Presidential Candidates:: Containing Sketches, Biographical, Personal and Political, of Prominent Candidates for the Presidency in 1860Bartlett, D. W. (David W.)
History
Presidential Candidates:: Containing Sketches, Biographical, Personal and Political, of Prominent Candidates for the Presidency in 1860
Bartlett, D. W. (David W.)
Statesmen -- United States; United States -- Biography
capital into railroad enterprises, a derangement of internal
exchanges at home, and a collapse of the national credit abroad,
and a suspension equally of domestic manufactures and of foreign
commerce. Such are the legitimate results of the improvidence
which caused roads to be built of foreign iron, over the coal and
iron beds in our mountains. I hope, sir, that the House of
Representatives will make the needed initial step in a return to a
wise policy, and will send the miner once more with his torch into
the deserted chambers where the coal and the ore are stored away
by the hand of nature, and will adopt such a policy as will
rekindle the slumbering fires in the forges and furnaces of
Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Tennessee and Missouri. It
would be a benevolent work. I do not say that I would force the
Government to assume it merely as a work of benevolence; but I do
say, that since there is need of taxes to avoid debt, I would so
levy the taxes as to secure incidentally that benevolent object."
To show that Mr. Seward indulged in no feelings of personal hostility
toward any slaveholder, we quote from his remarks on the death of
Senator Rusk of Texas, a man in his politics _utterly_ opposed to Mr.
Seward as we can suppose any southern politician, however ultra, to
be.
Said Mr. Seward of his fellow-senator:
"On the last day of August, I was reëntering the port of Quebec,
after a voyage of thirty days, in search of health, along the
inhospitable coasts of Labrador. The sympathies of home and
country, so long suppressed, were revived within me, and I was
even meditating new labors and studies here, when the pilot, who
came on board, handed me a newspaper which announced the death of
the senator from Texas. My first emotions were those of sadness
and sorrow over this bereavement of a personal friend. When these
had had their time, I tried to divine why it was that he, among
all the associates whom I honored, esteemed and loved here, was
thus suddenly and prematurely withdrawn from the scene of our
common labors; he for whom I thought higher honors were preparing,
and a fuller wreath was being woven; he who seemed to me to stand
a monument against which the waves of faction must break, if ever
they should be stirred up from their lowest depths; he, in short,
with whom I thought I might do so much, and without whom I could
do almost nothing, to magnify and honor the Republic. That
question I could not solve--I cannot solve it now. It is only
another occasion in which I am required to trust, where I am not
permitted to know, the ways of the Great Disposer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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