It was fitting that his own precious blood should be the last to be shed in the stupendous struggle He had called over two hundred thousand heroes to lay down their lives and then his own was laid down beside the humblest private soldier, or drummer boy, that filled the sacred mould of Gettysburg and Chickamauga.

In an instant, as it were, his career crystalized into that pure white fame which belongs only to the martyr for justice, law and liberty.

For more than a generation his ashes have slumbered in his beloved home at Springfield, and as the hearts of millions of the liberated turn toward that tomb, they may well say to their liberator: "We were hungry and thou gavest us the bread of sympathy; we were thirsty for liberty and thou gavest us to drink; we were strangers, and thou didst take us in; we were sick with two centuries of sorrow, and thou didst visit us; we were in the oppressive house of bondage, and thou earnest unto us;" and the response of Christendom is: "Well done, good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of the Lord." In closing this chapter of my reminiscences, I may be allowed to express my strong conviction that our Congress, impelled by generous feeling, and what they regarded as a democratic principle of government, committed a serious error in bestowing the right of suffrage indiscriminately upon the male negro population of the South.

A man who had been all his life an ignorant "chattel personal" was suddenly transformed into a sovereign elector.

Instead of this precipitate legislation, it would have been wiser to restrict the suffrage to those who acquire a proper education, and perhaps also a certain amount of taxable property.