Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/76

 THE ORGANIZATION OF THE POST-OFFICE DEPART- MENT OF THE CONFEDERACY John H. Reagan was born in Tennessee in 1818, when Andrew Jackson's name and the Second War with Great Britain were on the tongnes of men. Jackson stood the representative champion of the Union. He had been its valorous defender at New Or- leans; he was to prove its iron hero in the nulhfication controversy; and he was but an exaggerated type of the western pioneer who had pushed into the wilderness beyond the Alleghenies, daring all things, fearing nothing, building cabins, and laying the founda- tions of commonwealths. This westward migration from the older colonies had begun to be considerable only with the closing of the Revolution. In the ranks of those that moved forward to the con- flict were many soldiers who had fought at Boston or at Cowpens. Among them was one Timothy Reagan, father of the Postmaster- General of the Confederacy. Inured to the hardships incident to the frontier, equipped with the resourcefulness inbred in the backwoods- man, and animated with the ideas current in his state that the Second War with Great Britain had been fought for the preserva- tion of the Constitution and the Union, young Reagan came to hold an exalted view of both; and this exaltation never suffered abatement. At an early age, displaying the ancestral in- stinct, he left Tennessee and landed in Texas, where were fresh traces of the ravages of Santa Anna's armies. He had a voice in the early policies of the new-born Republic of Texas ; favored an- nexation to the Union, was sent to Congress in 1857, and bore witness to the final curtain-fall on the impending tragedy of seces- sion. His was one of the last and loudest voices levelled in the halls of Congress in an endeavor to lift the curtain and try another shifting of the figures with a view to avoiding the deadly struggle that menaced. Failing the Crittenden Compromise and all others, Judge Reagan started to Texas. On his way he learned of the call of his state for a secession convention, and of his having been appointed a member. He attended the convention, which assembled at Austin, and when their labors were done he found himself a delegate to the Confederate Congress called to meet at Montgomery. The die had been cast, and, like many another, the ardent Unionist became the Secessionist. (66)