Rode to-day with the President and the Secretary of State to
the Capitol. Saw the statuary of the east pediment. The President objected to
Power’s statue of the Wood chopper, as he did not make a sufficiently clean
cut.
Coming home the President told Seward of what Frank Blair said
about an interview he had had with Poindexter in the West. Poindexter said, “We
are gone up; there is no further use of talking!” “How about your institution?”
Frank asked. "Gone to the Devil!"
Seward said: “Slavery is dead; the only trouble is that the
fools who support it from the outside do not recognise this, and will not, till
the thing is over. In our Masonic warfare we made a great fight. The Masons
were beaten; they knew and felt it, and retired from the fight. But the Jack
Masons, as they were called, kept up their dismal howls of sympathy for the
masons, long after they had given up the fight and forgotten all about it. So
now, though slavery is dead, the Democratic party insists on devoting itself to
guarding the corpse.” . . . .
SOURCES: Clara B. Hay, Letters of John Hay and
Extracts from Diary, Volume 1, p. 92-3; For the whole diary entry see
Tyler Dennett, Editor, Lincoln and the Civil War in the Diaries and
letters of John Hay, p. 79-80.
No comments:
Post a Comment