I venture to ask a favor of the reader - that he do what I myself often shirk, it must be confessed - read this preface.
You would naturally infer from the title of this volume that it is the biography in part of a man whose career was very remarkable. So it is, but it is also - or is intended to be - something more. You may be inclined, at the first glance, to suppose that it can possess no interest for the present generation except as "ancient history." If you will read the narrative, I think that you will find this first impression an error. This sketch is part of the biography of a people, the American people, at a most important period of its life. The past is the parent of the present and of the future of a people's life, as it is with every man's life. Hereditary inclinations, good and evil, influence a people's career just as they influence that of an individual, and they should be equally subject to the guidance and restraint that experience imposes through conscience. Although this is an account of events happening many years ago, yet the causes producing them, at present in the background, are as full of vitality now as then - they are sleeping lions. Where treasure is, near at hand will always be lurking thieves. Because you may be sailing on summer-seas, free of care and with no thought of tempests, you do not doubt that the ocean, now so harmless-looking, will some time or other be lashed into angry waves mountain-high by blasts at present slumbering in the caves of the winds. So will the demon of storms reappear from time to time in your political summer-seas. You cannot prevent this by ignoring it, but you can save yourself from shipwreck by profiting by the experience of others. The miseries of Reconstruction were rendered possible only by the subversion of representative government - "the consent of the governed" - without which all government is simply despotism, however disguised.
