The backwoods-boy is now in Congress. He is one of the law-makers of the nation, and is an equal associate of eminent statesmen gathered from all parts of the country.

Let us look about us as we enter the old Hall of Representatives, and see into what company the backwoods-boy has come.

In the Speaker’s chair sits a dignified-looking man, an accomplished parliamentarian, whom friends and opponents alike concede to be amply competent to discharge the duties of his high place—this is Robert C. Winthrop, of Massachusetts, living still in a dignified and honored old age. Among the notable members of this Congress were John Quincy Adams, who had already been President, but who was willing notwithstanding to serve his country in an humble{122} place; George Ashmun, also representing Massachusetts; Jacob Collamer; Alexander H. Stephens, afterward Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy; Robert Toombs; Andrew Johnson, afterward associated with Mr. Lincoln as Vice-President, and upon whose shoulders fell the mantle of his lamented chief; Marsh, Truman Smith, Wilmot, Rhett, Giddings, and others, whose names were already conspicuous. This will give some idea of the personnel of the House; while in the Senate chamber, at the other end of the Capitol, Webster, Calhoun, Dix, Dickinson, Hale, Crittenden, and Corwin lent weight and dignity to that co-ordinate legislative branch of the Government.

Such were the men with whom the young Western member was to share the labors of legislation. Time has given to some of them a fame which they did not then possess. Their successors of our day may, after the lapse of a generation, bear names as weighty; but I am afraid we shall look in vain for successors of Webster, Calhoun, John Quincy Adams, A. H. Stephens, and Crittenden.

The question will occur to my young readers, What part did Abraham Lincoln take in the national councils? Was he a cipher, an obscure{123} member, simply filling his seat and drawing his pay, or did he take an active part in the business of the session? I will say in answer, that he was by no means a cipher. Though he did not aspire to be a leader—for in a new member that would have been in bad taste—he was always ready to take part when he felt called upon to do so, and his vote and words were such as he would not in after years have felt it necessary to recall or apologize for.

It is interesting to know that he arrayed himself with Mr. Giddings in favor of abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia. Mr. Giddings little suspected that the plain member from Illinois, whose co-operation he had secured, was to be the instrument under Providence of abolishing slavery, not only in the District of Columbia, but throughout the land.

But slavery was not at that time the leading political question of the day. Parties were divided upon the subject of the Mexican war. While opposed to the war, Mr. Lincoln was in favor of voting for the necessary supplies and appropriations, and he took care, in an elaborate speech, to explain his position. He felt that it{124} was his duty as a citizen and a patriot to see that the army which had been sent to Mexico should be properly sustained; but he did not for a moment concede that the war was just or necessary. As President Polk saw fit to construe such a vote as a formal approval of his action and of the war, Mr. Lincoln made an elaborate speech in arraignment of his interpretation. As this was Mr. Lincoln’s first speech in Congress, I shall make considerable quotations from it, partly to show where he stood on this important question, and partly to prove to my readers that he was no novice, but well qualified for the high position to which he had been elected by the suffrages of his fellow-citizens. I am quite aware that many of my young readers will skip this portion as uninteresting; but I hope that if in after years they are led to read this biography once more, they will count it worth while to read it.

After reviewing and controverting the reasons assigned by the President for the statement that Mexico had invaded our soil, and that therefore “by the act of the Republic of Mexico a state of war exists between that Government and the United States,” Mr. Lincoln proceeds:{125}

“I am now through the whole of the President’s evidence; and it is a singular fact, that if any one should declare the President sent the army into the midst of a settlement of Mexican people who had never submitted, by consent or by force, to the authority of Texas or of the United States, and that there and thereby the first blood of the war was shed, there is not one word in all the President has said which would either admit or deny the declaration. In this strange omission chiefly consists the deception of the President’s evidence—an omission which it does seem to me could scarcely have occurred but by design. My way of living leads me to be about the courts of justice; and there I have sometimes seen a good lawyer struggling for his client’s neck, in a desperate case, employing every artifice to work round, befog, and cover up with many words some position pressed upon him by the prosecution, which he dared not admit and yet could not deny. Party bias may help to make it appear so; but, with all the allowance I can make for such bias, it still does appear to me that just such, and from such necessity, are the President’s struggles in this case.{126}

“Some time after my colleague (Mr. Richardson) introduced the resolutions I have mentioned, I introduced a preamble, resolution, and interrogatories, intended to draw the President out, if possible, on this hitherto untrodden ground. To show their relevancy, I propose to state my understanding of the true rule for ascertaining the boundary between Texas and Mexico. It is that wherever Texas was exercising jurisdiction was hers; and wherever Mexico was exercising jurisdiction was hers; and that whatever separated the actual exercise of jurisdiction of the one from that of the other, was the true boundary between them. If, as is probably true, Texas was exercising jurisdiction along the western bank of the Nueces, and Mexico was exercising it along the eastern bank of the Rio Grande; then neither river was the boundary, but the uninhabited country between the two was. The extent of our territory in that region depended not on any treaty-fixed boundary (for no treaty had attempted it), but on revolution. Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing Government, and form a new one that suits{127} them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right—a right which, we hope and believe, is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing Government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can may revolutionize and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit. More than this, a majority of any portion of such people may revolutionize, putting down a minority, intermingled, or near about them, who may oppose their movements. Such minority was precisely the case of the Tories of our own Revolution. It is a quality of revolutions not to go by old lines or old laws, but to break up both and make new ones. As to the country now in question, we bought it of France in 1803 and sold it to Spain in 1819, according to the President’s statement. After this, all Mexico, including Texas, revolutionized against Spain; and still later, Texas revolutionized against Mexico. In my view, just so far as she carried her revolution by obtaining the actual, willing or unwilling, submission of the people, so far the country was hers and no further.

“Now, sir, for the purpose of obtaining the{128} very best evidence as to whether Texas had actually carried her revolution to the place where the hostilities of the present war commenced, let the President answer the interrogatories I proposed, as before mentioned, or some other similar ones. Let him answer fully, fairly, and candidly; let him answer with facts, and not with arguments. Let him remember he sits where Washington sat; and, so remembering, let him answer as Washington would answer. As a nation should not, and the Almighty will not be evaded, so let him attempt no evasion, no equivocation; and if, so answering, he can show that the soil was ours where the f............