Law. Reviewing the history of the Missouri Compromise and the growth of the Kansas agitation, he pictured President Pierce as completely at the mercy and direction of the South. When the South found that the Presidential patronage and the repeal of the Missouri restriction did not serve their purposes, they wanted a constitutional sanction for slavery everywhere.

"This," continued Governor Chase, "came from the Dred Scott decision. Now you have certainly got sufficient. You have got the Dred Scott decision, by which slavery is sanctioned in all the Territories; you have the Government so organized as to enforce these decrees. Then surely you are satisfied now. 'Oh, no: what is the use of having slavery established in all the Territories unless we have negroes to put there?' So Mr. Stephens said the other day in Georgia. Said he, 'I don't see that we have gained much unless we have negroes to put into the Territories. If you want,' said he, 'to put slavery in the Territories, you must have negroes to put there.' So they have revived the slavetrade already. The Government made some poor, puny, and ineffectual attempts to repulse it by a judicial proceeding at Charleston. What was the result? The slaveholders in the jury-box said, 'We don't recognise any law or Constitution which condemns the slavery which exists among us; and if you condemn the traffic in slaves in Africa, you equally condemn that traffic at home.' That is true. You cannot get away from that. Everybody has to admit that, and so these South Carolina men said, 'We are not a-going to condemn it at home, and therefore not abroad; and therefore we shall acquit these men.' And acquit them they did."

He held that the slave-trade was actually revived; and the question was, Would the Democracy consent to the repeal of the laws prohibiting it? They would say that they would not; but they had said so of the Missouri Compromise and of the FugitiveSlave Law, and yet they did consent. If they had not an African, they had an American, slave-trade. People might deem his views but as imagination, but he did not dream when, in the Senate, he resisted the Fugitive-Slave Law, and foretold that the Democracy would inscribe it on their Presidential banner.

He branded as false the statement that the Republican party were unfriendly to the foreign-born citizens, and challenged scrutiny into his own career on the subject. His every act and word breathed the broadest spirit of liberality for all, regardless of the country of their birth; and in common with the Republican party he protested against any such discrimination as the Government proposed in the Cass letter.

In the name of the Republican party he also stood by the Homestead Bill; that is, he and they stood by the principle that it was a great deal better that the public lands of the country should pass into the hands of settlers; that they should have all opportunity to take up those public lands with little or no price, and cultivate them, the country looking for remuneration, not to the price of land, but to the increased wealth resulting from the settler's industry. It was the policy of the Republican party to have free homes for all. He avowed that the Democratic party in the State Convention endorsed it too; but what did they do at Washington? In solid phalanx they voted against it. All the slaveholders in the South, aided by a great body of the Democracy of the North, united in voting down that proposition.

Governor Wise, having been informed that certain combinations were being made in Ohio to follow up the attempted invasion of Virginia commenced at Harper's Ferry in October, wrote to Governor Chase on the subject. The reply of the Governor of Ohio was laid before the Legislature on the 6th of December, 1859. The following embraces the chief points :—

"Whenever it shall be made to appear, either by evidence transmitted by you, or otherwise, that unlawful combinations are being formed by any persons or at any place in Ohio for the invasion of Virginia, or for the commission of crimes against her people, it will undoubtedly become the duty of the Executive to use whatever power he may possess to break up such combinations and defeat their unlawful purposes; and that duty, it need not be doubted, will be promptly performed.

"I observe with deep regret an intimation in your letter that necessity may compel the authorities of Virginia to pursue invaders of her jurisdiction into the territories of adjoining States. It is to be hoped that no circumstances will arise creating, in their opinion, such a necessity. Laws of the United States, as well as the laws of Ohio, indicate the mode in which persons charged with crime in another State, and escaping into Ohio, may be demanded and must be surrendered; and the people of this State will require from her authorities the punctual fulfilment of every obligation to the other members of the Union. They cannot consent, however, to the invasion of her territory by armed bodies from other States, even for the purpose of pursuing and arresting fugitives from justice."

For one who has been but one term in Congress, Governor Chase, like Mr. Bates, of Missouri, has a paramount hold on the affections of his party. His services there and elsewher done much to combine and elevate it.

HOWELL COBB,

OF GEORGIA.

HOWELL COBB was born at Cherry-Hill, Jefferson County, Georgia, on the 7th of September, 1815, and is the son of John A. Cobb, who, when quite a boy, removed from Greenville, N.C., with his father. The mother of the present Secretary of the Treasury, Sarah R. Cobb, was the daughter of Thomas Rootes, of Fredericksburg, Va. His uncle, Howell Cobb, after whom he was named, represented a district in Congress up to the second war with Great Britain, in which he served with distinction as captain; and a cousin, Thomas Cobb, having been a Representative from 1817, with slight intermission, to 1824, was Senator in Congress from that year until 1828.

At the age of nineteen, in 1834, the subject of this sketch was graduated at Franklin College. On the 26th of May of the following year he was married to Mary Ann Lamar, daughter of the late Colonel Zachariah Lamar, of Milledgeville. In 1836, Mr. Cobb was admitted to the bar; and the best proof of his immediate success and the confidence inspired by his abilities is to be found in the fact that, though barely of age and but a year in practice, he was in 1837 elected by the Legislature to the office of Solicitor-General for the Western Circuit of his State. In this position he had to meet the most competent and able gentlemen of the bar, and no doubt owes much of his present prominence to the cultivation of the resources he found in himself during this arduous but gratifying period of his career. It is said that his naturally cool judgment and almost intuitive legal perception made amends for want of experience; and certain it is that such information as I have been enabled to consult credits Mr. Cobb with having conducted the office with skill, vigor, and unvarying success. He held the place three years, and left it taking rank with the chief lawyers

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and advocates in the State; and he failed not to avail himself of his prominence and reputation. For the next three years his attention to professional labor was unremitting and productive. Gifted with a quickness of perception, rapidity of thought, and force of expression engrafted on a sympathetic disposition that vehemently adopted his clients' rights and wrongs, Mr. Cobb's appeals to a jury were naturally strong and effective. Human nature has more power than legal technicalities. The crotchetty few can understand the latter, the large-hearted many acknowledge the former. This was a chief secret of Mr. Cobb's success. Speaking of the Georgia bar and the period at which Mr. Cobb won his spurs" at it, a writer in the "Democratic Review" for 1849 says, "As a professional man, his character has been moulded by the combined influence of his own temperament and the customs of the country in which he for the most part practised. The Western (his) Judicial Circuit of Georgia has never been distinguished for devoted application to books. Situated in a broken and, in part, mountainous country, with a sterile soil and wretched roads, the people are simple and primitive in their ideas and habits, and to this day remain untouched by the progress of luxury or refinement. The character of its bench and bar has, as usual, assimilated itself to that of the country, and the proceedings of the court have been characterized by the same features. The viginti annorum lucubrationes' have never been much valued there. Courts and juries in that region, therefore, are more influenced by the arguments of a strong though rough common sense than by the refinements and subtleties of legal learning. The bar, consequently, have been distinguished by a quick and clear apprehension of the prominent and controlling points of a case, and by force and eloquence in presenting them to courts and juries, rather than by the display of professional research and nice discrimination of shades of principle. Of this general character of the circuit Mr. Cobb is one of the finest examples, though, when forced by circumstances to resort to books, he readily shows that he can follow the law applicable to his case through the most intricate refinements,-which, however, is not the usual method of his practice. In common with his professional associates, he usually relies on a readiness and self-possession of which no surprise can deprive him, on a perfect under

standing of the facts, and on a forcible application of the broad and fundamental principles bearing on his case.'

In the Nullification agitation which so distracted Georgia and South Carolina, Mr. Cobb sided with Jackson, and, having thus early won reputation as a Union Democrat, the people of his district sent him to Congress in October, 1842,-it being his first entrance into any legislative body. In the early part of his Congressional career, he mingled sufficiently in the debates to master the details and duties of the new field upon which he was destined to achieve extended reputation. He was successively re-elected in 1844, '46, and '48, representing that portion of his State which, under the apportionment of the sixth census, was designated the sixth district. In the TwentyEighth and Twenty-Ninth Congresses, Mr. Cobb continued to devote himself to a perfect study of the management of the deliberations of the House. This information,―necessary above all other to a man who would succeed as a leader in any legislative body, with the quickness of thought and readiness in resource which he possessed, began to direct attention to the young Georgian in moments of exigency. His business capacity acknowledged, the tenacity with which he clung to the policy of his party became of great service, and indicated him as a leader among much older politicians.

In the Thirtieth Congress,-from December, 1847, to March, 1849, Mr. Cobb's position was still more broadly defined. As the lamented Drumgoole, of Virginia, failed in health, it became necessary that some one should supply his place as parliamentary leader of the Democracy in the House, "which for ten years that gentleman had filled without even the semblance of rivalry.” In the occasional contests over political points in the absence of Mr. Drumgoole, it was found that Mr. Cobb possessed more of the elements of a successful parliamentary leader than any other on that side of the House. Mr. Cobb is the first who, without previous service in a State Legislature, or long experience in that body, was suddenly, as it were, elevated to a party leadership in the House. Yet, says one who claimed to have carefully noted his career at Washington, "we are by no means surprised

* Democratic Review, September, 1849.