Slavery -- United States; United States -- Politics and government -- 1861-1865; United States -- Race relations
O the unutterable pathos of his life from 1835 to 1850! During this time
he was like the mother of a boy whom consumption has marked for its own.
In advance of all others she reads the first symptom, nay, she anticipates
it. All those who believe that they know him as well as she does, laugh at
her fears with unsympathetic incredulity. But her eyes never fail to see
grim death at the door, although bravely she hopes against hope, and
fights, fights, fights. Inexorably, relentlessly the end, which others now
begin to discern, comes on, but until the last breath of her darling she
has ever some suggestion of change of place or climate, of a new remedy,
of something else to be done. It is the supreme tragedy of her trial that
while outwardly she is all self-gratifying love, inwardly she is all
self-consuming misery. We say the love of a mother is greater than all
other. But we know that she loves her country better than she does her
child. Patriotism is as yet the strongest love of all. Realize that our
exalted patriot was tending and nursing the cause of his country. Think of
the noble Lee, his career of victory over, wearing away the winter at
Petersburg, hourly expecting his line, so tensely stretched in order to
face overwhelming odds, to break; think of him after it does break, on the
retreat, when he has discovered that his supplies have gone wrong; and
think of him when he must yield the sword as ever memorable as Hannibal's.
The world has given Lee, and will long give him, rains of gracious tears.
But he was never plagued with Calhoun's sharpened eyes to future disaster,
and he was confident that he would reach the mountains almost until the
very moment of surrender. Think rather of the great sufferers for high
causes,--Bonnivard, wearing a pathway over the stone floor of his prison;
Lear, of all of Shakspeare's heroes, in the deepest gulf of misfortune;
and especially of Calvary and the crucifixion, for Jesus travailed for his
brothers and sisters. It is here you must look for the like of Calhoun.
For fifteen years that "mass of moan" which was coming to his dear ones
pierced his ears plainer and plainer and made his heart sicker and sicker,
and during this long bloody sweat he gave the rarest devotion and
self-sacrifice to his country which he feared more and more was to plunge
over the precipice. As we recall the scene of his death it makes us
rejoice to know that the cross he had borne so long has at last been cast
off and he has entered into the rest of the martyr-patriot. Then it
occurs to us that he carried with him his affections,--too lofty not to be
immortal,--and we cannot believe that the sad spirit ever smiled until
Wade Hampton, twenty-six years afterwards, re-erected white domination in
South Carolina.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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