What he would have done had his life been protracted ten year
longer, is subject of interesting speculation. By temperament and
habit he belonged to the preceding generation and it is difficult
to conceive him working in harmony with the fiery and unyielding
Puritans who succeeded. He loved the Union heartily and hated
secession. He would have supported Lincoln in the great crisis.
In the regenerated America, which rose from the fiery baptisms of
the war, with its new ideal, its new hopes, its new convictions
and deeper earnestness, he would probably have found himself sadly
out of place. The epoch of history to which he belonged was closed.
Young as he was, he had outlived his historic era and there is a
dramatic fitness in the ending of his career at this time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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