employment, some more enviable feelings and that consolation which is to be reaped from such a circumstance. To such also, he bids ADIEU! But he still hopes that there are some who were enemies of the editor he shall cordially meet with, in private life, as friends of the man."

The egoism and lofty sense of duty: the pertinacity and defiance of adversity which this newspaper article discloses as marking the intellectual character of Yancey, upon the verge of his manhood, remained with him. His present voluntary retirement from public life was an indication, no less certain than remarkable, of his distaste for it; and thus early did the peculiar force of his later public services take root in repugnance to an official career.

Three days after arriving at his majority, August 13th, 1835, Mr. Yancey was married to Miss Sarah Caroline, fifth daughter of George Washington Earle, Esq., a wealthy planter of Greenville district. This gentleman seems to have descended from George Washington Earle and his wife Elizabeth Robinson, the former from the vicinity of Alexandria, Virginia, and the latter from Fredericksburg, the same State. The Earles were a proud and handsome race, exercising decided influence in the upper part of South Carolina. Immediately after his marriage Mr. Yancey settled with his wife upon a farm, inherited by her, where they owned about thirty-five slaves. Of all pursuits of life, agriculture was his choice and upon this he entered with ardor.

A view, however restricted, of the course of politics in the United States, in the several years of Mr. Yancey's retirement from an active part therein, will be useful to a correct understanding of his conduct in the great events of the future.

Of the three political leaders of the times, Clay, Calhoun and Adams, Adams came into the peace, established by the "compromise," far in advance of the others. Whatever Clay had lost, in the surrender of the American System, Adams gained in the opportunity thus offered to denounce the surrender to the manufacturers. Whatever Calhoun had gained in the tacit recognition of the Constitutional rights of slavery, Adams was ready to appropriate as the basis of his argument to the wage workers of the manufactories against the alleged rivalry of slaves with them in the benefits of, the government.

On the evening of January 6th, 1832, nearly a year before the nullification convention met at Columbia, twelve men emerged from the heart of Boston to walk into the darkness of the suburbs together. Entering, together, a little dingy negro school house, in secrecy and in confessed peril from the mob, they organized the most autocratic voluntary association of men known to history - The New England Anti-Slavery Society. William Lloyd Garrison drew up the constitution, but so revolutionary were its provisions that, for the time being, two of the twelve present refused to sign it. When it was suggested that an expense be incurred, it was found that not one of the persons present was worth $100. Several were preachers of the gospel. While the men walked together toward the lights of the city, Garrison harrangued them eloquently: "We have met (he said) under cover of darkness, in an ignoble way. We will be mocked, insulted and perhaps our lives may be put in jeopardy. But Fanueil Hall will yet resound with our doctrine, and we shall shake the nations with its proclamation." A month before this eventful meeting Mr. Adams had taken his seat in the lower House of Congress, as has been explained on a preceding page. He began at once a systematic attack upon slavery. The New England AntiSlavery Society became his mouth piece. Auxiliary Societies were founded with great rapidity. The Misses Grimke, two maiden sisters, of Charleston, South Carolina, emancipated their slaves and, hastening to Boston, became the first female public lecturers known in America, in the cause of emancipaEncouraged by Mr. Adams, a ceaseless flow of petitions. were presented through him to Congress to abolish slavery. By this adroit device the Society, in every part of the country, received free advertising through the public printers and a free circulation of their enterprise through the mails under official frank. In less than three years from the meeting at the negro school house on the outskirts of Boston, the Society had opened a printing establishment at New York and the mails were going out into the South laden with inflammatory matter to be delivered to agents of the Society masquerading in that section at numerous places as school teachers, teachers of music, peddlers of seeds, orchard trees, laborers, etc. Wendell Phillips, the rich young orator, had joined the workers'

Theodore Parker, the wonderfully gifted pulpit exhorter, was attracting enormous Sunday audiences to hear slavery denounced and the Constitution derided as "a league with hell and a covenant with the devil." The agents, under the urgency of the Society, were exerting their best endeavors to incite insurrections simultaneously in all the region from the Mississippi to the Potomac. Long petitions to abolish slavery, long speeches in abuse of the South, continued to be published by the government and scattered by the mails as a part of the proceedings of the national Legislature.

Never has an American community been so united as were the people of South Carolina under the lead of Mr. Calhoun, after the year 1834, until his death, sixteen years later. There was, indeed, small room for factions or factionists in that State under its peculiar organism. The people elected members to the lower House of Congress, elected militia officers and elected members of the Legislature. The Legislature chose the Presidential electors, elected the Governor of the State, and all the constabulary, including Sheriffs and Clerks of all courts, elected the judiciary for life, from the highest Judge to the Justice of the Peace, and the Tax Assessors and Collectors. The lower House of the Legislature was composed of 124 members, apportioned half to taxation and half to population, so that it happened a member from the rich low-country represented only a few dozen planters and a member from the populous upcountry represented thousands of small farmers. The Senate was composed of one member from each district, except Charleston, which had two Senators. The center of public thought was Mr. Calhoun. The Abolitionists continued to employ Webster and Clay, under various pretexts, to promote their ends. Calhoun proved a full match to both and the pride of the State rejoiced in him. The universality of his acceptance with his people is in nothing better proven than in the alacrity of public men, of the first standing, to advance him, as the following incidents attest: In 1832, Hayne resigned his seat in the Senate, where his prospects were most flattering, to allow Calhoun, who had resigned the vice-Presidency, to succeed to it. William C. Preston, who proved to be one of the most brilliant of American orators, early espoused the Nullification cause and was promoted to the Senate from the ranks

of the people. He remained in sympathy with Mr. Calhoun throughout the stormy time of the Van Buren Administration, which was supposed to reflect the views of Jackson in retirement. When, however, the Presidential election of 1840 approached, Preston returned to his hereditary Whig politics. Calhoun compelled him to resign.* When Calhoun's term as Secretary of State, under Tyler, expired, in 1845, Daniel E. Huger, in the midst of a term in the Senate, resigned that Calhoun might be elected to take the seat. The retiring Senators were in each example an honor to the American Congress.

I give one other example of the facility with which the people of the slave States forgot the animosities of party rivalry in the presence of great problems of statesmanship. In six months after General Jackson retired from the Presidency, Governor Hayne, now President of the Louisville, Cincinnati and Charleston Railroad Company, repaired to Nashville to secure the consent of Tennessee to its charter. General Jackson heard of the visit and sent his Secretary, Mr. Donelson, to wait upon Hayne and request him to visit the "Hermitage" before he took his departure from the State. The invitation was accepted, and the author of the proclamation against nullification and the author of the reply spent the day in social amenities. When the parting hour arrived, no word had been spoken even in distant allusion to the recent conflict of the President and the Governor. The latter, in the act of proffering his hand in farewell, said: "General, it is more than probable we shall never meet again; the past circumstances that shook our friendship are by me forgotten." With difficulty Jackson rose from his seat, grasped the hand of his guest warmly, exclaiming: "I say in sincerity and pleasure,. Governor Hayne, that in the great record of your country, which belongs to history, your name will stand conspicuous among her sons as a jurist, an orator, a counsellor, a sagacious and honest statesman. We stand now together as of old."

Mr. Yancey removed his family and his slaves to Alabama the year after his marriage, spent the winters there in the oversight of his cotton plantation, and returned with his family to spend the summers near Greenville, for the sake of

I have this explanation from an intimate, personal friend of Senator Preston's who heard him in conversation make it.

health. It would be unnecessary to relate here, with particularity, a deplorable accident which befell him, save that, in the heat of political conflict in after years, bitter speech was made and much error was written of it. Early in September, 1838, he rode to the muster of a militia company, twelve miles from Greenville, where, after the military exercises, it was expected a debate would be held between General Waddy Thompson and Judge Joseph N. Whitner, candidates for the lower House of Congress. After the debate ended gentlemen, in coteries, standing on the ground, discussed the prospects of the candidates. Yancey's remark so displeased a youth of seventeen, a nephew of General Thompson, and a cousin of Mrs. Yancey, Elias Earle, that he replied in a rude speech, for which offence Yancey boxed his face. Elias returned the single blow with one or more strokes of his riding whip. Bystanders at once stopped the difficulty. Elias became pacified and Yancey then spoke to him kindly, advising him to tell his uncle what had been said, adding: "I did not intend to fight you, Elias, but only to chastise your impudence; I would rather give you Salvador' (a favorite saddle horse) than to have a personal difficulty with you." Dr. Robinson M. Earle, father of Elias, and uncle of Mrs. Yancey, several days after the occurrence, and after he had assured Yancey that if his son had "acted with spirit" in the affair he was content, attacked Yancey on the porch of a store at Greenville with a section of the handle of a grain cradle as a weapon. Yancey, at the outset, began to retreat, step by step, still facing his antagonist and warning him repeatedly, as if reluctant to defend himself by the use of the weapon he carried. His hat had been knocked off, his shirt bosom torn open and he had been forced to the extreme edge of the porch, some two or three feet above the ground. He then fired and mortally wounded his antagonist in the left side. Dr. Earle was six feet high, weighed two hundred pounds, and declared on the spot, "had Yancey not fired I would have easily whipped him." The case was put on trial at the term of the Circuit Court at Greenville. The jury brought in a verdict of manslaughter. During the seventeen consecutive hours in which the trial progressed the prisoner retained perfect repose, "neither elated when the evidence was in his favor