I knew him well. And I looked up to him as I have since looked up to the higher summits of the Rocky Mountains—with wondering awe for height which I might never hope to reach.
Royal as this man was in all his ways, his heart was warm and true. Pure as the woman he called wife in his loyalty to the marriage tie, his morality recognized the double-life nowhere, and he scorned all that was mean and false and cruel and oppressive.
Always and everywhere he was for the under-dog.
A more stalwart soldier of Right never stood up in defense of the weak.
In a murder case he was able to command a fee of ten thousand dollars; but he was proudest of that triumph he won in the court-house when he volunteered to defend a penniless negro, and saved the life of the accused by tearing open his shirt and showing the scars which the black man had received on a battlefield in Virginia while defending the life of his young master.
Having incurred the displeasure of the Federal authorities prior to the Civil War and by certain conduct of his during that war, the best Government the world ever saw told him to “git up and git”—and he did it. In his native land he was outlawed.
He went to Europe for his health.
While waiting for the wrath of Thaddeus Stevens to cool, he studied conditions abroad—particularly the railroad systems and the public schools.
Upon his return home he created a demand for a new Constitution for his State, and in the convention which framed it he was the undisputed leader.
The legislative appropriations for the convention were spent before the Constitution was finished, and the patriots were about to disband. Average patriotism moves on its belly, as an army does.