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day to day until the 27th, when Maury, who led the opposition, moved to amend by inserting that they were not duly elected and were not entitled to their seats. This negative pregnant seemed to protract the debate.

Pennypacker's statement of the case was very lucid: that Claiborne and Gohlson had been elected to the Twenty-fourth Congress; their term of office had expired the 4th of March. last; by the elective laws of Mississippi her general election could not be held till the first Monday of November; the President had called this extra session; it was seen by the executive of Mississippi that the State would be unrepresented, and he had therefore ordered a special election for Representatives to serve till next November, when it was supposed their successors would be elected. He contended that the election was not only legal, but that it covered the whole term of the Twenty-fifth Congress.

He thus, by a sort of political legerdemain, but by no possible rule of political arithmetic, tried to inflate a fraction into a whole number, while Mr. Maury, per contra, tried to dwarf the fraction into a nonentity. The level head of the "old man eloquent," ex-President John Quincy Adams, and Slade, and a few others took the middle and only proper ground, and told the committee that if they would modify their resolution and confine the right to the seats to the first Monday of November they would vote for it.

The delegates from Mississippi were sorely tried by this protracted discussion, and, to bring the matter to a conclusion, Mr. Gohlson, on the 25th, moved that it be made the special order of the day for the ensuing Monday; but it was not until the 3d of October that the report of the majority of the committee was affirmed by a vote of one hundred and eighteen yeas against one hundred and one nays, declaring that Messrs. Claiborne and Gohlson were entitled to their seats in the Twenty-fifth Congress. This resolution, as we shall hereafter see, was the res adjudicata upon which these gentlemen mainly relied in the subsequent contest before the House in the ensuing November.

We trust that we have made plain, thus far at least, the true status of the Mississippi election case. We shall now return from this episode to the movements of Mr. Prentiss.

His visit to his native home was cut short by the news he received that he had been nominated for Congress, for the regular term, the election to be held on the first Monday of November, and he hurried home by the land and river route across the Alleghanies and down the Ohio and Mississippi. He arrived, after a fatiguing trip, about the 14th of August, and in his letter home gives a gloomy picture of the financial condition of the country. He immediately issued an address to his constituents, which, after giving his views on the currency question, closes as follows:

"If I am then elected as your Representative, I shall vote to immediately establish a United States Bank, for the following reasons: First. Because it will furnish the government with a competent fiscal agent. Second. Because it will furnish a currency of equal value in all the States of the Union. Third. It will restore exchange in transferring funds from one State to another. Fourth. Because it will keep in check State banks, check undue inordinate issue of local paper, and by that means in all likelihood prevent a return of the desperate remedy, 'suspension of specie payment.'"

After saying that the objections to the old charter might be obviated and the constitutional objection removed by an amendment, he proceeds:

"I have thus frankly given my views upon the bank question, a question upon which my opponents, Messrs. Claiborne and Gohlson, entertain, I am informed, a directly opposite opinion to mine. Under other circumstances I should never have placed myself in opposition to them had it not been for the opinion they avow on this important question. They are both gentlemen whose personal qualifications to represent the people of Mississippi no one can doubt. There is no personal rivalry in this contest."

He opened the campaign in Natchez in September, 1837. It will be remembered that just eight years before he stood upon that spot a penniless boy of nineteen. How changed the scene! Then unknown, now "the observed of all observers;" then without a friend, now he named them legion; then a private citizen, the shell unchipped upon his brow, now the standardbearer of the most glorious party that ever unfurled a banner to the breeze.

Although he was far from being confident of success, he did

not exactly feel as though leading a forlorn hope. There stood his friend Bingaman, whom he had fought so hard on the Chickasaw counties question. They were divided then, but together now. There was the brilliant John M. Ross, who so soon after fell a victim to the scourge of the tropics. There were the pure and accomplished McMurran and his old friend, George Winchester. These and a host of others were on the tiptoe of expectation, and all felt a tremor when Prentiss first stood upon the rostrum. All fear, however, was quickly dissipated so soon as he began to speak, and their most sanguine expectations were realized. Not a note, alas! of this initial speech is left, and its echo died away with the sound of his voice, leaving only a lingering impression of its power upon the memory of its hearers, nearly all of whom have passed away.

From this point he began his political crusade over the State. He swept through it with untiring energy, making the circuit of forty-five counties, riding, on an average, about thirty miles a day, and speaking each day from two to three hours. He filled every appointment, rain or shine, and, notwithstanding the sweltering weather, the daily changes of diet and water, and his great intellectual efforts, he remained in perfect health. This is the more to be wondered at, inasmuch as September in our Southern clime is the trying month; it is then that the sun shines hot and the malaria seems to be condensed into a more concentrated poison.

The notes of his triumphs came pouring in from all parts of the State; on the 4th of September a friend wrote from Benton, Yazoo County:

"The voice of the eloquent Prentiss had scarcely died away upon my ears when I seated myself to announce to you that he addressed a very large assembly of his fellow-citizens of Yazoo in this place to-day. Never in my life do I recollect to have seen so delighted an audience, manifested by the breathless attention which they gave the speaker for over two hours. ... Would to God that every citizen of Yazoo could have heard this masterly speech! I wish I could do it justice, but that is utterly impossible."

At Holly Springs, the beautiful county-seat of Marshall, he was tendered a public dinner, and toast after toast was given in his praise; the last of which makes a delicate allusion to his

former course on the Chickasaw question,-"The Ides of November, may they show that the people of North Mississippi feel a returning sense of justice to our distinguished guest."

On the 6th of October he reached Columbus, and there dropped a letter to his brother sketching his "trials and triumphs." There, too, he learned that his colleague on the ticket had declined to run, and that the Whigs had substituted in his stead a distinguished young lawyer of Pontotoc, Thomas J. Word. Prentiss immediately wrote to his friend, William C. Smedes, of Vicksburg, to have the name of Word placed upon the ticket; this was done, and henceforth their two names were indissolubly linked together in the great contest.

In his voyage through the State Prentiss had to plunge into the chopped sea of the Chickasaw counties. Here he had to encounter not only the great wave of the regular Democratic majority, but also the personal prejudice engendered against him by his former political course in regard to them. He was greeted with the magnanimity which all honorable men mete out to one who conscientiously acts up to his convictions. His vindication was generously received, and so far from detracting from his vote, seemed actually to increase it. Mr. Word, with that modesty which so peculiarly characterized him, afterwards wrote, in substance, that his name was originally put up to give strength to Prentiss in these counties, and that the result was that instead of this the latter had given him strength. Our hero, for such we must be excused for styling him, reached home on the eve of the election, and was met with an ovation like that of a returning conqueror.

Slowly, like the snow-flakes, fell the ballots on "that first Monday and day following in November;" very slowly came in the official returns, and weeks passed before the final result was announced. Prentiss had polled thirteen thousand six hundred and fifty-one to Claiborne's six thousand two hundred and fifty-eight, thus nearly doubling his own vote at the July election, and beating Claiborne's vote at that election by about two thousand four hundred and forty-eight.

He wrote to his brother on the 14th of November, with characteristic modesty attributing his success mainly to the fact

that his opponents had endeavored to hold on to their seats beyond the time limited by their credentials; as he tersely expresses it, "Claiborne and Gohlson have ruined themselves by their course, which has caused great excitement here."

Again, on the 27th, he writes:

"I have achieved a triumph sufficient to satisfy my highest ambition. I have received the largest vote ever cast in the State,-between two and three thousand more than Claiborne and Gohlson received at the July election, and that, too, in the face of the most bitter and unprincipled opposition."

As soon as he could tie up the arteries of his private business he hurried on to Washington, and reached there the day after Christmas. The capital was then, as now, as he wrote to his mother, the "city of magnificent distances." He knew that he had before him an arduous task, and, after greeting his friends and casting about to mature his plan of action, he settled upon his course.

Before lifting the curtain for the great drama, let us follow him into the solitude of his own chamber. On the 1st day of January he sat there all alone, surrounded by books and voluminous papers; these, with his usual rapidity, he glanced through, imbibing their contents for the coming struggle. Ever and anon his eye wandered as though his thoughts were not there: he was thinking of two sisters, not the two so plaintively portrayed by Walter Scott in his poem of "Rokeby," who stand at the goal to greet the votaries of ambition:

"Two sisters by the goal are set,

Cold Disappointment and Regret ;
One disenchants the winner's eyes,
And robs of all its worth the prize,
While one augments the gaudy show,
Still to enhance the loser's woe.
The victor sees his fairy gold
Transformed, when won, to drossy mold;
Yet still the vanquished mourns his loss,
And rues, as gold, the glittering dross."

It was often Prentiss's fate to be crowned as victor, and, judging from some of his letters, he sometimes felt "the fairy

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