The debates in the House of Representatives of the Twenty-ninth Congress, are unsurpassed in ability and eloquence by those of any preceding or subsequent session of that body, and upon its rolls are to be found many names, now national in reputation, which were then but recently introduced to public attention. Stephen A. Douglas, the most thoroughly representative American politician of his time, uniting to a more than average proportion of the respectability of his class, his full share of its vicious characteristics, politic, adroit, and ambitious, was comparatively a new member, and, at this time, in the morning of his reputation. R. M. T. Hunter, of Virginia, a statesman of sound judgment and accurate information, who based his arguments upon the facts, and reduced the complicated problems of governmental economy to the conditions of a mathematical demonstration, had not yet been transferred to the Senate. James A. Seddon, the safe theorist, whose study, like Edmund Burke's, was "_rerum cognoscere causas_," the acute dialectician, who, in his mental characteristics, no less than in his principles, was so closely allied to Mr. Calhoun, was, like Jefferson Davis, for the first time a member of Congress. Andrew Johnson was then a member of the House and at the outset of his remarkable career; and in addition to these were Brinkerhoff, Washington Hunt, Dromgoole, George S. Houston, and a score of others, whose names recall interesting reminiscences of the day in which they figured. To a man of ordinary purpose, or doubtful of himself, the prospect of competition with such men, at the very outset of his public career, would not have been encouraging. But there are men, designed by nature, to rejoice at, rather than to shrink from those arduous and hazardous positions to which their responsibilities summon them. An attribute of genius is the consciousness of strength, and that sublime confidence in the success of its own efforts, which doubly assures victory in the battle of life. It was with an assurance of triumph, far different from the harlequin-like effrontery which is often witnessed in the political arena, that Jefferson Davis advanced to contest the awards of intellectual distinction. With the activity and vigor of the disciplined gladiator, with the _gaudia certaminis_ beaming in every feature, with the calm confidence of the trained statesman, and yet with all the radiant _elan_ of a youthful knight contending for his spurs at Templestowe, he pursued his brief but impressive career in the lower house of Congress.