powerless now to make that organ vibrate. Four years later, my
emerging voice did better justice to "Harry Clay of Old Kentucky," and
my early teens found me in an environment that quickened prematurely
my interest in public affairs. My father, the pioneer apostle of an
unpopular faith, ministered in a small church of brick faced with
stone to a congregation which, though few in numbers, contained some
remarkable people. Millard Fillmore and his partner, Nathan K. Hall,
soon to be Postmaster-General, were of his fold, together with Hiram
Barton, the city's mayor, and other figures locally noteworthy.
Fillmore was only an accidental President, dominated, no doubt, and
dwarfed in the perspective by greater men, while the part he played
in a great crisis brought upon him obloquy with many good people. "Say
what you will about Fillmore," said a fellow-totterer to me the other
day, adjusting his "store" teeth for an emphatic declaration, "by
signing the Fugitive Slave Bill he saved the country. That act
postponed the Civil War ten years. Had it come in 1850, as it
assuredly would but for that scratch of Fillmore's pen, the Union
would have gone by the board. The decade that followed greatly
increased the relative strength of the North. A vast immigration
poured in which almost universally came to stand for the Union.
Moreover the expanding West, whose natural outlet until then had been
down the Mississippi to the South, became now linked to the East by
great lines of railroad, and West and East entered into such a new
bond of sympathy that there was nothing for it, in a time of trial,
but to stand together. As it was, it was only by the narrowest margin
that the Union weathered the storm. Had it come ten years earlier,
wreck would have been inevitable, and it is to Fillmore's signature
that we owe that blessed postponement." As the old man spoke, I had a
vision of the grave, troubled face of my father as he told us once of
a talk he had just had with Mr. Fillmore. The relations of the