THE WAR
of a gentleman. It was the general opinion that Potter would have cut Pryor, who had more assertiveness than strength, into pieces. In the Senate John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, who maintained the ethically indefensible attitude of participating in the legislation of the Government while making his arrangements for command in the rebel army to fight against it, attracted much attention. Tall and of good proportions, handsome, dark as an Indian, with straight black hair, he walked up and down the chamber with slow step and with his hands clasped behind him, giving to all a good view of his imposing person. Later he became a major-general in the rebel service and in a number of defeats was still conspicuous, though I believe a brave soldier. I also met John J. Crittenden of Kentucky, then old, thin and a little withered and wrinkled, who had made an earnest effort to avert the inevitable struggle. Much of the conversation about the capitol concerned those congressmen who had gone in a barouche to view the battle and had fallen into the hands of the enemy.
We returned home, having failed in the object of our visit, but I had been in the midst of the most trying and critical situation of the entire war. If the rebels had advanced upon Washington after their success at Bull Run, the whole history of the world might have been changed. The prevalent feeling in Washington at the time was that we were in immediate danger and that the final outcome was in grave doubt.
In 1863 I was a private in Company F of the Twenty-sixth Pennsylvania Emergency Regiment which met Early's division of Lee's Army as it advanced upon Gettysburg before the coming of the Army of the Potomac under Meade. I do not intend to give here the details and incidents of that campaign, for the reason that I wrote at the time a full description of it, afterward published in my Historical and Biographical Sketches, and for the further reason that in my address at the dedication of the monument erected on the
