Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 May 1885 — REMINISCENCES OF PUBLIC MEN. [ARTICLE]

REMINISCENCES OF PUBLIC MEN.

BY BEN: PERLEY POORE. Twenty-four years ago, as the; period for the inauguration of Alraham Lincoln approached, the country was drifting into civil xVar, yet Mr. Seward, hopeful that something would turn tip to arrest the collision, assumed great levity of jnanner and speech. When the owner of the Star of the West went to him, and in the most earnest manner besought him to give some positive assurance of what Lincoln’s policy would be, Seward replied: “I tell you what you do. Buy a ticket for the Lincoln inauguration ball. Head the list with your name, and that will bring peace to the country!” The man retired, nauseated at such folly. As for Douglas, his power to cope with the issue before him might have been judged from what he said to Crittenden : “How this thing is to be settled* we don’t know. But settled it will be, somehow. We feel it in our bones, don’t we. Mr. Crittenden, that all will be well ?” When Andrew Johnson returned to the Senate, in 1876, he was greeted by the following Senators who voted guilty on the articles of impeachment presented against him when he was President of the United States, namely; Messrs. Anthony, Cameron, Conkling, Howe, Cragin, Edmunds, Frelinghuysen, Ferry, of Connecticut ; Morrill, of Maine; Morrill, of Vermont; Morton, and Sherman, twelve in all of the thir-ty-five. None of the nineteen Senators who voted “not guilty” were present, except’Mr. McCreery, of Kentucky. As the summer of 1861 advanced, it became necessary to organize a detective system of espionage for the protection of the United States Government against the adherents of the Confederate cause. The reports made by this corps of detectives to the Department of State showed the daring acts of the Southern sympathizers, several of whom were ladies of wealth and fashion. How they watched and waited at official doors till they had bagged the important secret of state they wanted; how they stole military maps and plans from the War Department, and from under the very nose of Gen. Scott; how they listened, and eavesdropped, and took copies of official documents; how they smuggled the precious news of the Government’s strength and movements in the linings of honest-looking coats; and how they hid army secrets in the meshes of innocent and unprotected crinoline; how they luirned signal-lights from upper * windows; bow they sneaked about the camps, talking Union, with facile “Drake De Kay’s” passes in their pockets, and explored the nakedness of the land; how they crossed the Potomac far down, at dead of night, and with muffled oars, or smuggled the newspapers over in the capacious receptacles of market -women’s clothes—all these became familiar facts, almost ceasing to excite remark or surprise. Of this band of active and, useful plotters, who were "constantly engaged playing into the hands of the Confederates, under the very shadow of the Capitol, some of the women of Washington were the busiest and most useful. The intriguing nature of these dames appears to have found especial delight and scope in forwarding the schemes of the leaders in the movement to overthrow the Washington Government It mattered hot that mbst of them owed all they possessed of fortune and position to that Federal Government, and to the patronage which, directly or indirectly, they had received from it. This very fact lent a spice of daring to the deed, while an irresistible attraction was furnished in the fact that they were plotting the ruin of a government which had fallen into the hands of that Northern majority whom, with all the lofty scorn of “patrician” blood,' they despised and detested. There was Mrs. Greenhow, a busy emissary of this treason, who spent days and nights in contriving and executing missions to the camp of Beauregard. There was Mrs. Phillips, wife of a millionaire, who was the center of a throng of mingled beauty and disloyalty. There was Mrs. Hassler, the Superintendent of a Southern mail which employed the capacious hoops of female emissaries for its missives between Maryland and Virginia. There was Mrs. Gwin, wife of the California Senator, whose house was the rendezvous of Ben McCulloch, Jacob Thompson, John B. Floyd, John M. Mason, and other conspirators who drew the gold of that Government they were secretly leagued to overthrow. Then there were the artful coinplotters of the secessionists all about Washington, like the Misses S , of Alexandria, whose blandishments seduced a Connecticut Captain from his camp and made him prisoner to the rebel army. All the arts and fascinations of the sex were employed upon officers, both civil and military, to forward the ends of the Confederate junto which had its headquarters at Richmond, and its lesser court in the salons of Washington and Baltimore.