2
GENERAL McCLELLAN'S REPORT 92
THE REBELLION: ITS CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES 118
McCLELLAN OR LINCOLN 153
ABRAHAM LINCOLN 177
RECONSTRUCTION 210
SCOTCH THE SNAKE, OR KILL IT? 239
THE PRESIDENT ON THE STUMP 264
THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION 283
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL AT THE AGE OF 62. ENGRAVED ON STEEL, BY J. A. J. WILCOX Frontispiece
MAJOR ROBERT ANDERSON 56
GENERAL GEORGE B. McCLELLAN 92
ABRAHAM LINCOLN 178
ANDREW JOHNSON 264
WILLIAM H. SEWARD 302
POLITICAL ESSAYS
THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY
1858
There was no apologue more popular in the Middle Ages than that of the hermit, who, musing on the wickedness and tyranny of those whom the inscrutable wisdom of Providence had intrusted with the government of the world, fell asleep, and awoke to find himself the very monarch whose abject life and capricious violence had furnished the subject of his moralizing. Endowed with irresponsible power, tempted by passions whose existence in himself he had never suspected, and betrayed by the political necessities of his position, he became gradually guilty of all the crimes and the luxury which had seemed so hideous to him in his hermitage over a dish of water-cresses.
The American Tract Society from small beginnings has risen to be the dispenser of a yearly revenue of nearly half a million. It has become a great establishment, with a traditional policy, with the distrust of change and the dislike of disturbing questions (especially of such as would lessen its revenues) natural to great establishments. It had been poor and weak; it has become rich and powerful. The hermit has become king.
If the pious men who founded the American Tract Society had been told that within forty years they would be watchful of their publications, lest, by inadvertence, anything disrespectful might be spoken of the African Slave-trade,--that they would consider it an ample
The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V, page 1
by James Russell Lowell