Page:Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892).djvu/455

Rh celebration of the fall of Richmond, for it was a meeting as remarkable for its composition as for its occasion. Among the speakers by whom it was addressed and who gave voice to the patriotic sentiments which filled and overflowed each loyal heart, were Hon. Henry Wilson, and Hon. Robert C. Winthrop. It would be difficult to find two public men more distinctly opposite than these. If any one may properly boast an aristocratic descent, or if there be any value or worth in that boast, Robert C. Winthrop may, without undue presumption, avail himself of it. He was born in the midst of wealth and luxury, and never felt the flint of hardship or the grip of poverty. Just the opposite to this was the experience of Henry Wilson. The son of common people, wealth and education had done little for him; but he had in him a true heart, and a world of common sense; and these, with industry, good habits, and perseverance, had carried him further and lifted him higher than the brilliant man with whom he formed such striking contrast. Winthrop, before the war, like many others of his class, had resisted the anti- slavery current of his state, had sided largely with the demands of the slave power, had abandoned many of his old Whig friends, when they went for free soil and free men in 1848, and gone into the Democratic party.

During the war he was too good to be a rebel sympathizer, and not quite good enough to become as Wilson was—a power in the union cause. Wilson had risen to eminence by his devotion to liberal ideas, while Winthrop had sunken almost to obscurity from his indifference to such ideas. But now either himself or his friends, most likely the latter, thought that the time had come when some word implying interest in the loyal cause should fall from his lips. It was not so much the need of the union, as the need of himself, that he should speak; the time when the union needed him, and all