Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/630

590 times, he was graduated in 1832 at the age of twenty years, and was admitted to the bar in 1834. His practice of the profession scarcely opened before he was summoned to enter on the long and distinguished political career which gave his name an exceedingly prominent place in American history. After declining political honors and seeking to pursue without interruption a professional life, he was nevertheless forced by his constituency to represent them in political office. His county sent him in 1836 to the he positively declined re-election. But in 1842 he was chosen State senator. His record as a State legislator shows him diligent in protecting all common interests, and in advancing the State s material welfare. His earliest course in public life at once foreshadowed that career in which he won the title of The Great Commoner. His first entry into the United States Congress occurred in 1843, after which he served 16 years with distinction constantly increasing until in 1859 he returned to private life by his own choice, with premature congratulations in an address to his constituents on account of what he supposed at that time a full settlement of all dangerous questions. He had been a firm advocate of the compromise measures of 1850, and having subsequently participated in the settlement of the Kansas troubles, accepted the result as an end of sectional strife so far as the South was concerned. The presidential campaign of 1860 found him an advocate of the election of Stephen A. Douglas, in which he led the electoral ticket for that statesman in Georgia. The election of Mr. Lincoln alarmed him as being a disturbance of the settlement and a menace to the Union, but with ardent devotion to the republic of States under the Constitution, he endeavored to avert secession, proposing to fight the Republican administration inside the Union, and failing there to invoke concerted separation of all the Southern States. He was elected a member of the Georgia convention of 1861, and