posed the too hasty allotment of privileges and powers to railroads and corporations. His words would find many to-day to echo them, few to improve them. " What do I see before me? The grave. What beyond that? Starving millions of our posterity, that I have robbed by my action here, in giving them over to the keeping of these corporations. The right to control these railroads belongs to the State, to the people, and as long as I represent the people, I will not relinquish it, so help me God!"83
A fighter, you see, so long as breath was in him, a rampant individualist, a champion of all the wordy ideals of the eighteenth century, the embodiment of passionate will, which would not be over-persuaded or over-ridden, or broken down. Although he nominally accepted Christianity and even declared on his deathbed that he " had not a resentment. I would not pang a heart," 84 yet he remained proud, haughty, self-confident to the very end. "Yes, I know I am fast passing away. Life's fitful fever will soon be over. I would not blot out a single act of my life." 85 The United States Government had conquered him, subdued him, constrained him. It governed Georgia and he was a Georgian. But he never forgave.
"Pardon?" he said, when they asked him to sue for amnesty; "Pardon for what? I have not pardoned you all yet." 86 And he declared that he would die as he had lived, "an unpardoned, unreconstructed, unrepentant rebel"
