Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 27.djvu/160

 152 Southern Historical Society Papers.

fulness the memories of the past, and from oblivion the names and features of so many of our Tidewater Virginians who made that past forever memorable.

All honor to you, sir, for this noble work, and Heaven's blessings upon your unselfish and patriotic labors.

This portrait of Mr. Hunter, the gift of his great-niece, is a faith- ful likeness of that great man.

To no man who is at all acquainted with his career is it necessary for me to prove the correctness of the use of that term.

If the county of Essex had produced no other distinguished son, she would still be entitled to honor him as among the foremost ot the world's great men.

In all the elements which go to make up true greatness, in purity of character, in fearless advocacy of truth and right, in strength ot purpose and lofty intellectual power, he shone pre-eminent among the intellectual giants of his day.

Recall, if only for a moment, the outline of his life. Brilliant as a scholar at the University a pupil in law at the feet of that distin- guished jurist, Judge Henry St. George Tucker, he commenced the practice of his profession here. Entering public life at the age ot twenty-five, he passed successively through every stage of that fas- cinating but exciting and delusive drama from the General Assem- bly of Virginia, through the Federal Congress and Senate, until it seemed that the Presidency of the United States was to be the easy prize for his surfeited ambition. The youngest speaker that ever ruled the conduct of the House of Representatives, he soon became the most honored, trusted and distinguished Senator in that body.

Glance at some of his great work:

The establishment of the independent treasury of the United States, as it exists to-day; the Tariff for Revenue of 1846; the retro- cession of Alexandria county and city to the Old Dominion; the preservation of the peace with Great Britain, so nearly broken over the Oregon boundary question; his firm and dignified stand in every assault against the Union of the States, and their equality in the Union, when the Mexican war and its results were sought to be used by the politicians of the North to weaken and degrade their brethren of the South.

Then, as now, the South was sending forth to battle its best sol- diers, its most precious youth, in numbers far exceeding its proper quota, and shedding its best blood for a cause which could redound chiefly to the advantage of the North.