The balance is history. McDuffie became one of the greatest legal advocates and political orators this country has ever known.
Later in life he became involved in a newspaper controversy which drew him into two duels. In one of these he received a wound which injured his spine and affected his brain.
In his melancholy decline, and not long before his death, McDuffie was moved by a yearning to come back to Georgia and visit the spot where his boyhood home had stood. He came from South Carolina by private conveyance, and spent the night with my grandfather. Next day he went on down to the Sweet-water Creek neighborhood where the McDuffie hut had been. My father used to tell me that when they led the broken statesman to the spot, pointed out the remaining shade tree and the dismantled chimney, they drew away, leaving him alone with his memories. After awhile they returned to find Mr. McDuffie sitting upon the stones of the ruined hearth, crying like a child.
When the boy, George McDuffie, left the store in Augusta and went over into South Carolina to go to school, he carried all of his earthly possessions in one little pine box.
When he became a man he made much money, owned large estates and moved as a peer among the proudest leaders of his day.
But he never parted with the little pine box. It was a souvenir of the old days of youth and poverty. It was sacred in his eyes, and he treasured it. When his mind was almost gone, he would put his arms about the box, and tell again the story of how it had held all that he owned when he came into South Carolina—a poor boy, on his way to the great battle-field of life.
Did you know that to this almost forgotten statesman, George McDuffie, belongs the distinction of having made the most powerful and most prophetic speech that was ever made in Congress against our damnable Tariff System?
Well, it does. Such men as Nelson Dingley and Joseph H. Walker were good judges in such a matter, and they regarded McDuffie’s argument as the strongest ever made against the New England scheme of enriching its Capitalists by plundering other sections. Dr. Goldwin Smith should also be a competent judge, and you will find that McDuffie’s speech is the one he quotes from in his “Political History of the United States.”
George McDuffie