OCR Text |
Show B A Sorrowful Story H n yrYRTA AVERY has put out in book form the B IVI dIarv of Alexander H. Stephens, as it was B kept from day to day while he was a pris- B oner in Fort Warren in 1865. He was sent there when thousands of men in the north were clamoring clam-oring for a conviction of all the leading men of the southern confederacy. It is difficult to understand the feeling now, but probably it was natural then. The north was covered with graves of the Union dead; thouaands of homes were desolate because of their dead in undistinguished graves on southern battlefields, and the awful tragedy was closed by the death of President Lincoln, and as the train bearing his remains back to Illinois swept through the country, it was attended all the long way by mingled prayers and anathema; and for a long time the question was continually asked: "Is there to bo no retribution?" It was at that time Alexander Stephens was consigned to Fort Warren. Broken in health, broken of heait, altogether alto-gether broken in hope, ho personally presented a pitiable spectacle. But this diary shows no bitterness of soul, but rather a vast anxiety that the wnoie country might be restored and le-united. He had been a Union man up to the last and only went to the confederacy when there was not other place on the continent that he could go. He had no complaints to make over the cell and that hard bed allotted him; he tried to make friends with a mouse that sometimes came to his cell for a few crumbs; he wrote often to President Johnson urging that he might have a speedy trial, though ho knew that a conviction at that time would mean his death. When he was finally released he went at once to Washington and urged President Johnson to come out for negro suffrage for such negroes as could come up to a simple standard of citizenship. citizen-ship. His anxiety for the people who had been slaves was constant. He dreamed of them and often in his sleep called lovingly over the names of the slaves that had been his family slaves and body servants. He also urged negro education. When he went to Fort Warren his hair was a glossy chestnut. When released five month3 later it was snow white, and at his release he weighed ninety-four and a half pounds. While imprisoned he never showed any resentment resent-ment toward any one save Jefferson Davis. He believed it was because of Davis that the cause was lost. The editor of the book says: "It must be remembered that Stephens was a Union man. He fought secession to the last gasp, and his selection se-lection as vice-president of the confederacy was a concession to the Union element. But his official of-ficial position and the exigencies of the war did not avail to make him change his views. He was the one public man of the day who remained throughout the war neither northern -nor southern, south-ern, but American. "His idol was the constitution, and he clung to it in every weather. He arraigned the government govern-ment of Davis as well as that of Lincoln for what he regarded as encroachments on that sacred instrument, in-strument, and earned the hatred of Davis, though he kept the esteem of Lincoln to the last." The whole pitiable story ought to fix more deeply the impression upon every American that whatever the future may bring, there must never be any sectional quarrel in our country that must not be peaceably settled. |