I expect to make one within a week or two in
which I hope to succeed well enough to wish you to see it." And again,
some weeks later: "I just take my pen to say that Mr. Stephens of
Georgia, a little, slim, pale-faced consumptive man with a voice like
Logan's, has just concluded the very best speech of an hour's length I
ever heard. My old, withered, dry eyes are full of tears yet."
He was appointed the junior Whig member of the Committee on Post-offices
and Post-roads, and shared its prosaic but eminently useful labors both
in the committee-room and the House debates. His name appears on only
one other committee,--that on Expenditures of the War Department,--and
he seems to have interested himself in certain amendments of the law
relating to bounty lands for soldiers and such minor military topics. He
looked carefully after the interests of Illinois in certain grants of
land to that State for railroads, but expressed his desire that the
government price of the reserved sections should not be increased to
actual settlers.
During the first session of the Thirtieth Congress he delivered three
set speeches in the House, all of them carefully prepared and fully
written out. The first of these, on January 12, 1848, was an elaborate
defense of the Whig doctrine summarized in a House resolution passed a
week or ten days before, that the Mexican War "had been unnecessarily
and unconstitutionally commenced by the President," James K.
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