separations, let us take comfort in the knowledge that our countrys institutions flourish in larger and larger security, and that all our people feel more and more the depth and strength of mutual interest, sympathy, and good will.

Address of Mr. JONES, of Florida.
Mr. PRESIDENT : It is not my intention to weary the Senate at this hour by rehearsing the story of Mr. HILLS fame. Every thing interesting in his public life has been graphically set forth by his able colleague and the Senators who followed him, so that there is nothing left for me to do except to put on record my humble testi mony of the value of a man like Mr. HILL to this country, and my sense of the loss which this Senate and the nation.have sustained in our deceased brothers sad and untimely death. In surveying the great field of life and noting the progress which has been made in every science and almost every department of knowledge, it would seem from the little advance or change that has taken place in the affairs of government that we have reached a point of perfection in the art of ruling states and peoples; that it is beyond the power of human genius to do more than maintain the spirit and integrity of our existing establishments.
The best labors of the great minds of this country have been de voted to the work of settling in the public mind the great principles of our admirable systems of government, so that at all times the great body of the people could comprehend the line of separation which divides authority from popular rights, and thus secure a loyal support of government on the one hand and a steady and intelligent

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LIFE AND CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN H. BILL.

devotion to liberty on the other. In those unhallowed despotisms of the earth where man is crushed and oppressed by excessive public power, it is the mystery which surrounds the segis and exercise of governmental authority that sustains the unfortunate relations of tyrant and slave. There nothing is defined, limited, or compre hensible, but all is dark, complicated, and forbidding. The popular mind, long enslaved by superstitious devotion to slavish names and maxims, never sees anything of the light of truth, and power and authority united with ignorance and submission keep millions in bondage and chains.
You may ask, what has all this to do with the character or merits of the deceased ? I answer that in making up my estimate of the loss of our distinguished brother I cannot overlook the quality which, above all others, made him both eminent and useful. If, as I said awhile ago, we have made no progress in government of late, and have added nothing to the discovery of the fathers for the security or happiness of the people, it is of the highest impor tance that the work which has been accomplished shall be maintained. The gifted man whom we mourn to-day was especially fitted for the great duty of keeping before the people the beacon-light of political truth to teach them their obligations to themselves and their Gov ernment ; to impress upon their minds true conceptions of political liberty, allegiance, and loyalty to the demands of just authority, and the preservation of every power and authority which belong to the people and the States. His capacity for this great duty made him a leader of public opinion. In little matters he was not as great as little men. But where the magnitude of the question rose to the level of his great ability his power of argument was felt here and in the country.
The ordinary routine worker had then to stand aside, and every one admired the workings of his original, incisive mind as it put forth its powerful arguments in terse and pointed speech. This, after all, is the highest position a public man can occupy in a country like this. Men of detail and method and labor can be found anywhere and at all times, but even at a time when every thing is in a state of improvement these grand qualities of mind which immortalized Fox, Pitt, Canning, Grattan, Webster, Clay,

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and Calhoun are as rare and far more important than they ever were. It was Mr. HILLS great ability as an argumentative speaker and writer which gave him his fame.
He was often called a great orator, but he was more than an orator in the popular sense. He always addressed himself to the minds of his hearers. I never knew a speaker of the same reputation who drew less upon his imagination than Senator HILL. In his over-anxiety to fasten conviction on the mind he would often labor for the accuracy and precision of the mathematician. While his vocabulary was always strong and simple, in my judgment it often fell short of the vigor and the depth of his thoughts. Like all truly great men, he attached more consequence to his ideas than to his language. He was in no sense a wordy but always a thoughtful speaker. His views of the Constitution were broad and liberal. In his expositions of our great organic law he did not run into the extreme maxims of unlimited power on the one hand nor seek to abridge by too narrow bounds the authority of the Union on the other. While he always admitted that the Constitution of the Union was created by the people of the United States, he ever con tended that this was accomplished through separate State agencies the people of each State acting for themselves in the matter of rati fication, independent of the people of every other State.
But this view did not affect in "the least his opinion of the su premacy of the Federal Constitution. He always contended that the powers granted by the people of the several States, acting as organized political factions, to the General Government were as ir revocable and as binding upon the people and the States as though they emanated from the people of the Union without regard to State organizations. The great argument which he drew from the mode of ratification was that the States and the Government of the Union were parts of one system; that there could be no question of di vided allegiance between them; that the Union could not exist with out the States, although the States did exist before the Union. He always advocated a free and -liberal exercise of the powers granted this Government, but his nature was hostile to everything that had the appearance of usurpation. He was one of the few men in public life who combined high abilities as a political leader with

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LIFE AND CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN H. HILL.

pre-eminent legal talents. Lord Chatham at one time deprecated the presence of the mere lawyer in Parliament, and he said that you might shake the constitution of the land to its center and the lawyer would sit tranquil in his cabinet, but just touch a cobweb in the corner of Westminster Hall and the exasperated spider would crawl out in its defense.
But this was not the case with Senator HILL. He did not sacri fice the Constitution to the profession. He brought to the one all the support of an enlightened statesman and patriot full of devotion for the whole country and its institutions, and the other he adorned with legal learning and professional abilities that will long be re membered by the bar. Like all men of strong convictions and great prominence, lie was supported by devoted friends, and was not without some enemies. Although he was fondly attached to his high position where his talents had full play, and tenderly bound by the ties of affection to his devoted family, the world does not furnish an example more sublime than that which he has left us in all the qualities of moral and physical courage, true Christian and manly resignation, patient and uncomplaining submission to the will of God during the long, tedious months that he awaited in agony and suffering the period of his mortal dissolution. All the glory of the Senate and the fame of the hustings fade into insignifi cance before the grand spectacle presented by this Christian man when the time arrived which tested the weakness of human nature. Whether bleeding under the operations of the surgeons knife or silently feeling the gradual but sure inroads of the monster that was preying upon him, he never murmured or complained, but accepted the terrible situation as evidence only of Divine pleasure and with the firm conviction that his sufferings would be rewarded by a happier life beyond the grave.
Who can deny the value and efficiency of strong Christian faith with such an example of its power and influence before him ? With all the glory and renown of the world fading away before the shadow of eternity, this strong man, accustomed to all the proc esses of reason, under the inspiration of Christian hope was able to leave an example of true heroism more valuable and sublime than any left by the unbelieving philosophers of antiquity.

ADDRESS OF MS. BARROW, OF GEORGIA.

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Address of Mr. BARROW, of Georgia.
Mr. PBESIBENT : It is perhaps true that I stand alone here upon the point from which I consider the character of the illustrious man in memory of whom the Senate meets to-day. All others who surround me at this moment have recorded impressions recseived and stamped upon their own mature and well-settled indi vidualities. They have studied him and measured him from the first in the light which a long experience of their own in public affairs cast upon him, and the figure they contemplate is shaded perhaps by some clouds which have never darkened the picture upon which I am looking.
In the buoyant, hero-worshiping, enthusiastic heyday of my early college days I first saw him and heard him. Under the ancient and historic locusts that stand like sentinels around the court-house at Lexington, in the old county of Oglethorpe, in Georgia, in the last days of the summer of 1857, there first burst upon my youth ful eye the exhibition of his wonderful oratory. Engaged in a heated political campaign as a candidate for governor of Georgia, his opponent being my present colleague in the Senate, conscious that there was before him " a foeman worthy of his steel," and that in that old Whig county, thousands of whose best people were con gregated to hear the debate, he had an army of friends whom he must uphold, encourage, and keep together, he put forth all his powers. As he towered and soared in his grand swelling tributes to the historic renown of the old Whig party, and, roused to his highest pitch, appealed to the immense audience before him in the name of its past, its heroes, and its mission, I felt, young Democrat that I was, that I was a witness to an almost apostolic revelation of eloquence; and then when he turned upon his opponent and began to hurl his terrible invectives, scathing, pitiless, unsparing, his every word glittering like steel, his every accent resonant and ringing with the very inspiration of passionate indignation, his

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blazing figure was in my eyes the impersonation of every element of vengeance and destruction, the very Apollyon of politics. It is doubtful if any speech of his life contained as much of that power which operates particularly upon the passions of men as this unwritten, unpreserved phenomenal effort.
Almost undimmed by time, with the same bright hues and radi ant lights that greeted and delighted my boyish senses, this vision of eloquence remains. Long-after association, as much intimacy as disparity in age would allow, frequent opportunity to hear him again in the courts, before the people, and elsewhere, have all passed over those first impressions leaving them almost unchanged.
Although born upon the soil of Georgia, reared in the midst of of her home influences, surrounded all the time during which his character was being formed by all the agencies and forces peculiar to her people, taught in her schools, graduated from her university, Mr. HILL was still in some respects not a typical Georgian. There was something in his nature, an impulse, an insubordination, that made him sometimes, when he thought he scented injustice or op pression, break over all bounds of seeming prudence and caution and rush into the first arena that presented itself to cast down his glove. His nature was not discreet. At such times the circum spect and deliberate moderation and wisdom that are characteristic of the Georgians fretted and chafed him. He would then rebel against the slow, fettering caution of his people and would lash out in his fiery way against what to him seemed apathy and pusillan
imity. It is not strange, then, that they sometimes misjudged him when
in the midst of some rebellious outbreak against what to his impet uous nature seemed the snail-like march of his people to the threat ened point, he rushed on in advance. Men of this mold in all ages have been leaders, and the masses of mankind have everywhere been saved, when saved at all, by those whom they did not com prehend and whom they at some time would greet with the everrecurring verdict of the rabble, "Let him be crucified." This re pressive power of the million upon their few great men who, ran nantes in gurgite vasto, outlive the wave and see the dangers that

ADIHiJSSS OF MB. HARROW, OF GEORGIA.

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gather in the future which are invisible to the submerged eyes of the rest of us, has sometimes cost them their liberties. Its influence, deadening, paralyzing, and disheartening, is more powerful than ever in this age. It was exerted upon him of whom I speak more than once, but he defied it. Alone, seeking no ally, looking with disdain upon the clamorous multitude, taking no counsel, trusting to his impulse and obeying it, he would burst out upon his meteoric course athwart the political heavens. Blazing and flashiflg with the brilliant and almost blinding scintillations of his vivid intelli gence, terrifying his friends as to the consequences, overwhelming his thunder-stricken enemies, coming into collision with the lifelong prejudices and cherished opinions of his own people, he would go sweeping on in his grand career. And yet the Georgians always forgave him in the end and admired and honored him.
Whatever of power and attractiveness Mr. HILL may have pos sessed as a political orator and debater, it was before a jury that his peculiar talents in one direction at least found their fullest play. If in the trial of a case in which his feelings became enlisted a corrupt and lying witness crossed his path, or the opposite party persisted in an attempt to palm off fraud and injustice upon the court to the injury of his client, then it was that the terrible lashes of his fiercest invective were laid upon their backs. No "dint of pity," no limit to wrath, no check or curb ever came near him then, and men are living now who shiver at the mention of his name, as the Saracen did at Richards, in mindfulness of some such merciless castigation. His greatest power was of this sort. There was but little pathos in him. His verdicts, and he won many, were those of the " cloud compelling Jove" rather than the "sweet influences of Pleiades."
Many great orators have had epochs in their lives when their style as such suffered a transformation. This was notably true of Choate, of Lincoln, and of Gambetta. It became less impassioned and more philosophical; but with Mr. HILL there was a marked and powerful exercise in his latest efforts of precisely the same great characteristics that distinguished his earliest; and even the tradi tions of his college days, that still lovingly cling around the old ivied walls of his alma mater at Athens, dim and shadowy though
4H

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LIFE AND CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN H. HILL.

they be, handed down from class to class, still outline the same striking individuality that afterward riveted the attention of a con tinent.
But with all his triumphs

Nothiug in bis life Became him like the leaving it; he died As one that had been studied in his death, To throw away the dearest thing he owd, As twere a careless trifle.

Stricken, fatally stricken in that very member which was his strength, his glory, and his pride, turning his steps away from the Senate after those sad and fruitless efforts to grasp a new life had all proved unavailing, calm, composed, resolute, resigned, he sought his own home. Happening in Atlanta on the 18th of July, just one month t>efore his death, I called to see him. I found him, him who was in some respects the greatest talker I had ever known, utterly powerless of speech. On his knee he held a paper upon which he wrote slowly with a pencil these words:
Wish I could talk. My present doctors have given ine to understand that I cannot recover, and my time is uncertain from a few mouths to several years. Have told me to employ any other doctors and remedies I see proper.

He gave it to me to read and I brought it away with me. It is here, and those who know his handwriting will recognize the familiar characters. His eyes as he gave it had a look of inex pressible sadness, but not of regret or repining. He had sought the refuge of home to die. He knew full well, as he so pathetic ally wrote, that his "time was uncertain," but he was in the place he had chosen to take his last look of the earth. Surrounded by friends, in his own home, under his own native skies, amid the scenes of his childhood, his youth, and his manhood, with the silver sheen of the maples to greet his weary eyes in the sunlight, and the soft lingual accents of his native South from all the myriad voices of the street, and the subtle sweetness of the honeysuckle, the jas mine, and the roses stealing in the long summer afternoons through his open windows, there where the nights always bring silence and

ADDRESS OF MS. BARROW, OF GEORGIA.

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rest and every morning its promise, he sat patiently awaiting his summons. When it came he received it
Like one who wraps the drapery of his coucL about him And lies down to pleasant dreams.
The PRESIDENT pro tempore. The question is on the adoption of the resolutions presented by the Senator from Georgia [Mr. Brown],
The resolutions were agreed to unanimously; and (at one oclock and thirty minutes p. m.) the Senate adjourned.

PROCEEDINGS IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Ix THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,
January 25, 1883.
MESSAGE FROM THE SENATE.
A message from the Senate, by Mr. Sympson, one of its clerks, communicated to the House resolutions adopted by the Senate on the announcement of the death of Hon. BENJAMIN H. HILL, late a Senator of the United States from the State of Georgia.
The SPEAKEE. The Chair lays before the House the resolutions that have just been received from the Senate.
The Clerk read as follows: IN THE SENATK OF THE UNITED STATES,
January 25. 1883. Resolved, That earnestly desiring to show every possible mark of respect to the memory of Hou. BENJAMIN H. HILL, late a Senator of the United States from the State of Georgia, and to manifest the high esteem in which his emi nent public services and distinguished patriotism are held, the business of the Senate he now suspended that the friends and late associates of Senator HILL may pay fitting tribute to his high character, his public services, and private virtues. Besolned, That in the death of Senator HILL the country has sustained a loss which has been felt and deplored to the utmost limits of the Union. Resolved, That the Secretary of the Senate communicate these resolutions to the House of Representatives. llesohed, That, as an additional mark of respect for the memory of the de ceased, the Senate do now adjourn.
Mr. HAMMOXD, of Georgia. I submit the resolutions which I send to the desk.
The Clerk read as follows: Resolved, That the House of Representatives has received with deep sorrow the official announcement of the death of BENJAMIN HARVEY HILL, late United States Senator from the State of Georgia. Resolved, That the House suspend its business, that fitting mention may be made of his private virtues and his public worth. Resolved, That at the conclusion of such tributes to his memory the House shall stand adjourned.

54

LIFE AND CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN H. HILL.

Address of Mr. HAMMOND, of Georgia.
Mr. SPEAKER : So many have spoken and written of the dead Senator, so aptly have the prominent incidents of his life and phases of his character been noticed that naught but repetition can follow. But, representing the district in which he lived, having practiced law at the same bar with him for twenty years?4and been long his neighbor and friend, I cannot allow this occasion to pass without adding my tribute to the many already so worthily be
stowed. Born without wealth, he owed to a relative the opportunity for
completing his education in the University of Georgia. There, in 1844, he bore off the first honor in a class noted for men who be came prominent in the affairs of our State.
In 1845 he began the practice of law at La Grange, Troup County, Georgia. In February, 1848, he was admitted to the su preme court of the State. Residing in the interior, among an agri cultural people, he had but little use for such branches of the law as commercial centers and seaports demand. He used no special pleading except in the United States courts, in which, prior to the war, the jurisdiction was limited and the business meager. He owned few books, and no large law library was within his reach.
He did not become learned in the law by comparing system with system, the polity of our people with those of other nations, measuring their weights and computing, their values as affected by times, places and circumstances. But he had a strong and compre hensive mind, and had cultivated his intellectual forces until he had acquired that high art so well described by Cicero: " Quse docet rem universam tribuere in partes, latentem explicare definiendo, obscuram explanare interpretando; ambigua primum videre, deinde distinguere; postremo babuere regulam quo vera et falsa judicarenter et quse, quibus positis, essent, quseque non essent, consequential
He cited but few authorities and seldom read from books. But he had mastered our system of blended law and equity, and this power of analysis and combination made him strong before the

ADDRESS OF MR. HAMMOND, OF GEORGIA.

55

bench, searching out and applying principles to facts. His diction was clear, precise, forcible, and ornate. His splendid physique, his graceful and manly delivery, his brilliant oratory, now mild and persuasive, now furious as the storm, made him an advocate unsur passed in our country.
Such ability and accomplishments commanded employment at the highest compensation, and furnished ample means to supply the wants and gratify the tastes of himself and family. A hundred acres comprised his suburban home and farm. In front were per haps twenty acres square on which grew nothing but massive oaks. Midway between them a gravel carriage-way and granite walk led to the top of a hill. There he built his house; square, spacious, and on three sides shaded by a colonnade of tall and heavy Corin thian columns. While one was struck with its adaptation to its surroundings, the fruits and fish-ponds in rear, the flowers in front, prepared him for the bountiful but unostentatious hospitality and plain but tasteful adornment within the lawyers home.
Here, in the midst of his family, of which he was at once the stay and idol, we leave him to glance at his career in the broader field of politics. Thus it has been epitomized by himself in the Con gressional Directory: He was State representative in Georgia in 1851 and State senator in 1859 1860. He ran as the candidate of the American party against Hiram Warner in 1855, and for gov ernor of Georgia in 1857 against Governor (now Senator) Brown. He was presidential elector on the Fillmore and Donelson ticket in 1856, and on the Bell and Everett ticket in 1860. He was a dele gate to the State convention of Georgia in 18615 and advocated the Union until secession had b&n irrevocably resolved upon; became a delegate to the provisional congress of the Confederate States and a senator in its regular congress. He was elected to the Fortyfourth Congress to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Garnett McMillan, and was elected to the Forty-fifth Congress, but resigned upon his election to the United States Senate. There he remained from the 5th of March, 1877, till his death.
The time thus covered was long. It was burdened by the grand events which led up to the war, by that terrible struggle for su-

56

LIFE AND CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN H. HILL.

premacy and the strife and convulsions of the people slowly wan dering back through untried paths to peace.
One part of it we may dwell upon, because he always mentioned it with such self-satisfaction that was his love for the Union of the States. He favored the Clay compromise measures of 1850; he supported H<lwell Cobb for governor as the candidate of the Constitutional Union party upon a platform declaring those com promises " fair, just, and equitable," and aided in piling up for him a then unprecedented majority in a gubernatorial race in our State.
This platform of 1855 spoke of "the maintenance of the Union of these United States as the paramount political good." By that of 1856 "the perpetuation of the Federal Union" was regarded " as the palladium of our civil and religious liberties and the only sure bulwark of American independence." That of 1860

Beaolved, That it is both the part of patriotism and of duty to recognize no political principles other than the Constitution of the country, the Union of " the States, and the enforcement of the laws.
He opposed the calling of the Georgia State convention of 1860. He was elected thereto to oppose secession. In that body, com posed of the flower of our State, men superior to him in age and political experience, he led the fight for Governor Johnsons reso lutions for a convention of States, to defeat those of Judge Nesbit for immediate disunion. Though his motion failed, he voted against the declaratory resolution for secession with a minority of less than a third of the convention. South Carolina had seceded; Mississippi, Florida, and Alabama had gone. Georgia then seemed to him to have no choice between joining her fortunes with theirs and confusion and chaos within her borders. He therefore then sought to make the convention unanimous for secession. And when the war was over, at an expense of nearly $2,000, he placed in front of that broad walk to his house immense iron gates, on each of which were shown our flag and eagle, that in going in and out he and his children might be daily reminded of the imperish able ensigns of their country.
But while he had struggled for the Union, none doubted his de votion to the Southern cause. While Georgias colonial flag floated

ADDBEtiS OF MB. fTAMMOND, OF GEORGIA.

57

over the capitol at Milledgeville he was chosen by the convention of 1860 as a delegate to the provisional congress, charged by a reso lution of our State to form a government " modeled as nearly as practicable on the basis and principles of the Government of the United States of America."
The first session of our general assembly elected him senator in the congress of the Confederate States, over Law and Governor Johnson, who had opposed secession, and Iverson, Jackson, and Toombs, who had urged disunion. And in that senate the confi dence of his State was supplemented by that of President Davis and all the most earnest friends of the new government.
That government failed, but his career was not ended. The war restored the Union. But how changed was the situation! The South did not concede that its quarrel had been unjust or its action wrong. There, as here, the soldiers gloried in their records. There, as here, he who bore a wound received in battle was re garded as holding a patent to the love and admiration of his fel lows.
The Union was restored in law, but without the ante-bellum surroundings. The Constitution was changed in essentials which the North thought would strengthen our system, but which the South thought subversive of the fundamental principles of our Government.
A new element was incorporated into the body-politic. The North thought that necessary to secure what it called " the fruits of the war;" the South thought that thereby her civilization was endangered and the safeguards of constitutional liberty strained to their uttermost. " Reconstruction" came in all its various phases disfrarichisement of former citizens and enfranchisement of former slaves, martial law, and bayonet rule.
The South was repeating the mournful Jeremiad :
\Ve are orphans and fatherless, our mothers are as widows. * * * Our necks are under persecution; we labor and have no rest. * * * Servants have ruled over us; there is none to deliver us out of their hand.
Mr. HILL heard and determined to strike for deliverance. Oc cupying no official position, he could appeal only as a private citizen. He had been well trained for such work. In 1855 he had met

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LIFE AND CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN H. HILL.

Warner, ex-judge of our highest court, strong, logical, and of spot less reputation for integrity, and reduced a large majority to al most naught by commanding eloquence on the stump. In his race for governor and canvassing as Presidential elector he had become well known throughout the State. He was ranked among the very best of a host of gifted men.
He never told an anecdote, indulged in no flights of fancy; he quoted neither poet nor classic, yet he charmed and enchained his audiences.
This new field suited his manner and disposition. His defiant speech at Davis Hall, his denunciations at the Bush Arbor, at Atlanta, electrified his sympathetic hearers. A larger mass was enthused by his "Notes on the Situation," written with a pen dipped in the very gall of bitterness. Invective was his forte, and in these efforts he excelled himself. He chafed as a caged lion as he saw statute after statute aimed by Congress against the political equality of his native State and her rightful rule thrice displaced by martial law. He believed all those measures " unconstitutional, null, and void," and that his would be the glory of having them so denounced.
He and his courageous comrades revived the drooping hopes and rekindled the courage of our people, and soon saw Georgia resume her normal position as a State in the Union, and strengthen by her counsel and example her struggling sisters of the South. But in all else there was signal failure. The changes wrought by war were unalterable, and he accepted the inevitable.
These topics are mentioned only because they cover so large a part of Mr. Hills public life. They are of great weight and full of interest, but may not be considered now. Better that the embers die out than that they should be rekindled by exposure. With restoration came peace and commerce and social intercourse. Pas sions cooled, old memories revived, common interests urged to common thought and purpose.
Soon he was elected Representative and then Senator. The positions assigned him here on committees and in debates show that his reputation was well established and national. His conduct here, his votes and speeches have passed into history. They are

ADDRESS OF MB. SAMMOND, OF GEORGIA.

59

too recent to need comment or justify discussion now. The pride of his State was seconded by the conntry which cheerfully counted him among the great men of our age.
His name may not be associated with any great reform; his genius may notbe crystallized in any statute of our country. This may be because he belonged to that large class of orators who build not themselves, but by encouragement and criticism perfect the building of others. Or it may be that a tree so frequently and so violently transplanted could not yield its natural fruitage until time had cured its shocks. That time was not given. In the zenith of his powers the end came.
That tongue so eloquent was being by a cancer destroyed. The cruel knife, intended to stay, seemed but to hasten the catastrophe. Nor nature nor art could arrest its progress. AVith mind unim paired he waited and patiently suffered the tortures which preceded death. As the sun rose upon the earth on the 16th of August last, he was gone.
His long suffering had mellowed admiration into love. Our capital city was draped in mourning, its business stopped, and its organizations, private and public, vied with each other in expres sions of sorrow. All parts of our State sent delegations to his funeral. Through a long lane of sympathizing fellow-citizens, Representatives and Senators bore him to his grave.
T^hey had sat in the church to which he belonged and heard the pastor, his life-long friend, tell of his early conversion and his en during faith. Long after his power of speech was gone, as the cruel cancer was eating his earthly life away, he thought and wrote of life eternal. Once, when engaged in such high thought, he had read by his pastor Pauls grand reasoning about the fact and necessity of the resurrection. Responding, with tremulous, dying hand he wrote:
If a grain of corn will die and then rise again in infinite beauty, why may not I die and then rise again in infinite beauty and life ? How is the last a greater mystery than the first ? And by so much as I exceed the grain of corn iii this life, why may I not exceed it in the new life T How can we limit tbe power of Him who made the grain of corn to die, and then made the same grain again in sncli wonderful newness of life?
His great soul had grasped the sublime " mystery " that " this

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LIFE AND CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN H. HILL.

corruptible must put on incorruptiqn and this mortal must put on immortality." And when, on a later occasion, he wrote for this man of God, " I cannot suppress a certain elation at the thought of going," he had evidently caught the triumphant enthusiasm of the Apostle of the Gentiles, when he concluded:
So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, arid this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.
O death, where is thy sting ? O grave, where is thy victory ?

Address of Mr. SPEER, of Georgia.
Mr. SPEAKER : To eulogize the deeds and preserve the memories of those who either in peace or war have conferred benefits or lus ter on their country has ever among the civilized been regarded a privilege and a duty.
The desire of inspiring an ambition to emulate such examples has doubtless given birth to such usages and sentiments. N^or can it be denied that the means are conducive to a beneficial end. The human mind is so constituted that it is not only interested, it is aroused and stimulated by lofty ideals of excellence. Indeed, a clear conception of what has been done, and therefore what can be done, is an important factor in achieving eminence in any profession or in any enterprise.
Csesar might never have won his splendid triumphs as soldier and statesman had he not chanced to see in an obscure town in Spaiu a statue of Alexander the Great. His passion for military glory was then and there fired by the thought that the Macedonian at thirty years of age had conquered the world, while he, though thirtyfive, had achieved but little renown. It is certain that an intense interest in the lives and deeds of the great men of their common wealths formed no small part ofthe patriotism of the ancient Greeks. Athens was but a vast museum of architecture, sculpture, and paint ing dedicated to the national glory and the worship of the gods. The city was full of the memorials of actual history. Its youth were perpetually surrounded with incentives to patriotic devotion. Every street and square from the Piraeus to the Acropolis was

ADDRESS OF MR. SPEER, OF GEORGIA.

61

adorned with statues (by the most consummate masters that ever gave life to marble) of the great men of the republic: Solon the lawgiver, Coiion the admiral, Pericles the mightiest of their states men, ami Demosthenes the prince of their orators, in imperishable marble, gave inspiration to the Athenian youth.
Twenty-three centuries have not extinguished this sentiment of veneration for the illustrious dead. It still lives to console and ele vate humanity. Its memorials are found to-day in every civilized land. On the banks of the Danube, that historic river whose waves have witnessed the march of the hordes of Attila and the paladins of Charlemagne, whose shores have echoed to the tramp of the Roman legions, the hymns of the crusaders, and the artillery of Napoleon, stands a noble structure of marble called the Hall of Heroes, a modern Valhalla, filled with the effigies of the great men of all Germany. "By the soft, blue waters of Lake Lucerne,",says the eloquent Meagher, " stands the chapel of William Tell. In the black aisle of the old cathedral of Innspruck the peasant of the Tyrol kneels before the statue of Andrew Hofer. In her new senate hall England bids her sculptors place the images of her noblest sons, her Hampden and her Russel. In the great American Republic, in that capital city which bears his name, rises the monument of the Father of his Country." Yes, even in young America, the ideal izing power of the painter and the sculptor are employed to kindle the generous ambition of the youthful aspirant to fame. Sir, how apposite in this connection are the melodious verses of Cowper:
Patriots have toiled, and in their countrys cause Bled nobly; and their deeds, as they deserve, Receive proud recompense. We give in charge Tbeir names to the sweet lyre. The historic muse, Proud of the treasure, marches with it down To latest times; and sculpture in her turn Gives hond in stone and ever-dnring brass To guard them and immortalize her trust.
We should not defraud the illustrious dead of their rightful re ward, that reward which is the great moral compensation for con temporaneous prejudice and injustice. Nay, more, we should never take away from coming generations the strongest incentive to pa triotism, to the love and service of-their country. Rather let it be

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LIFE AND CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN H. HILL.

proclaimed by memorial service and monumental marble, by noble and beautiful art, that those who consecrate their talents or their lives to the state will not, shall not, be forgotten; that they shall * * live in memory so long as men shall reverence law, honor patriotism, or love liberty. Thus may we hope for a long and glorious beadroll of great statesmen and gallant soldiers, and that it will never be said of this Union of States as was said of ancient Rome, "Octavius has a party and Antony has a party, but the Republic has no .party."
In conformity, then, with a usage sanctioned by the wisdom of ages of civilization, we have assembled to pay a national tribute of respect to the memory of BENJAMIN H. HILL, the late distinguished Senator of Georgia, He has already been laid to rest beneath the soil of that State which gave him birth, and which he served so long and loved so well. Never were public esteem and private affection more signally manifested than at his obsequies. The legislature of Georgia has ordered his portrait to be placed on the walls of the capitol. Public munificence has projected a stately monument to mark the place of his burial and as a token of admiration for his talents, recognition of his patriotic services, and respect and affection for his memory. -
But it is not extravagant to say that neither funeral pomp nor public eulogy, neither the painters pencil nor the sculptors chisel, can do that for his memory which he has done for it himself.
It vvill not be expected of me to undertake the superfluous task of dwelling in detail on the events of his life, or of attempting an elaborate delineation of his character. This has been done by the ablest writers of the press with an acuteness of analysis and an opu lence of illustration that will convey to posterity a vivid conception of the great subject. This has been appropriately done in wise and eloquent words in the other wing of the Capitol by Senators who have listened with admiration to the voice of our now silent but once matchless orator. They may have agreed with him or they may have differed from him, but they could not fail to recognize his lofty and chivalrous bearing, his commanding ability, his eloquent reasoning, his ardent and devoted patriotism. These will be remem bered when the asperities of political controversy are forgotten. .1

ADDRESS OF MB. SPUES, OF GEORGIA.

63

can say, however, from an intimate personal acquaintance with him, that he was a man of unimpeachable integrity, ever evincing by pre cept and example his respect for morality and -religion. The moral, the religious, the charitable, the educational institutions of his State have lost in him an influential friend and a generous benefactor.
His name was a tower of strength to every good cause in which it was enlisted. One trait only will I stress in this presence, and that is his patriotism. He loved his country, his whole country, its Constitution, its laws, its liberties. He was a man to-whom the whole country was ever more than a part. Originally a member of the old Whig party, an enthusiastic disciple of Clay and Webster, he loved as they did the Union cemented by the blood of our Rev olutionary fathers. He regarded that Union as a perpetual bond of national brotherhood, and as associated with the most precious memories of the past and freighted with the brightest hopes of the future. In the darkest period of that fierce sectional controversy between the North and the South, which ripened into one of the most gigantic wars in the bloodstained annals of our race until hope had been swept away by the fiery tide of revolution, he continued to hope and to temper the counsels of the people. He was there after throughout the struggle steadfast to his kindred and his people. This is characteristic of the man, and will be appreciated by the generous everywhere. His course was such that it could not be said of him as Dr. Johnson said of Junius:
Finding sedition in the ascendant he was able to advance it: finding the nation combustible, he was able to inflame it.
He knew that our system of government, like all human institu tions, however wise in theory and successful in its general operation, is liable to abuse; that unwise laws were sometimes enacted; that salutary laws were sometimes evaded and even resisted; that party spirit, the bane of all free institutions, which Washington himself pronounced the worst enemy of popular government, was sometimes pushed to the verge of remorseless and maddening convulsion. But he never despaired of the Republic. He had little sympathy with that dangerous folly which pretends that our national prosperity is on the wane; that the meridian of our countrys glory has been reached and passed; that nothing is to be expected but venality iu

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LIFE AND CHARACTER 01 BENJAMIN H. HILL.

legislative bodies and corruption in our courts of justice; that the "American Astrea, like the goddess of old, has fled to the stars."
He held, and wisely held, that the founders of our Government and their descendants had accomplished more and better results with in the century of their existence than had ever been accomplished in the same time in the history of any race. He was persuaded that they had secured for themselves a larger amount of the substantial blessings of life than are enjoyed by any people ou the globe.
He believed that our country might, and by the blessing of Provi dence would, reach a height of prosperity of which the world as yet has seen no example.
But I forbear. Six months have passed since lie was taken from us. His protracted sufferings and hopeless disease prepared us for the inevitable result. But I can not but feel to-day, as I did when it was first announced that Senator HILL was dead, that Georgia had hardly another, I might say not another, such life to lose. He was unselfish, thoughtful of all, generous and kind to all. His life and his labors were consecrated to the welfare and happiness of others; and, more than all, "for the profit of the people, for the advancement of the nation."

Address of Mr. TUCKER, of Virginia.
Mr. SPKAKEK : In the natural grief which Georgia feels for the loss of her great son, it is not fitting that Virginia should manifest her sympathy in silence at the tomb of one, who often said he felt like standing in her presence ever with uncovered brow. In this public calamity which touches the whole country Virginia begs to lay the tribute of her respect on his grave.
My acquaintance with the late Senator HILL Began with our en trance into this Hall as members of the Forty-fourth Congress. It ripened into intimacy from an association- as members of the Com mittee on Ways and Means. That relation has no doubt made it seem appropriate that I should have been invited to say something on this occasion.
Mr. HILL was born in Georgia in September, 1823, of" a parent-

OF MB. TUCKER, OF VIRGINIA.

65

age which was of English origin and had for generations lived in

his native State. He loved her with the devotion of a true and

faithful son. His father, though not very liberally educated, cov

eted high culture for his children, and secured a classical education

for his distinguished sou, which he completed at the University of

Georgia, at Athens, in 1844.

Mr. HILL was admitted to the bar in 1845, and reached that em

inence in his profession early in his career which great talents,

fidelity, and enthusiasm will always secure. He entered the

legislative halls of Georgia as early as 1851. . He was a candidate

for Congress in 1855 and for governor in 1857, but was defeated

on both occasions on political grounds; but it speaks strongly for

his rapid rise in public estimation that at so early aa age he was

nominated for the chief executive office of that great Common

wealth.

.

He was a decided Whig in politics, and was on the electoral ticket

of Bell and Everett in the memorable contest of 1860.

The election of Mr. Lincoln to the Presidency in that year caused

the call of the convention in Georgia in January, 1861, which passed

the ordinance for the secession of that State from the Union. To

that convention Mr. HILL was elected; and in its debates he took

a prominent part in opposition to secession and in favor of awaiting

in the Union the results of the triumph of the Republican party.

When the convention decided against his views he threw himself

with all the ardor of his powerful intellect into the cause of the

Confederacy. He was elected to the provisional congress at Mont

gomery, and afterward to the senate of the Confederate States, in

which he served his State with great zeal and signal ability until

the close of the war. He was in 1865 arrested and imprisoned in

Fort Lafayette for some time by the Federal authorities; and upon

his release returnea to the bar, practicing his profession with great

success and participating with the Democratic party in the political

questions of the period of reconstruction. He was elected to the

Forty-fourth Congress and was assigned by Mr. Speaker Kerr to

a position on the Committee on Ways and Means, of which my hon

orable friend from Illinois [Mr. Morrison] was chairman. Of

that committee there remain in this House but three members, the

5H

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LIFE AND CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN S. HILL.

then chairman,, the present honorable chairman of the committee [Mr. Kelley], and myself.
In January, 1876, the debate on the amnesty bill was opened with such a display of political excitement and sectional bitterness as I have never seen since that time, and which I am glad to hope will never be seen again in this Hall.
In that debate no one who heard it can ever forget the parlia mentary eloquence and ability of Mr. Blaine and of General Garfield, and the no less skillful and powerful speech of Mr. HILL. It was the battle of giants, and Mr. HILL was the equal of any man who took part in it. It placed him at once in the front rank of debaters in the American Congress.
Whether in the labors of the Committee on Ways and Means on the questions of tariff and finance, or in the discussions in the House, Mr. HILL continued while a member of this body to rise higher and higher in public estimation until his election to the Senate in the winter of 1877.
It is not too much to say that as a Senator he fully maintained his high reputation, and measured swords in debate on few occa sions in which he was not victor, and in none in which he was van quished.
A mortal disease, insidious in its progress and painful in its na ture, ended his life in the summer of last year, and the grave has closed upon a career which, though not prolonged to old age, was one of the most brilliant and memorable in our parliamentary his tory.
The elements which make up the character of a remarkable man it is interesting to analyze and portray. I feel incompetent to do so satisfactorily in this case, for while our intercourse was always familiar and cordial, our relations were not so close and confiden tial as to have enabled me to judge and measure him with critical accuracy.
His tall and striking person, his grave and thoughtful face, his clear but dreamy eye, and the gleam of sunshine which lit up his countenance when friendly intercourse detached his thoughts from the subject in which his mind was absorbed, all combined to inter est, attract, and impress every person who came in contact with

ADDRESS OF ME. TUCKER, OF VIRGINIA.

67

him. His ringing voice; his earnest, sometimes vehement, man ner; his bold and aggressive style; his strong, clear, and logical reasoning; his exalted and eloquent declamation, and withal his self-reliant and confident assertion of his views, made him one of the most powerful and impressive speakers of his time.
He worked with intense and concentrated energy. , His mind was capable of great abstraction. In the companionship of his own thoughts he became often unconscious of all around him, and his intellectual powers then glowed with the fires of his own enthusiasm.
He was an intellectual athlete. His strength was not mere dead force, but his sinewy frame enabled him to turn an adversary in the decisive wrestle, when he himself seemed to be overthrown. He was not technical in his reasoning, but cut down to the root of , the matter of debate. His nature was bold and aggressive. If his foe was in ambush, he uncovered him and forced him into the open field. His tactical method was assault. He struck for his enemys center and rarely attacked his flank. But when assailed and in retreat, he would suddenly turn upon his foe, retrieve his loss, at tack on flank or center as best he might, and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. He was formidable in the opening of battle, chiefly for attack, but lie was as dangerous in retreat at its close, when pressed by a too confident opponent. Disaster did not dis may mishap did not demoralize him. His ample resources were adequate to any emergency, and he would convert what seemed a fatal mistake into the source of a final triumph by his quick and bold repulse of his assailant, which he often pushed to a complete rout of his forces. He argued from the workshop of his own brain. He intensified thought upon the issue, and discarding au thority and extrinsic aids, drew from the well-furnished armory of hwiasrfeoawren. mind the<*weapons and munitions for the conduct of his
These qualities made him a great advocate at the bar, whether before juries or courts, and a great debater in the halls of legisla tion ; indeed, as formidable in these respects as any man of his day.
I believe he thought best on his feet. The fervor of his intel lect made his arguments present convictions which might pass away and give place to others as strong under mental action at another

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LIFE AND CHARACTER OF SEXJAMIN B. HILL.

time. To this peculiarity in his mental operations was due what seemed alack of consistency sometimes in the conclusions he reached. His intellectual activity was so powerful as to make him seem in tolerant to his opponents; but I do not believe it touched his heart. He struck the shield of his foe as a knight in the tournament, vigorously but without animosity; and when the strife was ended he could lift up the adversary he had struck down and clasp him in friendly regard with the hand which dealt the blow.
In his social life, while often abstracted by the thoughts which ab sorbed him, he was genial, kind, and loving. Generous and brave, he grappled to him friends with hooks of steel. Honest in his dealing, sincere and truthful in his intercourse, and cordial in his friendships, he died mourned by hosts of warm admirers and fol lowers.
He was not, I think, a great reader of books. For works of fic tion he had no taste. He told me once he had never read one of Scotts novels, after I had playfully called him in debate a Dalgetty, of whose name and character he was ignorant. But his reading was such as strengthened his powerful mind, and furnished his style with the materials which gave grace and beauty to the solid and simple Doric of his severe and classic oratory.
It was natural for such a man to have ambition. The eaglet in his home nest on the mountain cliff feels in his unfledged wing the power to soar toward the object on which he ever looks with unblenched eye. So genius, with prophetic instinct, aspires to achieve its conscious destiny. It seeks, or at least may not, without fault, put aside the opportunity which will enable it to do so. When Lord Selborne reached the woolsack some friend congratulated him on attaining the summit of his ambition. In substance he replied, "Not so; I have gained the opportunity to serve my country; the summit of my ambition is to serve her well, and to do good."
Such ambition is a noble virtue. The aspiration to uphold the right, to destroy the wrong, and to do good, is all of human glory which it is fit for human life to aspire to win. That passion for place and office, without consciousness of ability to fill it well and for the public good, is base and mean; it is a vice, the vice of our day, and leads to crime.

ADDRESS OF MB. HOUSE, OF TENNESSEE.

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Mr. HILL aspired for public positions from the self-conscious ness of his fitness to serve his country in and through them. In him it was a noble virtue.
He bore his prolonged and painful illness with patience, fortitude, and resignation. As the hopes of continued life faded away the light of immortality gleamed upon his latter^days with the assurance of peace and eternal joy. The tongue which had thrilled the multi tude and electrified the forum and the Senate, palsied by his mortal disease, faltered and was almost still. Yet it cheers us to know that in the death valley through which his great soul was called to pass, God gave that tongue the power to whisper in tones of touching tenderness and faith as his eagle eye gazed upon the opening glories of the immortal life, " Almost home!"

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

No farther ? Ay ! through the grave, where human glory ends, the Christian hope plants our feet upon that path which leads to celestial glory in the bosom of our Father and our God!

Address of Mr. HOUSE, of Tennessee.
Mr. SPEAKER : When the hand of death struck the name of BENJAMIN H. HILL, of Georgia, from the roll of Senators the sad event was deplored not only by the State that had honored him, but by the whole country. All realized the fact that a man of great intellectual power had fallen, and that a vacancy had been made in the national councils which could not be readily supplied.
I well remember the first time I ever met him. It was at-a mass-meeting during the Presidential campaign of 1860, at Knoxville, Tennessee. His fame even at that time, when he was com paratively a young man, had traveled beyond the limits of his own State. I recall most vividly the impression he made on me on that occasion as one of the most eloquent and powerful popular orators to whom I had ever listened. The crowd was numbered by the thousand, and the speaking took place in the open air in a beautiful grove near the town. Without much seeming efibrt on

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his part lie held the undivided attention of the vast assembly dur ing an address of some two or three hours. I can never forget the trepidation and misgivings with which I arose, according to the programme of the day, to address the audience on the same side of the question, through fear that it would be impossible for me to say anything that would interest a crowd that had listened to his magnificent effort.
I saw him no more until I met him at Richmond in the fall of 1861 as a member of the provisional congress of the Confederate States. At the end of the provisional congress our paths diverged. He entered the Confederate senate, where he served during the remainder of the war.
The next time I met him was in this Hall as a member of the Forty-fourth Congress. That Congress was the first one after the war to which full delegations of representative men were admitted from the Southern States. They came to Washington fully im pressed with the difficulties and complications that surrounded them. They felt that the people whom they represented, greatly impoverished by the war and struggling to repair their ruined fortunes, would be held to a strict accountability for the actions and utterances of their representatives. Thus impressed and thus appreciating the dangerous ground on which they stood and the delicate relations which they sustained to the Government, they de termined to tread the path of patriotic duty so plainly and firmly that none could fail to see that they fully and honestly acquiesced in the results of the war, and were prepared to discharge in good faith every demand imposed by the conditions of a restored Union and the common welfare of a reunited people. I think I know the animus of the Southern men who took their seats in this Hall as Representatives in the Forty-fourth Congress. Whether I have stated it truly and fairly I confidently leave the records they have made here to determine.
Soon after the assembling of that Congress a general amnesty bill was introduced in the House by Hon. Samtiel J. Randall, of Pennsylvania, being similar in all respects to a bill which had on two previous occasions passed the House of Representatives but failed in the Senate, The question arose of admitting Jefferson

ADDRESS OF MB. SOUSE, OF TENNESSEE.

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Davis to the benefits of the act. A distinguished Representative from Maine in the course of his remarks used this strong and em phatic language:
Aiid I, here before God, measuring my words, knowing their full extent and import, declare that neither the deeds of the Duke of Alva in the Low Countries, nor the massacre of St. Bartholomew, nor the thumb-screws and engines of torture of the Spanish Inquisition begin to compare in atrocity with the hideous crime of Andersonville. [Applause on the floor and in the galleries. ]
Up to this time no Southern man had taken any part in the pro ceedings. The discussion had not proceeded far before it became evident that it was destined to provoke more or less of sectional bitterness. The Representatives from the South deprecated and deplored the agitation of questions growing out of the war. They felt that all such agitation was mischievous in its tendency and could be productive of no good to their section of the country, and they were anxious that all such questions should be relegated to the tribunal of history. But as the discussion progressed it assumed a character which in their opinion demanded that a reply should be made from a Southern stand-point. Mr. HILL, from his known intimate relations with Jefferson Davis during the war, as well as from his acknowledged ability, was generally recognized as the most appropriate Southern man to speak for his section in a debate which all felt was destined to become historic. But little time for prepa ration was allowed him, as the discussion arose rather unexpectedly. I know he felt deeply the responsibility and delicacy of his posi tion. To defend the Confederate government against the charges brought against it and maintain the honor of the Southern name without saying anything that would militate against the interests of the Southern people in the prevailing temper of the public mind of the North required the exercise of the coolest judgment and the nicest discrimination. Thus restrained and shackled by the grave considerations which surrounded the situation, he felt that he could not indulge the usual freedom of debate, and was therefore forced to meet his adversaries upon unequal terms. When he arose to address the House he faced a most attentive audience upon the floor and in the crowded galleries. It was an occasion ofdeep solicitude and dramatic interest. I will not risk the imputation

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of intruding improper and unwelcome suggestions upon this occa sion by even a reference to the points or details of the discussion. It was watched with the keenest interest by both sides of this Chamber, and in fact by the whole country. It aroused feelings which, I am happy to say, time has softened and tempered, and which I would be the last to recall from the shades of the unhappy past. But justice to the dead requires that I should not omit to say that, difficult as were the requirements of the occasion, South ern Representatives and the Southern people felt that their good name suffered no detriment from want of ability in its defender.
Mr. Speaker, I recall another prominent figure in that memorable debate. James A. Garfield, of Ohio, replied to Mr. HILL. If any one had been called on at that time to point out two men on this floor whose robust health and vigorous manhood gave the greatest promise of a long life, the selection could not have fallen upon any two members more appropriately than upon James A. Gariield and BEX.TAMIX H. HILT,. How little we know or can know of what the future has in store for us. How soon were these two distin guished men, who encountered each other in that debate, doomed to leave this world under circumstances of lingering and protracted suffering that stirred the sympathies of all.
The former in a short while was transferred by the voice of his State from this House to the Senate, and before he could assume the duties of a Senator the voice of the American people called him to the Presidency. Honors were showered upon him with a profusion that left ambition but little to desire. He was inaugurated amid the well-wishes of the whole country. But while the thickly clus tered laurels upon his brow were yet wet with morning dew at a moment least expected, in the heart of a populous city, in sight of the Capitol the bullet of a beastly and vulgar assassin laid him low. The national heart stood still with horror when the first shock of the great crime was felt. As the distinguished sufferer lay upon his bed of pain, the hearts of his countrymen of all parties and all sections visited the chamber where he struggled with death, breath ing sympathy for his condition and hope for his recovery. This painful solicitude was merged into universal sorrow when the tele graph bore the news to every part of the country that the struggle

ADDRESS OF MR. SOUSE, OF TENNESSEE.

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was over. .The Democrat forgot that he was a Republican Presi dent, and the Southern man that he belonged to the North. All party, all sectional feeling was lost in the profound gloom that per vaded the whole country. He had met his fate and borne his great sufferings with a patient fortitude and lofty courage which silenced all criticism and melted all hearts, while it intensified the universal horror with which the assassins crime was regarded. For, Mr. Speaker, whatever may be true of other peoples and other lands, the crime of assassination can never be looked upon by the American people with other feelings than those of execration and abhorrence. It is a noxious plant that can never flourish in our soil. General Garfield reached the highest position to which human ambition can aspire ; but the grandest proportions which his character ever assumed were displayed in the heroism of his death-bed.
Mr. HILT, was likewise called by the voice of his State to a seat in the Senate. This was a field muoh better suited for the exercise of his great gifts than the House of Representatives, and he soon gained in that body the front rank as a debater and a statesman of great and varied attainments. His speech in the Senate in the de bate on the bill prohibiting the use of troops at the polls was recog nized by all who heard it or read it as an effort of transcendent ability. His analysis and exposition of our dual system of gov ernment, defining the powers that belonged to the States and those that belonged to the Federal Government under the Constitution, were thorough and profound. That speech alone was sufficient to rank him in the first class of American statesmen, and to that class he undoubtedly belonged. As a debater he had few equals, even among the distinguished men whose learning and ability dignify and adorn the American Senate. Whether on the hustings address ing the masses of the people, in the forum before judges and juries, or in the halls of Congress discussing great questions of national importance, he never failed to impress himself upon those who heard him as a man of great power and ability. No antagonist, whatever his fame or prowess, ever encountered him upon any of those fields of intellectual gladiature without feeling that he stood in the pres ence of a foeman worthy of his steel. But in the prime and pleni tude of his great powers, when he felt the solid ground of a well-

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earned national reputation beneath his feet and a long and a brilliant career of honor and usefulness opening up before him, the admoni tion of death came, not, it is true, in the guise of an assassins bul let, but in a form almost as tragic and no less certain.
Soon after the meeting of the present Congress I visited the court room where President Garfields assassin was being tried for his life. On leaving I met Senator HILL, and we walked some dis tance together. On the way I inquired as to the condition of the malady that had excited his fears and the apprehension of his friends. I found him hopeful and cheerful, and even buoyant under the conviction that he had experienced the worst and that he was now in a sure way to permanent and. final recovery. But not a great while afterward I heard that he had been compelled to again seek the offices of his surgeon. I felt then that he was a doomed man doomed to excrutiating suffering and certain death.
With his robust constitution and great strength of will he made a brave fight for his life, and sought all the means within his power to preserve and prolong it. But all efforts proved unavailing, and at last he went home to die. Within its peaceful bosom, surrounded by his family, and friends, and by the people who admired and loved and honored him, he looked death calmly in the face as he watched its approaches day by day, and knew that nothing could avert the inevitable hour. How less than nothingness must have ap peared to him all the glories of this world as he passed through his terrible ordeal of suffering to the grave that he saw opening to re ceive him. Distinguished as was his life, all the honors that clus tered around it fade into insignificance in the presence of the sub lime courage and Christian patience and resignation that crowned
his death.
Men in the whirl of busy life aud the carnival of earthly ambi tion may treat with a sneer or a jest the power of the Christian relig ion to sustain the struggling soul amid the agonies of dissolving nature and the gloom of approaching death; but that sneer is robbed of its sting and that jest loses its point beside the beds of protracted suffering and lingering death from which the victorious spirits of James A. Garfield and BENJAMIN H. HILL left their wasted tene ments of clay.

ADDRESS OF MB. WELLBORN, OF TEXAS.

75

Mr. Speaker, sooner or later our struggle with the last enemy must come; for whatever may be our hopes, our ambition, our schemes for the future, or may have been our achievements in the past, we may be assured of one fact time will overlook and death forget none of us. And in that solemn hour which witnesses the exchange of worlds the obscurest Christian that has honestly endeavored dur ing an unobtrusive life to do his duty toward God and man is more to be envied than the tallest son ofintellectual pride, though he may have walked the mountain ranges of human thought, without God and without hope in the world.

Address of Mr. WELLBORN, of Texas.
Mr, SPEAKER : " How peaceful and how powerful is the grave!" The qualities here ascribed to humanitys final resting-place are none the less true because poetically asserted. The grave is an abode of peace and an instrumentality of power. In both essentials it is above the vicissitudes of time, " Bulwarked around and armed with rising towers," earthly forces cannot break through nor raze. Whether the sun shines in brightness, or the clouds droop murk ily ; whether gentle breezes touch lightly, or the storm king rides upon the whirlwind, the condition of the grave is always that of repose. Enraged elements may beat down the monument, remorse less earthquakes swallow up the vault, but iu the ideal grave, of which the monument and vault are but unsubstantial types, peace abideth ever. Tranquil is the sleep of him upon whose honored grave the repre sentatives of millions of people, arrested for awhile in their ordi nary labors, are now laying the merited tributes of a nations es teem ; tranquil will it remain until after the latter days, when the promised summons spoke by angel tongue shall awake from the embrace of death and call forth the released captive to those awards of brightness and joy, which, on the testimonies of time, have al ready been entered up in the record-book of eternity. It is not the peace, however, but the power of the grave which the memorial services of this hour most strongly proclaim. Oppor-

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tunities neglected and opportunities abused have caused thousands, in dying, to leave behind them but few evidences of their having been; or if many, only sad proofs of misspent and mischievous lives. Hence, " Lived to little purpose," or " Lived to a bad pur pose," would be inscribed on many tombstones if they were truly epitaphed.
Not so of the marble column which will point coming genera tions to the consecrated spot where lie entombed the ashes of Geor gias great Senator. The matchless talents nature gave him were early dedicated to high aims, and the fruitful opportunities the wise improvement of those talents afforded shaped to their best uses. From the peace of his grave, therefore, rises in power an example worthy of all imitation, grandly illustrating how native talents use fully employed and properly directed can achieve wide and lasting renown in different and difficult walks of life, and how, in the su preme solemnity of the last hour, when earth and time are fast fad ing from view, they can nerve the soul of a feeble, wasted frame to bravely and triumphantly cross over the dark borders of that mysterious land before whose veiled terrors strong manhood is wont to tremble.
The example thus presented for our contemplation is made up from the experiences of Mr. HILL, in private, professional, and pub lic life. Of the last two only w<H I speak, leaving to others more familiar with it the portrayal of the first. It is not my purpose to undertake a narrative of events, but simply a hurried statement of traits of character which distinguished him in the public walks to which fortune or inclination called him. And in this I shall not aim at completeness, but only give a few of the impressions made on my mind by a general observation of him as a lawyer, an orator, a statesman, and a patriot; nor shall I communicate these impres sions in words of studied panegyric. Too well do I recognize, as applied to Mr. HILL, the truth of the apostrophe
Nature doth mourn for thee. There is no need For man to strike his plaintive lyre and fail, As fail he must, if he attempt thy praise.
The splendid triumphs of Mr. HILLS maturer years at the bar show that he must have mastered the law as a science during the

ADDRESS OF MK. WELLBORN, OF TEXAS.

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period of his professional pupilage. His attainments were not limited to a few scattering rules and forms picked up from particu lar decisions used in cases with which he was connected, but were opinions and convictions formed from a searching and comprehen sive study of jurisprudence as a grand system of principles resting on immutable foundations of right and justice. For the discovery of these principles he looked to the exercise of his own reason, and in forensic contests relied mainly on a conscious knowledge of the principles thus discovered. Adjudicated cases he regarded as but instances illustrating and applying principles. In other words, his own reason, strengthened and equipped by the pupilage before men tioned, discovered and applied general principles; precedents were invoked largely, if not only, to support and confirm the conclusions of his own mind. This view accounts for the singular readiness and accuracy with which he could meet the various and often un expected exigencies which complicated suits are liable to develop during the processes of trial.
Mr. HILL combined within himself the jurist and the advocate. He was gifted with perception to discern and judgment to apply appropriate principles to given states of facts. He had also a log ical and perspicuous style. The union of these qualities made him clear and forcible in the statement and proof of his premises, and powerful if not resistleas in the conclusions he sought to establish. In law, as in .politics, he was distinguished for originality of thought rather than scholarship. His was the grander power to originate, not the lesser faculty of appropriating the creations of others. He was a model, not a type. However so great the excel lency he may have attained unto in other pursuits, the judicial his tory of Georgia, as well as the traditions of her people, will always clain* his legal attainments and forensic triumphs as among the most brilliant experiences of his brilliant life.
To intellectuality Mr. HILL added the power to feel and to will. These mental endowments, with his fluency of language and at times impassioned delivery, formed for him what he became one of the great orators of his day.
Eloquence is denned to be "the utterance of strong emotion in a manner adapted to excite correspondent emotion in others. It

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ordinarily implies elevated and forcible thought, well-chosen lan guage, an easy and effective utterance, and an impassioned manner." Those who ever heard Mr. HILL at the bar, in legislative halls, or on the stump, when the energies of his nature were thoroughly aroused, could not have failed to recognize in his effort marvelous and unmistakable manifestations of all these qualities. I remem ber to have heard a speech he once made on a noted occasion char acterized by a critical auditor as " logic on fire." And it was logic, burning logic; not the formal disputation of a schoolman, but the power of passionately-expressed thought unto the conviction and moving of his hearers:
And each man would turn And gaze on his neighbors face, That with the like dumb wonder answered him. ***** -You could have heard The beating of your pulses while he spoke.

The traits and acquirements which made Mr. HILL, renowned as a lawyer and an orator fitted him for greatness in the arts of gov ernment. In these, after political engagements and official station brought his mind to bear upon them, he soon became deeply versed, and took rank with the foremost statesmen of his day. The ques tion "how can men be best governed?" was with him a subject of profound thought and philosophic research. He rightly looked upon it as a problem whose perfect solution the great minds of the world on memorable trials had failed to work out. The records of history, which he widely and usefully explored, instructed him that philosophy, with all its achievements in the realms of political science, had not been able to impart perfection or permanency to any civil fabric yet built, and that even the testimonies to its mighti est triumphs were chiefly chronicled iii the dismantled wrecks of the institutions it founded. He had fully learned the great lesson taught by ages of experience, that human infirmities will always impress their images on political as well as other human establish ments, and that the Utopia of fiction could never exist in fact.
The Constitution of the American Union, to which his best thought was long and profitably given, he considered the nearest approach to perfection in governmental structure human effort had

ADDRESS OF MR. WELLBORN, OF TEXAS.

79

yet attained. Under the methods, however, which even this in strument provided, he was prepared to see measures consummated which his judgment condemned as errors and told him were fraught with disaster and woe. Emergencies of this kind, the crucial tests of character, did not confound his faculties, but rather stimulated them to the most reliable, if not highest exertions of statesmanship, namely, to see when a thing was inevitable, and, accepting it as such to make -the best of the situation, however bad it might be. He lost no time, therefore, in bewailing accomplished facts, but when, proposed measures against which he warred became irreversible policies, his quick, comprehensive perception took in the whole sit uation, and he at once applied himself not to a continuance of vain resistance but the more sensible work of so controlling these poli cies as to avert, as far as possible, the ruin they threatened, and bring out of them the best attainable results. This quality of states manship, which, on close analysis, will be found to be nothing more nor less than the power of judicious selection between evils, Mr. HILL notably exhibited in his political course prior to and during the late war.
From 1855 up to the passage of the declaratory resolution by the convention of Georgia, January 18, 1861, he combatted the disunion sentiment with all the force and earnestness of his nature. The motives which influenced him were his attachment to the Union under the Constitution and ""his desire to avert the calamities he profoundly believed war would bring upon the South.
For years he did all man could do to stay the swelling tide of popular sentiment drifting his State and section, as he firmly be lieved, into a night of storm and tempest whose starless gloom would prove intenser than Memphian darkness. His efforts were ineffectual. The declaratory resolution before referred to, against which he voted, fixed and determined Georgias policy.
The die was cast. Then it was, under a high sense of duty to his State, he accepted as inevitable what he had struggled to pre vent, and recorded his vote in favor of the ordinance, believing this to be the initial and an important step to the unification of his people in the course they had determined against his judgment to adopt. Of the conspicuous part he bore during the convulsive

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LIFE AND CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN H. SILL.

throes that ensued I shall not speak further than to say that all in vestigations and researches thus far made into that period of storm and gloom have but served to confirm and draw out in bolder lines as his shining characteristics an intellect equal to every emergency in which he was placed, a fidelity to conviction nothing could swerve, a resolution difficulties could not unsettle, a courage dangers could not appall, and a fortitude whose endurance no adversities could exhaust. This chapter of manly virtues will ever be held in warm remembrance by his associates in misfortune and defeat, and can but be read with respectful attention even by those who condemn the cause in which these virtues were displayed.
Mr. HILLS abilities as a lawyer, an orator, and statesman were subjected while he was in public life to the guidance of one grand sentiment: "The noblest motive is the public good."
He loved his country with an intensity and ardor only lofty and generous natures can know. Good government he considered the highest boon that could be bestowed on a people. For this he sought and studied long and diligently. The result of this search and study was one of the profoundest and most valued convictions of his life, namely, that there was no other form of government nor had there ever been one comparable to the Union under the Con stitution. Hear him as he tells to a listening Senate, in stately phrase, the excellency of this Government:
It is the noblest government, the greatest government that hnmau wis dom ever devised, and it could not have been framed by human wisdom alone., The human intellect never existed in this world that could from its own evo lutions have wrought oat snch a thing as this Constitution of the United States. * * * It is a government such as Roman never dreamed of, such as Grecian never conceived, and such as European never had the power to evolve. When the American people, either for the pnrpose of dismembering the States or of destroying them, shall destroy this unparalleled government, this gov ernment without a model, this government without a prototype, they will have destroyed a government which seems to have been wisely adapted to the peculiar condition of the time and to all their future wants, and they will launch out on a sea of uncertainty the result of which no man can fore cast.
Hear him again, as he declares to a vast multitude at his own home, in rapid, beautiful utterance, his admiration for the Ameri can system of government:

ADDRESS OF MB. WELL HORN, OF TEXAS.

81

My countrymen, have you ever studied this wonderful American system of free government T Have you compared it with former systems aud noted how our fathers sought to avoid their defects? Let me commend this study to every American citizen to-day. To him who loves liberty it is more enchant ing than romance, more bewitching than love, and more elevating than auy other science. Our fathers adopted this plan with"improvements in the de tails which cannot be found in any other system. With what a noble im pulse of patriotism they came together from different States and joined their counsels to perfect this system, thenceforward to be known as the " Ameri can system of free constitutional government." The snows that fall on Mount Washington are not purer than the rnoti ves which begot it. The fresh dew-laden zephyrs from the orange groves of the South are not sweeter than the hopes its advent inspired. The flight of our own symbolic eagle, though he blow his breath on the sun, cannot be higher than its expected destiny.
Mr. Speaker, the Voice of patriotism calls to us to-day from the grave of the great Georgian. In silence more eloquent than stirring language it points us to the " American system of free con stitutional government" as the "noblest government, the greatest government that human wisdom ever devised." It impresses upon us that this system is the one founded by Washington and other patriots of the Revolution; that it is hallowed by sacred memories and freighted with precious hopes; that though the right ful inheritance of one people, humanity everywhere has an interest in its preservation; that, if in an evil hour it should perish, its ruins would entomb forever the institutions of freedom and give a new birth to the establishments of despotism.
By all these high considerations it pleads for the perpetuation of this incomparable system of government, "this government with out a model, this government without a prototype," and points out the path of public duty by urging as the measure of public worth " that, he shall be the greatest patriot, the truest patriot, the noblest patriot, who shall do most to repair the wrongs of the past and promote the glories of the future."
Mr. Speaker, the touching scenes and incidents of Mr. HILLS last sickness were a fitting close to the illustrious labors of his active life. The intellect, the resolution, the courage, the fortitude which had sustained him in the latter did not desert him in the former. Butr added to these, was a fuller reliance than ever on that unseen arm which alone can guide through the dark valley and shadow of death. So composedly did he contemplate his near
6H

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LIFE AND CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN S. HILL.

dissolution that he was able to say, "But for the good I had hoped to do my family and country, I should regard the announcement I must die as joyful tidings."
Above all, how entrancing the vision it was granted him to see just before death took him away, and which he pictured so aptly in the last two words he ever spoke, " Almost home!" Home! A magic word. The English language has no brighter, the En glish tongue can speak no sweeter. It names the best spot on earth, the radiant center of pure sentiments and heaven-approved attach ments. Thitherward the wanderer in distant lands ever turns his eye in bright expectancy; and when he has been long and far away and at last nears the loved place, and familiar objects begin to glad den his eye, the tired limbs may almost give out, but the hopebuoyed spirit exclaims, " Almost home!"
The end was at hand. The wanderings of time were over. Eternitys glories were breaking around. The dying Senator "spoke out in full and even triumphant accent," "Almost home!" The pulse throbbed its last beat, and the spirit flew to its God and immortal destiny.

Address of Mr. K.ASSON, of Iowa.
Mr. SPEAKER: I deeply regret that, contrary to well-ordered custom, I am obliged to speak to-day touching the honored dead without the preparation which properly characterizes such an occa sion. I learn to-day that those of my colleagues on this side of the House who, from old association with Mr. HILL, late Senator, were best fitted to speak of his character and to make just appreciation of those qualities which attracted the attention of the whole country, were by illness and other special cause prevented from taking part in the ceremonies of this day.
Unwilling that this side of the House, which had also teen a wit ness of the distinguished ability of Senator HILL, while he was a member of this body, should be unheard on this occasion, I vent ure to trespass on the kindness of my colleagues while I say ex temporaneously a few words upon his character and his services.

ADDRESS OF MB. KASSON, OF IOWA,

83

We from the States of the North had only that opportunity to become acquainted with Mr. HILL which was offered by his com paratively brief public career upon this floor. Some of us, includ ing myself, were on the floor at the time of that great debate to which so frequent reference has been made by my colleagues upon the other side. Few men had a higher appreciation of the intel lectual qualities developed by Mr. HILL in that discussion than myself. My sympathy with the views which he combated could not blind me to his power in debate.
I am obliged to speak of his qualities chiefly from my memory of that session, and especially of that occasion. There were in him certain traits of character which have led me to compare him with Oliver Cromwell among persons of English history, and with but few known to American history. He combined great self-poise and apparent consciousness of power with a certain solid, adaman tine honesty of purpose which gave to the movements of his in tellect unusual, extraordinary strength. Earnest in countenance, he expressed in that respect only the earnestness of his nature. He moved with solidity in the development of his intellectual forces. He could not be cast off his balance by any light attack whatever. He kept the main objection point always in view. His mind, like Cromwells, was impregnated with a sense of the obliga tions of religion. No man can be a great power in a Christian country without this inward sense of responsibility to a greater Power, a Power greater, higher than the people, and to whom the people themselves owe allegiance and acknowledge responsibility. It is the strong rock in human character to which, above all other qualities, the people themselves attach their confidence.
While I recognize these great controling elements of the human mind in him, I did not fail to see that he, like most of us, was still animated chiefly by his great sense of responsibility to that part of the country which he represented. I recognized that same hon esty of character when he determined that the sentiments of those who elected him should be also fairly manifested on this floor, and should be maintained by all the force of debate.
And while from our point of view we often thought we dis covered in him a strength of prejudice which was ineradicable, we

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LIFE AND CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN H. HILL.

also were obliged to remember that our opponents, bearing the same relations to us as we to him, would find for the same reason, for identically the same cause, ground to believe that our views also were influenced or controlled by prejudice of section and of associ ation.
Sir, I cannot speak of Mr. HILLS character prior to his entrance into the Forty-fourth Congress. We knew him to be a man of power. We in the North rejoiced when we heard that his voice was lifted to save us from the disasters that followed the opening era of secession. We mourned when we found that naturally, if not log ically for we appreciated that it was natural he cast in his lot with his own State for disunion and separate government. But we rejoiced again when at the close of that great struggle, as shown by the gentleman from Georgia who first spoke to-day [Mr. Haramond], he again presented himself in the front of that column which sought to return to the Union with honesty of purpose, with perfect in tegrity of heart, and with an earnest desire to do their duty to the -whole country as faithfully as they had done it to their own sec tion. I prefer to remember Mr. HILL from such utterances in that speech to which reference has been made as this:
We had well hoped that the country had suffered long enough from feuds, from strife, and from inflamed passions; and we came here, sir, with the patri otic purpose to remember nothing but the country and the whole country, and, turning our hacks on the horrors of the past, to look with all earnestness to find glories for the future.
When a man like Mr. HILL returns to what we may fairly call his first love and his first devotion, it means more than the flippant remark of one who desires to turn a phrase in oratory. He was of that rugged honesty of nature that, whether or not wholly justi fied by an impartial judgment in the course he took upon any ques tion, he never failed to impress his audience with the certainty and honesty of his conviction and of the opinion he professed to en tertain. I mourn when such a man passes from the midst of us. I regret deeply that the Senate will no longer hear his voice nor have the benefit of his sound judgment.
Sir, among the many sorrows which death inflicts upon the human breast it carries with it one blessing. It is the disposition which then comes to us all to give tocharity and justice their due dominion

ADDRESS OF ME. HOOKER, OF MISSISSIPPI.

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over intellect and heart as we stand by the grave of the dead. Would to God that while all are alive we could equally feel and exercise those qualities in regard to our associates, whether oppo nents or friends.
I take to myself, I think we can all take to ourselves, from the comments made upon such a character as Mr. HILLS, the thought how much more profitably, how much more agreeably, more pa triotically our duties on this floor would be discharged if we could carry from his grave to our work here the sentiments with which we all find ourselves inspired as we look into the face of the dead. No higher tribute to the character which we now commemorate could be given than that each of us should attempt to exercise in all our relations those virtues which we here celebrate as the en nobling qualities of him to whose memory we this day render the final honors.

Address of Mr. HOOKER, of Mississippi.
Mr. SPEAKEE : Having been invited by my friend from Georgia [Mr. Hammond], who sits beside me, to say something on this occasion, I have felt it my duty to accept that invitation, because of the relatious which have existed between the people of my own State and the great State of Georgia, to whose distinguished Sena tor we have assembled here to-day to pay the last solemn obse quies; for while the daughter has somewhat outgrown the mother in many respects, she has not ceased to feel filial affection for that great country which supplied so many of her early citizens. As it is not my custom to write speeches on any occasion, I am con strained to speak to-day, so far as affection for the dead is con cerned, rather from the heart than from the head.
"With reference to the" private life of the great statesman whose death we mourn, I can say but little except what I gather from the friends who lived closer to him than it was my fortune to do. But in regard to his public character, and the two aspects in which it presents itself to the world at large, I will say a few words.
BENJAMIN H, HILL underwent as a part of bis education the

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LIFE AND CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN H. HILL.

severe training of a lawyer. It was in this aspect that he first presented himself to the people of his own State. His mind was formed by that vigorous discipline which belongs to the profession of the law. It made him logical. He is said to have excelled especially in that great power of the lawyer, the statement of his . case. This he made so simply, so briefly, so lucidly, that the most unintelligent court must seize the salient fects of the case. It was in his capacity as a lawyer that Mr. HILL, was first known to the people of his own State for his distinguished ability as a reasoner and an orator. I have heard from a friend of his an incident of his early life, when he was employed to defend a man charged with murder. That defense was assumed by him in the courts, and he failed.
At that time in the State of Georgia it was within the power of the defendant in a case of this kind to appeal to the senate of the State. Mr. HILL, made that appeal, not so much in behalf of the defendant himself as of the aged and widowed mother, from whose heart he wished to avert the blow which would fall upon the head of her son. He went into the State senate with his case, with a widowed mother leaning on his arm.
This gentleman describes the scene as he witnessed it one in which Mr. HILL looked, for the first time in his life, pallid with excitement, because of the great responsibility which rested upon him; for in all his advocacy at the bar he was impressed with the sentiment of the great responsibility resting upon the advocate and the intimate relation between the advocate and his client, a senti ment which has been beautifully, though perhaps somewhat too strongly, expressed by one of the greatest of English lawyers and English premiers, Lord Brougham, when he declared that it is the duty of a lawyer to stand by the interest of his client even to the upturning of the government. Mr. HILL walked into that senate chamber and made his appeal to the senate on the ground of the insanity of the man who had committed the alleged murder. He spoke for hours, and he obtained from the senate a verdict which relieved the widowed mother and spared the life of the son.
In all his relations a-s a lawyer Mr. HILL achieved distinction because he was inspired with fidelity to the great duties which

ADDRESS OF MS. HOOKEK, OF MISSISSIPPI.

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devolved upon him. But his great intellect was not destined to be confined in its exercise to the bar, though it was the shaping and the fashioning of that intellect by close attention to his profes sion that prepared him for a new and different arena. I had the pleasure of first meeting him here as we entered together the Fortyfourth Congress. He leaped into this grand arena of debate like Minerva from the brain of Jove, armed cap-a-pie for any contest that might occur. He was prepared to take rank among the first in this hall of debate of the American Commons.
I remember especially an occasion a short time after the con vening of the Forty-fourth Congress when he spoke here almost from the position in which I now stand. The magnanimous, gen erous-hearted Representative from Pennsylvania [Mr. Randall], then the leader of this side of the House, had introduced his bill for universal amnesty, thinking that the time had come when there should be a restoration of the Union, not in name and word, but in deed and in truth; that amnesty should be extended to every citizen, from the humblest subaltern animated by a sense of duty to the lofty-plumed chief who led the Confederate forces; that all the memories of the war should be blotted from the hearts and the minds of the entire people.
In this spirit the gentleman from Pennsylvania introduced that resolution upon which Mr. HILLS voice was first heard in this Hall, as has been so beautifully described by my friend from Vir ginia [Mr. Tucker]. He encountered on that occasion an orator on the other side of the Chamber who had been for years the leader of his party, who had at one time occupied the seat which you now odcupy, who, as a debater, as a stater of facts; as a parliamentary tactician, had probably no equal at that time on either side of this Hall.
It was a conflict, as the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Tucker] has well remarked, of giants, which took us back to the older days in these halls, when Hayne and Webster and Calhoun and Clay and other orators of the past rendered illustrious the days in which they lived. As has been well said, it was a battle of the giants, and both giants fought with Damascus-like blades.
But, Mr. Speaker, it was a somewhat unequal contest, for he"who

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LIVE AXD CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN H. HILL.

represented one side of the question was the victor and wore the laurel wreath which crowns the victors brow, while the other rep resented what has become known in history as the " lost cause," and wore the melancholy cypress, which is the emblem of defeat and death. Therefore,I say it was a somewhat unequal contest; but those of us for whom he spoke, and spoke with so much clearness, so much precision, so much wisdom, so much patriotism, felt that we could appeal to the magnanimity of his great opponent; great he was and still is we felt that we could appeal to the magna nimity of bis great opponent in that contest that Mr. HILL had stated his side of the question as no other man could have stated it
in this Hall. During the time he was here as our colleague we all remember
him with the teuderest affection and esteem. We venerate his great ability. We deplore his loss to the State who called him son, and to the country who honored him for his patriotism and fidelity.
It was not long, Mr. Speaker, before the people of his State, in 1877, called on him to occupy a higher position. I remember his being seated in that portion of the Hall from which he had de livered his powerful and eloquent speech a few minutes before, and receiving a telegram conveying to him the intelligence that the State of Georgia had transferred him to the other end of the Capitol.
He went there, Mr. Speaker, as he came here, and at once took his rank in that graver, more dignified body, that body of loftier debate, took his seat there when that Chamber was filled with men of the highest intellect in this country, when the gigantic intellectual form of Thurman sat on one side and on the other the equally gi gantic intellectual form of Conkling. BENJAMIN H. HILL took his place in the Senate of the United States, as he had done in this Hall, as the peer and equal of any man there. He had achieved great triumph in every position of life, as lawyer, as Representative, as Senator. He had strewed along the pathway of that life mem orable acts and wondrous intellectual efforts, "as the giant oak of the forest sheds its foliage in a kindly largess to the soil it grows on." He has passed from us to another scene of action. He has passed from us to that " home" to which he looked so fondly.
Whether speaking to his people in the State of Georgia, or ad-

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89

dressing the Representatives in this Hall on the most delicate ques tions, or debating in the Senate Chamber of the United States, there never fell from his lips any other words than words of wis
dom and patriotism. His were .
" Not such words as flash From the fierce demagogues unthinking rage To madden for a moment aud expire Nor such as the rapt orator imbues With warmth of facile sympathy, and molds To mirrors radiant with fair images, To grace the noble fervor of an hour ; But words which bear the spirits of great deeds Wingd for the future; which the dying breath Of Freedoms martyr shapes as it exhales, And to the most enduring forms of earth Commits to linger in the craggy shade Of the huge valley, neath the eagles home, Or in the sea-cave where the tempest sleeps, Till some heroic leader bid them wake To thrill the world with echoes."
4
Wherever he spoke and whatever he said, all was for his coun trys good. He rose superior to all partisanship because he was a statesman, looking always to the best interests of his people.
It has been said when every other passion which sways the human heart has been burned to ashes on its altar, ambition still lives and rules and controls. But he had lived even until this last passion had died out, and the last hours of his life touched scenes in his mortal illness when he was ministered to by his lov ing wife and equally loving daughter, which enabled him to throw aside every passion aud every emotion which rule the hu man heart, and look forward with that feeling of hope which be
longs to the pure Christian man. It was at this time that one of his brother members of the bar
(Mr. John "W. Clampitt) of a distant State, the State of my friend from Illinois [Mr. Springer], sent him that beautiful poem de scribing the very condition of mind in which Mr. HILL then was. It reached him only a few days. before his death. That gentle man is now a member of the bar of this city. I will read a few stanzas from that pathetic poem addressed to Senator B. H. HILL,
and beginning with

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LIFE AND CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN H. SILL.

I am weary of my burden. And fain would rest.
Every leaf upon its sliore lines Is a gem;
Not a withered one is drooping, While the hand of love is looping And into garlands grouping
All of them.
In that world there ia no sorrow, Not a tear;
Never comes the broken-hearted, From whose eager life departed The hopes that once had started
Fond and dear.
Not a storm-cloud ever gathers On the air;
Only summer clouds are drifting, And summer breezes sifting, . And sweetest perfume lifting
From gardens fair.
Only music soft and melting Soothes the soul;
And its billows mild and wooing, With a gentle hand undoing All the cares that were bestrewing
Each earthly goal.
Lead me to that land of beauty, So I may abide;
Lead me where the flowers are blooming, Where the music mild is wooing, Where the hand of love is moving
On every tide.
Like a little child Ill follow Swift after thee;
To the land of never weeping, Where nly fathers love is keeping Mortal souls who failed in reaping
Earthly ecstasy.
I will take my burden for a pillow And lie down to Test;
Gods love shall dwell beside me, And no clouds shall ever hide me From the loving ones that guide m&
To the portals of the blest,

ADDRESS OF MR. COS, OF NEW YORK.

91

These lines fitly and appropriately describe the closing scenes of that memorable life, which had Jaeen so distinguished in the great events of this country. It may be said of him, Mr. Speaker, as was said by the great Marshall of his friend Menafee, when he was describing him after death :
His escutcheon is broad, spotless, bright, and beautiful as Bayards oriflamme adorned with the lilies of France.
Senator HILL died, Mr. Speaker, in the meridian of his life, of that singular, fatal, and insidious disease that up to this time has defied the eye of the scientist to determine how it originates or how it may be relieved. He passed away before he had attained that lofty eminence that the future had evidently in store for him. But in that dying hour, looking back over the great events in the history of his country in which he had borne so prominent a part, he might well have been justified if at its conclusion the power of speech had been restored to him, in saying in the language of the great Latin poet as he contemplated his mighty epic:

Jamque opus exegi, quotl nee Jovis ira, nee ignis, nee vetustam ferrum poterit delere.

Address of Mr. Cox, of New York.
Mr. SPEAKER : When a great French leader of opinion died the other day, it was queried whether French institutions would sur vive. " The republic is Leon Gambetta," was the sententious phrase. Wherever the signs of sorrow were displayed over the death of the great Frenchman, from San Francisco to Syria, the powerful tribune of the people, the vehement orator, the energetic patriot was mourned as if France herself were lost. The very floral offerings were shaped into the tricolor of France. Not so in other lands. Disraeli dies, and though his party goes on, sadly lacking his genius, the English Government in form and structure receives no detriment. I saw nobles of ancient lineage and peasants of the country he had so long represented follow his remains to its sepulcher. All that was mortal of the dead Hebrew and brilliant

1

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LIFE AND CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN H. HILL.

minister received the last rites of the established church, but the English constitution and English ^society received no shock.
So, too, in these cisatlantic republican commonwealths states men and Presidents come and go like rainbows, but the state sur vives. It is more permanent because of the monumental service of the departed statesman it has nourished.
The eloquent Georgian and Senator whom we honor to-day rounded an active life of rarest mold. No glamour of the sol dier was his. He was the peerless citizen who led men by voice and thought in perilous times, through troubles and tyrannies, with a foresight and wisdom all too rare in this land of mercenary grasping and unrelaxing excitement. He dies ; but his State and the nation grow better by the emphasis of his life and the virtue of its lessons.
It was my privilege to know Senator HILL, even before he be came a member here. It is because of delightful, almost intimate friendship, that his friends have assigned to me a part in these sad obsequies.
The dates and events, the links connecting such details, which make the chain of his personal history and serve to illustrate the individual feeling and life, the character of the man these others have touched with magnetic, loving hand.
This chain was fashioned as all character is by surrounding cir cumstances. Those who knew him in his early days love to trace the main elements of his character to his parentage. His father was of slender education, but of robust virtue. He was remark able for his invincible will and force. His mother was of an earnest, gentle nature, full of reflective and religious qualities. These made up the rudiments of that character which enabled him to overcome obstacles by endurance and palliate them by persua sion. The sturdy oak was garlanded with tenderest flowers. Like a Grecian or Doric fane, to which the gentleman from Vir ginia [Mr. Tucker] likened it, his character combined beauty with strength.
The old farm-house and the red hills where he passed the scenes of his boyhood modified these inborn elements of his nature, and gave fresh vigor to his healthful life and added grace to his gentlenesss.

ADDRESS OF MB. COX, OF NEW YOB*K.

93

In his college experience the development and discipline of his miud was prodigious. His shyness and awkwardness, born of the country, soon gave way before his energy and ambition. From the rustic boy, in his long jeans coat and scant trousers, he at once became a thoughtful student. His habit of abstraction began thus early. Whether in the Demosthenian Society, or as its anniversarian orator, or delivering the valedictory of his class, he im pressed those who listened with his unequaled power of debate and the rare felicity of his eloquence. One index of the gentle side of his character may be noted. His theme at the junior com mencement was the " Life, Love, and Madness of Torquato Tasso," into which he threw all his mothers poetic sensibility with his scholarly warmth.
Soon the scholar ripened into the advocate. Here was his field. He had a legal mind. He drove the logic of the law bravely through every obstacle of fancy and fact. His fluency of speech and fertility of expedient, together with his power of appli cation and study, gave him a forensic power which Lord Coke said a good lawyer should have for the "occasion sudden;" a power which partial friends have compared with that of Erskine. As a lawyer few men, even in our largest cities, have had such success. Although diverted again and again fr<5ni his jealous mistress, the law, to canvass for Congress, legislature, elector, and governor, he was still employed in all the leading cases of the State. It is estimated if such estimates may be quoted here and now that he had made a million dollars, as fees, by the time he was fifty. He was as lavish in the expenditure and as improvi dent in the investment of his earnings as he was indefatigable with head and voice in their accumulation.
There is another phase of his life which gave its impress to the scholar, the citizen, the orator, the advocate, the statesman, and the man. It is the sectional or Southern aspect of his life. Without this phase he would not have made the mark which he so indelibly did" upon his State. He had no act of the dema gogue, no party tactics at command, no storied lore racy of the soil such as made the " Georgia Scenes " so whimsical and humor ous, and little or no conversational loquacity ; but he had the re serve which carries the battle, and thus armed he was dauntless.

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LIFE AND CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN H. HILL.

Yet there seems to be an unevenncss and inconsistency in his career and character. This unevenness may have been the result of the vicissitudes of the eventful times when the best of men were distracted as to duty. Inconsistency ? Gladstone, the young Tory, becomes the venerable Liberal, and Palmerston laughed at the vanity of consistency.
Call it what you will, State pride or local affection, and say it is irreconcilable with a larger love of country, yet is it not the same patriotic impulse which made Tell love the mountains of Switzerland, and Webster the rock-bound shores of New Eng land ? Besides, is it necessary to reconcile the love one bears the mother with that one bears the wife ? When one is true to his bridal troth is he less true to the mother who bore him ?
It was this State pride which led the youth to prefer his own State University at Athens for his education rather than follow the advice of his teacher, who was a graduate of Yale. It was the same sentiment which colored his after-life and gave glow and glory to his oratory. Even while protesting against secession ordinances on the hustings and in convention he followed with no laggard step his State into revolt against the Federal domination. When the question came home to him whether he would have the unity of his Georgian people or the unity of all the States, he chose, and honestly chose, the unity of his home.
Herein lies that seeming unevenness and inconsistency which some have observed in his character. I shall rather call it the tough fiber of his native robust being, its nature gnarled by soil and tempest, but none the less beautiful because it had the hard intertwisted knot of local devotion.
True, he contended for "the Union, the Constitution, and the en forcement of the laws." He left his lawyers desk and sought leg islative honors, to champion constitutional Federal unity. It was because he thought the mother was the loving friend of his bride.
The first test of the young statesman, thirty years ago, was in the contest for the compromise of 18 50. He desired to signalize the end of slavery agitation, which he foresaw would end in civil war and Southern disaster. Hence his entrance upon political life in 1851 as a Union man.

ADDRESS OF MB. COX, OF NEW YORK.

95

Throughout his subsequent life, up to the signing of the seces sion ordinance, he was, in its best sense, an ardent Federalist. He was of such moderate views and so opposed to the ultraists of his State that he traversed Georgia proclaiming fealty to the Union. He sounded the tocsin of revolt against the leaders of revolution. Never was a crisis met so courageously. At a time when Yanceys sentences thrilled the South, and when even Howell Cobb was the coadjutor of Senator Iverson, the silver voice of BENJAMIN H. HILL, joining that of Alexander H. Stephens, was a trumpet, not of sedition, but of loyalty to the Union.
In his speeches, full of the fervor of that wild day, and in a minority, he was to Southern Unionism what Gambetta was to dis tracted France. Both were too late to save, but both lived to re build and restore.
It is not for me to inquire why the late Senator gave his voice only for secession and not his arm. It was not from lack of cour age, physical, mental, or moral; but he was doubtless continually shadowed by his own prophecy. " Take care," he said, "that in endeavoring to carry slavery where natures laws prohibit its en trance you do not lose the right to hold slaves at all!"
The Senator had no love for the secrecies and ritual of Knownothingism, and when that semi-religious and anti-American cru sade was preached it was condemned by him. But from his con servative habitude he defended the Fillmore administration, and in 1860 he became a Bell and Everett Union elector. Georgia rang from side to side with his elegant and urgent phillipics against radicalism North and South and his fervent patriotism for the Union of our fathers.
It is impossible to analyze a life so full of incident or a mind so well disciplined and an oratory so alert and brilliant, without draw ing upon the language of high encomium.
All the virtues and genius as well as faults of the man and Sen ator center around the love he bore to his own State of Georgia.
He was a native of Georgia, and had he lived till now would have been three-score years of age. He was born in the center of that "old red belt which encircles the State from the Savannah to

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LIFE AND CHARACTER Of BENJAMIN H. HILL.

the Chattahoochee." To borrow the language of a friend in the days of my first service here, Judge James Jackson:

He was all a Georgian. The robust physique of the man sprang from the soil of our beloved State, and the giant intellect which so distinguished him was equally Georgian. If honey was upon his lips, the Georgia bee gathered it from Georgia flowers. If the silver ring of his eloquence touched all hearts, the silver was dug out of the red old hills we love so much.

Georgia, geologically and picturesquely, under and above the

genial soil, has natural advantages and beauties which along with

her liberal institutions early attracted such adventurous minds as

the Hebrew Meiidez, the English soldier Oglethorpe, and the

Methodist "Wesley. Even the mounds are yet pointed out, in the

county where our Senator was born, into which De Soto delved for

gold. Her mountains dip and curl in crested grandeur toward the

west, while her savannas add their greenery and wealth to her

shores.

~.

General James Oglethorpe, who, as Burke said, had called a prov

ince into existence and lived to see it an independent State, was

the epitome of Georgia history. Oglethorpes life was so full of

achievement and variety that it is a romance. Pope eulogized, Dr.

Johnson admired, and Thompson celebrated him. He was not only

ready to defend his honor in the duel, but was the prisoners friend

and the founder of an "empire State." Sir Robert Montgomery

called the new colony which the gallant general founded "the most

delightful country of the universe." Even the poet of the Seasons,

Thompson, in his "Liberty," sang of the swarming colonists who

sought the "gay colony of Georgia." He eulogized it as the calm

retreat of undeserved distress, the better home of those whom bigots

chased from foreign lands. It was not built on rapine, servitude,

and woe. The very history and literature of England thus im-

bound with this colony is almost unknown to the North. Other

States, it seems, attracted more literary attention.

It was this Georgia, the asylum and hope of man, and founded

in honor, religion, and bravery, that our Senator loved. Even

John Wesleys mother, when the high church Methodist asked her

whether he should proceed to Georgia, said : " Had I twenty sons

I should rejoice if they were all so employed." The very religion

ADDRESS OF MR. COX, OF NEW 1OKK.

97

of Georgia had ia it a courage which does not belong to our time, when the voyage across the Atlantic is robbed of most of its terror.
In the center and heart of this historic State, and in a county which bears the name of the bravest soldier that ever bore a banner to victory Jasper and with the heroic and religious associations of its founders, young HILL was born. At an early age he followed his family and its fortunes to the Alabama border, near the Chattahoochee River. The town of La Grange, to which they removed, is the county seat of Troup. It was then, and is yet, noted for its love of education and its school facilities. There are many asso ciations in this county, and even connected with its very name, which might well attune a young mind to thoughts of ambition in the forum of law and polities. Giants were arrayed in Georgia in those days, and their efforts, especially about 1833, when force bills and nullification were rife, gave impassioned tone as well as high temper to political discussion.
Doubtless the mind of young HILL took its hue from these sur roundings; but in a State the very name of whose counties betoken a lofty division of sentiment where Washington, Jackson, Jeffer son, Franklin, and Madison speak of the Federal Constitution, and Henry, Randolph, Troup, and Crawford speak of State sovereignty and local liberty; but where, above all, the names of Pulaski, De Kalb, Morgan, and Carroll shine like primal virtues, all starry with our Revolutionary radiance, it could not be otherwise than that men of earnest thought should perceive a divided duty, and that great controversial acumen and power should enter the arena and inspire contentious oratory.
Doubtless Senator HILL was greatly influenced in his pursuits and characteristics by such rare men and events as Georgia has produced. These names may not be as familiar to Northern ears now as in the days of Jackson and Calhoun, but they are still po tential to start a spirit in Georgia, where State pride has lost but little of ite prestige by the result of the civil war. Read the roster of Georgias forum the brilliant lights of her bench, bar, litera ture, and senate: Beall, Crawford, Berrien, Mclntosh, Clayton, Colquitt, Cobb, Tripp, Dawson, Forsythe, Lumpkiu, Lamar, Jackson,
7H

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LIFE AND CHARACTER OF BENJAMIN H. HILL.

Shorter, Reid, Warner, Johnson, Wilde, and Baldwin, not to speak of men who yet survive, like her present wonderful chief magistrate, and his contrast in stature and mate in intellect, Robert Toombs.
A State like this, so grand in its beginning and so splendid in its hundred and fifty years of prosperous history, must be proud of its heroes, whether fit
For arms and warlike amenance, Or else for wise and civil governance, To learn the interdeal of princes strange; To mark the intent of councils, and the change Of states.
Her annals are shining with the names of De Soto, Raleigh, and Oglethorpe; and the names of their successors under conditions of later days detract nothing from the luster of their worth and renown.
To emulate the fame of Hortensius, king of the forum, Cicero never ceased his efforts till he ascended the throne of oratory. So in this unrivaled galaxy of gifted Georgians. Emulation made ambition reach high. From sire to sou the names of eminent Georgians appear again and again, showing the elevating incentives which enlivened and exalted this imperial State of the South. The gold in her hills, the silver on the cotton-pod, the sun with its balm, the rivers which flow from her mountains, the opulence of her soil, are not more Georgian and imperial than the high standard of those who gave Georgia to the world as a colony, preserved her independence of England, brought her through fire into the federa tion of States, and after the vicissitudes of a great civil trial rescued her first among the recusant States from the chaos of war.
The Senator we meet to honor was no exception to the emula tion and exaltation of his surroundings. His natural ardors and ambitions thus received their stimulus and food. But the mass ive mind which made the great advocate and the moral heroism which made the defender of individual and civil liberties these are of no soil; they belong to no time. They illustrate the age of Aristides and give a glory to the fame of Rienzi. They made Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry possible, not as provincial men, but as enlarged and loving patriots,

ADDRESS OF MB. COX, OF NEW TOSK.

99

He who would best portray the salient features of BENJAMIN

HARVEY HILL must remember that his devotion to Georgia was

but the stepping-stone to a broader and loftier devotion to that

Union which he loved to serve in our councils here.

The people of New York City have not yet forgotten the ring

ing periods of Senator HILL, in one of her halls, as he discoursed

of the magna charta and other precious monuments of popular lib

erty. To his impassioned utterance his fine frame and musical

voice gave a charm beyond the reach of art.

His State love was, sir, after all, the golden key which unlocked

the secrets of his grand elocution and opened the casket wherein

were the jewels of his splendid imagery.

When the war had ended, and his State was in the grasp of un

principled adventurers and under the heel of an unbridled satrapy,

and in the chaos wrought by the war, he gave to the reconstruction

acts his defiance, and hurled his anathemas against its spoilers.

In 1868 he went among his people with the stride of a demi-god.

He fired their hearts, and though surrounded by bayonets and

threatened by bastiles, he uttered such sarcasm, scorn, and daunt

less defiance that the satraps who outraged every canon of law and

impulse of liberty shrank from their hateful work in the very

midst of a conquered people.

-

Since the war ended we know something of his Federal service

and career. The gentleman from Iowa [Mr. Kasson] has truly

given us some rare sentences of fidelity to the Union. One sen

tence he did not quote, which I well remember: "This is our

fathers house. We have returned to it to stay!" In hope and

despair; in and out of his party, in his place of business, in the

forum of his love, the bar, and outside upon the platform, the same

heroic altitude he illustrated to the end gave him power to combat

the enemies of local and constitutional liberty. No weakness called

on him for championship that he did not respond. His State was

lifted up out of the reconstruction mire into the life and vigor of a

new birth under the impulses of his eloquence. He gave her beauty

for ashes. Under his magic wand a new Atlantis such as Bacon

loved to picture arose above the tide of desolation; and a new

Atlanta, with its goblin of steam and its energies, was recreated

100

LIFE AND CASBACTER OF BENJAMIN H. HILL.

under the ribs of death. Matchless in his winged words and fear less in his consummate bravery, he stopped at no post of trust until he became the foremost Georgian at this Federal center; and in the flower of his genius he laid down his eventful life with a Christian resignation and devotion only next to that of the martyred Polycarp.
I doubt, Mr. Speaker, if ever man suffered in the flesh as this man. It would not be fitting here to describe the details of that mortal malady and those surgical agonies that racked him so long and so terribly. He perished day by day, hopelessly perishing with a pain which only his Christian fortitude relieved. Out of his torture at length came deliverance; and in the middle of August last his courage yielded, but yielded only to death.
When the great Frenchman Gambetta was agonized by his dis ease he cried out, " It is useless to dissemble. I welcome death as a relief." This was the end of one of Plutarchian mold; but it was not the end of our beloved American statesman. Amid the tender farewells of his wife and family, with a patience sanctified on high and a faith which "endured as seeing Him who is invisible," this more than classic hero, this gentle follower of the meek and lowly One, sought consolation, courage, and hope in his faith. His last words, as given to his pastor, and repeated by my friends from Virginia [Mr. Tucker] and from Texas [Mr. Wellborn], were, "Almost home."
It is an illustration of the sympathy and loving kindness which make the comforts of home so tender and eloquent that two gentle men have most touchingly referred to these last words. But to me they have a double, almost personal, meaning.
I remember after the war, with a tenderness all too gentle for words, the first greetings I received from this Senator. He was pleased that I had aided to defeat, by a speech based on the consti tutional clause as to attainder of treason, the attempt to take more than the life estate, i. e., the fee-simple, which belonged to the in nocent children of the South. I had, he said, thought of the future homes of the South. That was our first bond of friendship.
Home! best of all solaces, without whose social benignities and affectionate sweetness all the learning, eloquence, wit, lore, and re-

ADDRESS OF MR. COX OF NEW TOliK.

101

nowii of men fade away. His own sweet home! In the midst of his own beloved circle, the immortal spirit looked to that home beyond in the mansion not made with hands. Yes! oh, yes! he was almost there his heavenly home where pain no longer tor tures, where the world has no temptation and the grave no terror, where, with the loved ones gone before and the loved ones to follow, he would join in the song of the Lamb forever!
In conclusion: It remains for us that we should so live that we - be neither surprised, aor leave our duties imperfect, nor our sins uncanceled, nor our persons unreconciled, nor God unappeased; but that when we descend to our graves we may rest in the bosom of the Lord till the mansions be prepared, where we will sing and feast eternally. Amen! Te Deum laudamus.
This would be the language of our departed friend from his home above, as it is the admonition of sweet Jeremy Taylor in his " Holy Living and Dying." It comes from beyond the tomb.
To the dead he sayeth, Arise! To the living, Follow Me!
Ami that voice still aoiindetli on From the centuries that are gone,
To the centuries that shall be.

Mr. HAMMOND, of Georgia. As has been remarked, Mr. Speaker, by the gentleman from Iowa [Mr. Kasson], there were several gentlemen on each side of the House who were to have spoken to-day in memory of the late distinguished Senator, but who were unavoidably compelled to be absent on this occasion. I ask for them, informally, the privilege of printing in the REGXJBD such remarks as they may see proper to insert in this connection.
The SPEAKER. There is no objection to the request of the gen tleman from Georgia.
The question is on agreeing to the resolutions which have been read.
The resolutions were unanimously agreed to; and in pursuance thereof the House (at 4 oclock and 50 minutes p. m.) adjourned.