spirit of the commonwealth in resisting the sweep of the invader. The removal of Johnston and the appointment of Hood on the eve of the battle of Atlanta was an unfortunate blunder, but irrespective of leaders Governor Brown aided heroically in the defense of Georgia soil with the fire of State troops. Nothing could surpass the spirit with which the home guard disputed with the foe the territory of Georgia. Composed largely of old men and young boys who were not embraced within the age limits of the conscript Acts, they had nevertheless been well drilled and equipped in anticipation of such an emergency, and they literally fought like lions at bay. But all to no purpose. Atlanta soon fell under the crushing fire of an enemy whose strength nearly trebled the force of resistance; and other strongholds followed. However, there was no surrender yet; and it was not until Lee and Johnston had both resigned the sword that Governor Brown, at the head of the home guard, did likewise.

On the twenty-second of May, 1865, immediately after the Legislature had assembled, the executive mansion at Milledgeville was surrounded by an arresting body of Federal troops; and Governor Brown, notwithstanding his parole, was put under arrest and taken to Washington, where he remained in the old Capitol prison until released by President Johnson.

Returning to Georgia he found the State under military law, and being unable to exercise the authority vested in him by the people of Georgia as chief executive, he resigned the office which he had filled for nearly eight years, and which he had nobly illustrated for all time to come as Georgia's War Governor.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

From the Fiery Furnace to the Senatorial Toga.

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OTHING perhaps is more obvious, even to the most careless and casual observer of political events, than the ever-recurring fact that the experiences of public men, like the features of Mother Earth, are flecked with lights and shadows and diversified with hills and valleys. The price of the breezes which play upon the uplands is not alone the tedious and toilsome climb, but often the heavy moments of spirit loneliness and soul depression which brood in the obloquy of bitter herbs upon the bottoms. Nor is this exacting tariff so often the fault of the individual as it is of the mass, which somehow fails to understand, amid the excitements of political unrest, that attitudes may change with circum-. stances while principles remain unaltered.

At the close of the Civil War there was no man in Georgia more popular than Joseph E. Brown. He had not only occupied the executive chair for the unprecedented period of eight years, but he had been, during all this time, and especially throughout the turbulent era of conflict, what may be termed in no mere technical or official sense the commanding figure of the commonwealth. He had been admittedly Georgia's favorite son; for, even

more nearly than Toombs or Stephens or Hill or Gordon he had been identified with Georgia's immediate fortunes. Nor was he less idolized when the historic walls of the old capitol building at Milledgeville were exchanged for the dungeon walls of the old capitol prison in Washington City. But Joseph E. Brown was fated to experience within the next few months the most pronounced reversal of public favor and to suffer unremittingly for the next fifteen years the most trying ordeal of political ostracism which has probably ever been known in Georgia.

This sudden revolution of the wheel of fortune was caused by the readiness with which he accepted and the zeal with which he urged Georgia to accept the congressional measures of reconstruction. The logic which underlay this course, to quote the language of Judge Speer, was grounded upon "the international law which fixes the power of the conqueror and restricts the rights of the conquered"; but Governor Brown put it subjunctively in this form: "If we could not successfully resist the North when we had half a million bayonets in the field, how can we resist now when we have none?" Powerful as was the force of this argument it was strongly combatted by the racial fact that the Southern people were the inheritors of proud blood which had never bowed submissively to yokes and chains. Governor Brown realized this fact and moreover deplored what he recognized to be the injustice of the reconstruction wrongs; but this inventory of the obstacles only emphasized the unpalatable truth that the vanquished South was completely at the mercy of the victorious North; and he argued that resistance instead of mitigating would most likely only in