Here is Chillon, with its great white wall sinking into the deep calm of the water, while its very stones echo memorable events, from the era of barbarism in 830, when Count Wala, who had held command of Charlemagne's forces, was incarcerated within the tower of this desolate rock during the reign of Louis le Debonnaire, to the imprisonment of the Salvation Army captain.
"Lake Leman lies by Chillon's walls;
A thousand feet in depth below,
Its massy waters meet and flow;
Below the surface of the lake
The dark vault lies"
where Bonnivard, the prior of St. Victor and the great asserter of the independence of Geneva, was found when the castle was wrested from the Duke of Savoy by the Bernese.
[THOMAS M. GREEN]
Thomas Marshall Green, journalist and historian, was born near Danville, Kentucky, November 23, 1836, the son of Judge John Green, an early Kentucky jurist of repute, who died when his son was but two years old. Green was graduated from Centre College, Danville, in what is now known as the famous class of '55, which included several men afterwards distinguished. In 1856 Green joined the staff of the Frankfort Commonwealth, then a political journal of wide influence; and in the following year he became editor of that paper. He left the Commonwealth in 1860, to become editor of the Maysville Eagle, of which he made a pronounced success, its screams smacking not at all of the dignified days of its first editors, the Collinses, father and son. His Historic Families of Kentucky (Cincinnati, 1889), gave him a place among Kentucky historians, but the late Colonel John Mason Brown, of Louisville, gave to Green his greatest opportunity when he published his The Political Beginnings of Kentucky (Louisville, 1889). This work of Colonel Brown's was, in effect, an avowed vindication of the reputation of his grandfather, John Brown, first United States Senator from Kentucky, who, in the stormy days in which his lot had been cast, had been violently attacked for his alleged connection with the Spanish Conspiracy of Aaron Burr, which was charged in a controversy running through many years of violent disputation, to have been an attempt in connection with General James Wilkinson, Judges Sebastian, Wallace, and Innes of the Kentucky Court of Appeals and others to detach Kentucky from her allegiance to the United States, and annex her territory to the Spanish dominions of the South and South-west, through which the much-desired free navigation of the Mississippi would be assured. Colonel Brown was a brilliant man of unusual scholarly attainments and deeply read in American history. These qualities with his large legal training enabled him to present a strong case in the vindication of his grandfather's reputation. His arguments, theories, and proofs were illuminating, able, and to many minds most convincing, while they fell with small effect upon Green and many others who held the opposite view. For this reason Green wrote and published The Spanish Conspiracy (Cincinnati 1891), a wonderfully well informed and clever work, and the one upon which he takes his place among Western historians. Students who would be fully informed as to the many phases—the charges and matter relied upon for defense, pro and con, in this bitter controversy which marshalled Kentucky into two hostile camps, whose alignments were more or less maintained through many strenuous years—must study these two books. They present the last word on either side. Colonel Brown's untimely death, which occurred in 1890, some months before the appearance of Green's book, probably lost Kentucky a reply to the Maysville historian that would have added to the flood of light thrown on this early and vital crisis. The Spanish Conspiracy was supplemented and supported in its conclusions by Mr. Anderson C. Quisenberry's The Life and Times of Hon. Humphrey Marshall (Winchester, Kentucky, 1892). Thomas M. Green died at Danville, Kentucky, April 7, 1904.
Bibliography. Biographical Encyclopaedia of Kentucky (Cincinnati, 1878); Library of Southern Literature (Atlanta, 1910, v, xv).
THE CONSPIRATORS[24]
[From The Spanish Conspiracy (Cincinnati, 1891)]