The extravagance of the debates of those years amazes the modern reader. Occasionally when I have occasion to recur to them I am myself nonplussed, for they did not sound so terrible at the time. My father was a leader of the Union wing of the Democratic Party—headed in 1860 the Douglas presidential ticket in Tennessee—and remained a Unionist during the War of Sections. He broke away from Pierce and retired from the editorship of the Washington Union upon the issue of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, to which he was opposed, refusing the appointment of Governor of Oregon, with which the President sought to placate him, though it meant his return to the Senate of the United States in a year or two, when he and Oregon’s delegate in Congress, Gen. Joseph Lane—the Lane of the Breckenridge and Lane ticket of 1860—had brought the territory of Oregon in as a state. I have often thought just where I would have come in and what might have happened to me if he had accepted the appointment and I had grown to manhood on the Pacific Coast. As it was I attended a school in Philadelphia—the Protestant Episcopal Academy—came home to Tennessee in 1856, and after a season with private tutors found myself back in the national capital in 1858. It was then that I began to nurse some ambitions of my own. I was going to be a great man of letters. I was going to write histories and dramas and romances and poetry. But as I had set up for myself I felt in honor bound meanwhile to earn my own living. III I take it that the early steps of every man to get a footing may be of interest when fairly told. I sought work in New York with indifferent success. Mr. Raymond of the Times, hearing me play the piano at which from childhood I had received careful instruction, gave me a job as “musical critic” during the absence of Mr. Seymour, the regular critic. I must have done my work acceptably, since I was not fired. It included a report of the debut of my boy-and-girl companion, Adelina Patti, when she made her first appearance in opera at the Academy of Music. But, as the saying is, I did not “catch on.” There might be a more promising opening in Washington, and thither I repaired. The Daily States had been established there by John P. Heiss, who with Thomas Ritchie had years before established the Washington Union. Roger A. Pryor was its nominal editor. But he soon took himself home to his beloved Virginia and came to Congress, and the editorial writing on the States was being done by Col. A. Dudley Mann, later along Confederate commissioner to France, preceding Mr. Slidell.