In the election which took place on the day following, Senator Brown received 146 votes and General Lawton 64. Vindication had come at last. The senatorial toga by the sovereign voice of the great State of Georgia had now been conferred upon the man of snow-white beard and hair who had so lately emerged from the fiery furnace. Six years later he was again elected with only one vote against him. Never was public sentiment more overwhelmingly reversed or triumph more complete.

Voluntarily retiring from public life in 1892, after having represented Georgia for more than twelve years in the United States Senate, he retained until his death the unwavering support and confidence of his fellow citizens who had learned to honor him anew. Nor was he ever more tenderly reverenced in the old days than now. He had been tried in the fire and found to be pure gold. Besides accumulating an immense fortune in attestation of his business sagacity and judgment he had also reared monuments to his generosity and public spirit by his judicious benefactions, having given over fifty thousand dollars to the Baptist Theological Seminary at Louisville, Kentucky, and another fifty thousand dollars to the University of Georgia, for the encouragement of poor boys who were the special wards of his affection. Thus from an humble beginning, by dint of perseverance and industry, the friendless lad who had first appeared on the slopes of the Blue Ridge years before, with the slenderest prospects of success in life, had not only reached the dizzy summits, but having twice met and conquered adverse fortune he had made himself, in some respects at least, the most striking figure of his times.

Joseph E. Brown was again upon the heights. Once

more the old commonwealth lay at the feet of the farmer boy of Gaddistown. He had climbed above the cloudbelt and stood beneath the starry stretches. The vapors had slowly given place to the ramparts of the granite rocks and the reward of patient years had flowered at last in the splendors of the firmament. He had retired of his own free will from the highest arena of the nation, withdrawing like the aged gladiator who droops beneath his locks but bends more heavily beneath his laurels. He could now rest. Wan and worn the tired old man lay down. The withered hands sought each other in the clasp of coming sleep. The pallid lips grew tight. The eyelids closed. The wrinkles faded one by one. At last he slept; and all was now serene and beautiful. The sun had set in the west wearing the purple robes of the King. The farmer boy of Gaddistown had gathered the last crop of golden wheat from the once scant but now rich acre of ground. The mountaineer had fallen asleep on the mountains.

CHAPTER XXIX.

Benj. H. Hill: the Champion of Mr. Davis in the Confederate Senate.

G

EORGIA'S foremost orator was Benjamin H. Hill. He was Demosthenes and Cicero combined. But, unsurpassed as was the measure in which he possessed the divine gift of eloquence, he was powerless to stay the advancing tide of public sentiment which swept Georgia from the Union in 1861. Against the mistaken policy of secession, whose disastrous consequences he foresaw with almost inspired wisdom, Mr. Hill opposed the stubborn assault of an uncompromising resistance. He argued like a syllogism, fought like a trooper, entreated like a suppliant and thundered like a stormcloud. He played alternately the lover in wooing and the prophet in warning. But having fired his brilliant arrows and bent his intellectual bow in vain, he followed the fortunes of Georgia into the maelstrom of revolution and became on the floor of the Confederate Senate the breastplate and the bugle of the chief executive. Mr. Davis called him "Hill the faithful." He not only championed his chief, but during all the years of the war he towered at the very forefront of the Confederate cause, and pointed out the path of safety for the new-born nation like the pillar-pilot of the Exodus.

Though Mr. Hill had been an ardent Union man and anti-secessionist, he was nevertheless chosen as a delegate to the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States, which met in Montgomery in 1861 to lay the foundations of the new government; and he was influentially responsible in large measure for the almost photographic likeness in essential features between the constitution of the Confederate States and the constitution of the United States. But the former even more completely than the latter embodied the spirit of the original compact and continued to be in vital essence the time-honored and unimpaired document of the Federal forefathers.

Feeling that there was probably no further work for him to do in the civil branch of the Confederate service, Mr. Hill returned home and prepared to enroll himself among the earliest volunteers who were soon to be needed at the front. He was just on the eve of enlisting when much to his surprise he received a telegram from Milledgeville stating that the Legislature, which was then in session, had elected him Confederate States Senator on the first ballot over such veteran competitors and staunch secessionists as Robert Toombs, Henry R. Jackson and Alfred Iverson. These unsuccessful rivals for the senatorial toga were all distinguished Georgians whom to defeat was no idle honor. General Toombs had been the impassioned Mirabeau of secession and had missed the executive chair of the Confederacy by only one vote. But it was evidently the wise policy of the State lawmakers at this critical season to commission cool, conservatism rather than hot polemics, and since Mr. Hill had tempered the counsels of the secession convention with caution, it was thought that he possessed the equipment

which was most needed at this particular time at the legislative helm. Such was also most likely the underlying reason for the choice of Alexander H. Stephens by the Provisional Congress for the second post in the gift of the young republic.

Still within the area of the youthful thirties when this unexpected honor was thrust upon him, Mr. Hill became almost immediately an acknowledged leader on the floor of the Confederate Senate, taking an important part in the debates and shaping much of the legislation as chairman of the Senate judiciary committee. He also became the recognized champion and intimate personal friend of Mr. Davis, not only representing but frequently advising him upon matters of administrative policy. Some idea of the close relationship which existed between the two men may be gathered from the fact that years later when Mr. Hill was memorialized in stone, Mr. Davis, who was then an infirm old man closely verging upon fourscore years traveled all the way from Mississippi to Georgia to be present at the unveiling of the monument. This was the last journey which the illustrious old chieftain ever took from home until he journeyed in funeral silence to sleep upon the slopes of Richmond.

Early in the political march of Confederate affairs the conscription law was passed, which brought Mr. Davis into heated controversy with Georgia's chief executive, Joseph E. Brown. Though it embarrassed Mr. Hill somewhat to see this administrative measure encounter such firm resistance from his own State, he nevertheless gave it his own most efficient support. It was simply the