Some years ago my friend, Mr. Park Pitman, now (1900) the efficient clerk of El Paso County, was a candidate for a county office on the Democratic ticket, and was the only candidate of his party defeated—possibly because he was the best man on that ticket. Soon thereafter, I was a candidate for a city office on the Republican ticket, and was the only Republican defeated (whether we voted for each other or not is nobody’s business). Soon after my defeat, I met Pitman with a party of friends, and I said to him: “Let us mingle our tears.” He replied, “I am writing a book which is to be entitled, ‘Bleeding Inwardly,’ I will compliment you with a copy.”
On my return from Washington City, in 1897, my friend, Zack White, congratulated me upon my appointment as United States Consul at Chihuahua, Mexico, and I told him I had been surprised at receiving so many congratulations and that I believed most of them sincere. He replied, “They are _all_ sincere. It’s like this; half of the people of this town are your friends, and, like me, they are glad of your success, and the other half are glad because you are going away. _It’s unanimous._”
I think a man who makes an “even break” among the people of El Paso does fairly well, and I “let it go at that.”
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The North American Review, November, 1889.
In every Southern State at the commencement of the rebellion there lived a class of men, prominent and influential in political and social life, whose patriotism, devotion to principle, wisdom and courage, trials and sufferings, have been scarcely touched upon by late writers upon the war and its causes and results. Most of them were then of mature years; all of them had been born and reared in the South and were slave-owners. Many of them were Democrats; none of them were then Republicans. Most of them were disappointed at the election of Mr. Lincoln, and feared that his administration and that of the Republican party, which they considered sectional and aggressive, would be unfriendly, if not actually hostile, to the welfare of their section, where their pride, interests, and sympathies were all centered. Many of their wives, mothers and daughters were Secessionists. Their sons, many of them, were the first to enlist in the Confederate ranks. These men doubted the policy of secession, and, with a courage and manhood which have no parallel, denounced the movement and predicted its failure and the ruin of the South. In so doing they knew that they were courting certain political ostracism and defeat, subjecting themselves to danger and perhaps to death, and to what was equally terrible to men of their pride and character—the changing of the love and confidence of their neighbors and friends, and even their kindred, into bitter hatred; and yet these men through all those dreary, doubtful years of war, some at their homes, some in the mountains, some in exile, some in prison and others on the battlefield beneath the stars and stripes, never wavered or lost hope in the success of the one cause for which they had sacrificed and dared so much—the success of the Union arms.