E-text prepared by Thierry Alberto and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net) Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 22609-h.htm or 22609-h.zip: (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/2/6/0/22609/22609-h/22609-h.htm) or (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/2/6/0/22609/22609-h.zip) Riverside Edition THE WRITINGS OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL IN PROSE AND POETRY VOLUME V Political Essays by JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL [Illustration: _Mr. Lowell in 1881_] London MacMillan and Co. 1898 CONTENTS THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY 1 THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER 17 E PLURIBUS UNUM 45 THE PICKENS-AND-STEALIN'S REBELLION 75 GENERAL McCLELLAN'S REPORT 92 THE REBELLION: ITS CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES 118 McCLELLAN OR LINCOLN 153 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 177 RECONSTRUCTION 210 SCOTCH THE SNAKE, OR KILL IT? 239 THE PRESIDENT ON THE STUMP 264 THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION 283 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL AT THE AGE OF 62. ENGRAVED ON STEEL, BY J. A. J. WILCOX _Frontispiece_ MAJOR ROBERT ANDERSON 56 GENERAL GEORGE B. McCLELLAN 92 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 178 ANDREW JOHNSON 264 WILLIAM H. SEWARD 302 POLITICAL ESSAYS THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY 1858 There was no apologue more popular in the Middle Ages than that of the hermit, who, musing on the wickedness and tyranny of those whom the inscrutable wisdom of Providence had intrusted with the government of the world, fell asleep, and awoke to find himself the very monarch whose abject life and capricious violence had furnished the subject of his moralizing. Endowed with irresponsible power, tempted by passions whose existence in himself he had never suspected, and betrayed by the political necessities of his position, he became gradually guilty of all the crimes and the luxury which had seemed so hideous to him in his hermitage over a dish of water-cresses.