short years deepened and embittered the contention to the degree that
disunion and war seemed, certainly proved, the only way out of it.

The extravagance of the debates of those years amazes the modern reader.
Occasionally when I have occasion to recur to them I am myself nonplussed,
for they did not sound so terrible at the time. My father was a leader
of the Union wing of the Democratic Party--headed in 1860 the Douglas
presidential ticket in Tennessee--and remained a Unionist during the War of
Sections. He broke away from Pierce and retired from the editorship of the
Washiongton Union upon the issue of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise,
to which he was opposed, refusing the appointment of Governor of Oregon,
with which the President sought to placate him, though it meant his return
to the Senate of the United States in a year or two, when he and Oregon's
delegate in Congress, Gen. Joseph Lane--the Lane of the Breckenridge and
Lane ticket of 1860--had brought the territory of Oregon in as a state.

I have often thought just where I would have come in and what might have
happened to me if he had accepted the appointment and I had grown
to manhood on the Pacific Coast. As it was I attended a school in
Philadelphia--the Protestant Episcopal Academy--came home to Tennessee
in 1856, and after a season with private tutors found myself back in the
national capital in 1858.

It was then that I began to nurse some ambitions of my own. I was going to
be a great man of letters. I was going to write histories and dramas and
romances and poetry. But as I had set up for myself I felt in honor bound
meanwhile to earn my own living.