Presidential Candidates:

"He explained that the reason why he permitted two days to elapse before he replied to the gentleman, was because the gentleman himself after making his speech the other day on the motion to commit, put down the hatchway of the previous question, so that he was denied an opportunity of responding to him.

"He had said, and he now repeated, that with the gentleman's motives he had nothing to do; he had made and should make no attack upon them. When he spoke of the movement of the gentleman, he characterized it as one the effect of which would be to kill the bill, and said that after the question was decided, he was surrounded by every abolitionist in the hall, and received their congratulations for the course he had pursued. He did not intend to charge the gentleman with intentionally playing the part of an assassin; but said, and could not take it back, that the act, to all intents, was like throwing one arm around it in friendship, and stabbing it with the other – to kill the bill.

"The gentleman from New York had said that there were but eighteen or nineteen bills before the Nebraska bill on the calendar?

"Mr. English. – There are fifty bills before the Senate bill.

"Mr. Cutting. – Before the House bill?

"Mr. Breckinridge. – I will nail the gentleman to the counter there. 'Before the House bill?' says he. 'Why, I give up that we will never reach the Senate bill, but we will reach the House bill.' But did not the gentleman say that his object in moving to commit the bill was that he might discuss the bill and examine the Badger proviso? And is not the Badger amendment contained in the Senate bill? Thus it would be seen that the bill which the gentleman moved to commit for the purpose of examining into could never be reached.

"The meaning of the gentleman's remarks about the press was, that he (Mr. B.) had acted in concert with papers in this city to drive the gentleman from the support of the bill. Was it not a low ambition for a man to take a course against a measure because another was for it? Did the gentleman suppose that twenty Administrations could ever drive him (Mr. B.) from his position? Even if the Administration were against the bill, he (Mr. B.) would go for it. They should never influence him in this respect. He had no more connection with the Administration than any other gentleman on this floor.

"The gentleman had said that he (Mr. B.) was the last individual whom he supposed would have made an assault on him, because in the hour of his greatest need the Hards came to his assistance. This innuendo was so deep that he could not understand it, and therefore asked for an explanation.

"Mr. Cutting replied, that he had been informed that during the canvass in Kentucky, it having been intimated that the gentleman's friends needed assistance to accomplish his election, his friends in New York made up a subscription of some $1,500, and transmitted it to Kentucky, to be employed for the benefit of the gentleman, who is now the peer of Presidents and Cabinets. [Laughter.]

"Mr. Breckinridge. – And not only the peer of Presidents and Cabinets, but the peer of the gentleman from New York, fully and in every respect.

"Mr. Breckinridge, resuming, said that the gentleman should have known the truth of what he uttered before he pronounced it on this floor. He (Mr. B.) was not aware that any intimations were sent from Kentucky that funds were needed to aid in his election, nor was he aware that they were received. He did not undertake to say what the fact might be in regard to what the gentleman had said, but he had no information whatever on that fact. He (Mr. B.) came here not by the aid of money, but against the use of money. [Applause.] The gentleman could not escape by any subtlety, or by any ingenuity, a thorough and complete exposure of any ingenious device to which he might resort for the purpose of putting gentlemen in a false position, and the sooner he stopped that game, the better.

"Mr. Cutting said that he had given the gentleman an opportunity of indulging in one of the most violent, inflammatory, and personal assaults that had ever been known upon this floor; and he would ask, how could the gentleman disclaim any attack upon him when he followed it up by declaring that his (Mr. C.'s) intention and motive was to destroy a measure for which he professed friendship?

"Mr. Breckinridge asked the gentleman to point to the occasion when he made such a remark.

"Mr. Cutting submitted to the committee that the whole tenor and scope of the speech of the gentleman from Kentucky was an attack upon his motives in moving to commit the bill. It was in vain for the gentleman to attempt to escape by disclaiming it; the fact was before the committee. But he would say to the gentleman that he scorned his imputation. How dare the gentleman undertake to assert that he had professed friendship for the measure, with a view to kill it, to assassinate it by sending it to the bottom of the calendar? And then, when he said that the committee of the whole had under its control the House bill upon this identical subject, which the committee intended to take up, discuss, amend, and report to the House, the gentleman skulked behind the Senate bill, which had been sent to the foot of the calendar!

"Mr. Breckinridge. – I ask the gentleman to withdraw that last word.

"Mr. Cutting. – I withdraw nothing. I have uttered what I have said in answer to one of the most violent and most personal attacks that has ever been witnessed upon this floor.

"Mr. Breckinridge. – Then, when the gentleman says I skulk, he says what is false.

"The Chair. – The gentleman is not in order.

"Mr. Cutting. – I do not intend upon this floor to answer the remark which the gentleman from Kentucky has thought proper to employ. It belongs to a different region. It is not here that I will desecrate my lips with undertaking to retort in that manner.

"Mr. C. then declared that in moving to commit the bill, his object was to get it in such a shape as would be satisfactory to the country, and put at rest the outcries of fanaticism which now prevailed throughout the land.

"He desired peace and harmony, and would suggest to gentlemen who were anxious for the passage of the bill, that it was not the best mode of accomplishing their object by assailing those who proclaimed themselves favorable to its principles and its great cardinal outlines. It seemed to him, if gentlemen desired the success of the bill, it would answer a better purpose if they would turn their batteries upon its enemies, rather than attempt to destroy those who were its friends."

The result was, that the preliminaries of a duel were arranged, but fortunately, by the interposition of friends, an amicable adjustment of the difficulty was arrived at.

When Mr. Pierce was in power, he offered Mr. Breckinridge the Spanish mission, but he refused it. In 1856, he was put upon the Democratic ticket and elected Vice-President of the United States.

The official position of Mr. Breckinridge has been such as to render his position on some of the present political issues somewhat doubtful. He is, of course, a believer in the old Democratic creed, and is a moderate supporter of the South and her institutions. It was generally understood at Washington, during the Lecompton struggle, that he sided with the President against Mr. Douglas – in other words, was in favor of the bill. He was a warm supporter of Mr. Douglas in 1854, and his great measure, the Kansas act. In the last session of Congress, Mr. Breckinridge gave his casting vote to postpone the consideration of the Homestead bill, which gives an indication of his hostility to the measure. He is a very fair politician, of unspotted integrity as a man, and is possessed of talents of high order, such as fit him to occupy with ability any office within the gift of the people.

JOHN C. FREMONT

The leadership of Mr. Fremont in a Presidential campaign has doubtless made his name and history familiar to all intelligent men, but the fact that he is a prominent candidate for the Presidency in 1860, makes it proper to give in this volume an outline sketch of his life. Aside from this, such men as Fremont, whether Presidential candidate or not, whether President or not, are the great, daring, characteristic, men of our times, and their deeds should always be held in remembrance.

Mr. Fremont is a native of Savannah, Georgia, where he was born, June 21, 1813. At an early age he entered the law office of John W. Mitchell, of Charleston, where he gave such indications of talent, that Mr. Mitchell bestowed unusual pains upon his education, placing him under the care of an excellent teacher, Dr. Robertson, a Scotch gentleman, who carried him through the classics. At the age of sixteen, young Fremont was confirmed in the Protestant Episcopal church. In 1833, the sloop-of-war Natchez entered the port of Charleston and was ordered from there to South America. Fremont, just twenty years old, got the situation of teacher of mathematics aboard of her, and made a cruise of two and a half years. Upon his return, he was made professor of mathematics and appointed to the frigate Independence. He afterward made one of a corps of topographical engineers to explore a route of a railway from Charleston to Cincinnati. It was here that Fremont got his first experience of camp life. He went next to the Upper Mississippi on a similar undertaking.

In 1841, Mr. Fremont was ordered to examine the Desmoines River, in Iowa – then a wilderness; and when it was performed, he returned to marry Jessie Benton, the young daughter of Thomas H. Benton. The next year he projected his first great exploring expedition to the Rocky Mountains, setting out from Washington, May 2, 1842. The results of the expedition were great and made a deep impression upon the Government and nation, and a second expedition was ordered, much more complete in preparation than the first. The party left Kansas in May, 1843, and did not get back to the United States until August of 1844. The tour was full of dangers and thrilling incidents, and the results were still more striking than those of the first expedition. Col. Benton sketched the expedition in a few eloquent words, as follows:

"'The Government deserves credit for the zeal with which it has pursued geographical discovery.' Such is the remark which a leading paper made upon the discoveries of Fremont, on his return from his second expedition to the great West; and such is the remark which all writers will make upon all his discoveries who write history from public documents and outside views. With all such writers the expeditions of Fremont will be credited to the zeal of the Government for the promotion of science, as if the Government under which he acted had conceived and planned these expeditions, as Mr. Jefferson did that of Lewis and Clark, and then selected this young officer to carry into effect the instructions delivered to him. How far such history would be true in relation to the first expedition, which terminated in the Rocky Mountains, has been seen in the account which has been given of the origin of that undertaking, and which leaves the Government innocent of its conception; and, therefore, not entitled to the credit of its authorship, but only to the merit of permitting it. In the second, and greater expedition, from which great political as well as scientific results have flowed, their merit is still less; for, while equally innocent of its conception, they were not equally passive to its performance – countermanding the expedition after it had begun – and lavishing censure upon the adventurous young explorer for his manner of undertaking it. The fact was, that his first expedition barely finished, Mr. Fremont sought and obtained orders for a second one, and was on the frontier of Missouri with his command, when orders arrived at St. Louis to stop him, on the ground that he had made a military equipment which the peaceful nature of his geographical pursuit did not require! as if Indians did not kill and rob scientific men as well as others, if not in a condition to defend themselves. The particular point of complaint was that he had taken a small mountain howitzer, in addition to his rifles; and which, he was informed, was charged to him, although it had been furnished upon a regular requisition on the commandant of the arsenal at St. Louis, approved by the commander of the military department (Colonel, afterward General Kearney). Mr. Fremont had left St. Louis, and was at the frontier, Mrs. Fremont being requested to examine the letters that came after him, and forward those which he ought to receive. She read the countermanding orders and detained them! and Fremont knew nothing of their existence, until after he had returned from one of the most marvellous and eventful expeditions of modern times – one to which the United States are indebted (among other things) for the present ownership of California, instead of seeing it a British possession. The writer of this view, who was then in St. Louis, approved of the course which his daughter had taken (for she had stopped the orders before he knew it); and he wrote a letter to the department condemning the recall, repulsing the reprimand which had been lavished upon Fremont, and demanding a court martial for him when he should return. The Secretary of War was then Mr. James Madison Porter, of Pennsylvania; the chief of the topographical corps the same as now (Colonel Abert), himself an office man, surrounded by West Point officers, to whose pursuit of easy service, Fremont's adventurous expedition was a reproach; and in conformity to whose opinions the secretary seemed to have acted. On Fremont's return, upward of a year afterward, Mr. William Wilkins, of Pennsylvania, was Secretary of War, and received the young explorer with all honor and friendship, and obtained for him the brevet of captain from President Tyler. And such is the inside view of this piece of history – very different from what documentary evidence would make it.

"To complete his survey across the continent, on the line of travel between the State of Missouri and the tide-water region of the Columbia, was Fremont's object in this expedition; and it was all that he had obtained orders for doing; but only a small part, and to his mind, an insignificant part, of what he proposed doing. People had been to the mouth of the Columbia before, and his ambition was not limited to making tracks where others had made them before him. There was a vast region beyond the Rocky Mountains – the whole western slope of our continent – of which but little was known; and of that little, nothing with the accuracy of science. All that vast region, more than seven hundred miles square – equal to a great kingdom in Europe – was an unknown land – a sealed book, which he longed to open, and to read. Leaving the frontier of Missouri in May, 1843, and often diverging from his route for the sake of expanding his field of observation, he had arrived in the tide-water region of Columbia in the month of November; and had then completed the whole service which his orders embraced. He might then have returned upon his tracks, or been brought home by sea, or hunted the most pleasant path for getting back; and if he had been a routine officer, satisfied with fulfilling an order, he would have done so. Not so the young explorer, who held his diploma from nature, and not from the United States Military Academy. He was, at Fort Vancouver, guest of the hospitable Dr. McLaughlin, Governor of the British Hudson Bay Fur Company; and obtained from him all possible information upon his intended line of return – faithfully given, but which proved to be disastrously erroneous in its leading and governing feature. A southeast route, to cross the great unknown region diagonally through its heart (making a line from the Lower Columbia to the Upper Colorado of the Gulf of California), was his line of return; twenty-five men (the same who had come with him from the United States) and a hundred horses, were his equipment; and the commencement of winter the time of starting – all without a guide, relying upon their guns for support; and, in the last resort, upon their horses – such as should give out! for one that could carry a man, or a pack, could not be spared for food.

"All the maps up to that time had shown this region traversed from east to west – from the base of the Rocky Mountains to the bay of San Francisco – by a great river called the Buena Ventura: which may be translated, the Good Chance. Governor McLaughlin believed in the existence of this river, and made out a conjectural manuscript map to show its place and course. Fremont believed in it, and his plan was to reach it before the dead of winter, and then hibernate upon it. As a great river, he knew that it must have some rich bottoms, covered with wood and grass, where the wild animals would collect and shelter, when the snows and freezing winds drove them from the plains: and with these animals to live on, and grass for the horses, and wood for fires, he expected to avoid suffering, if not to enjoy comfort, during his solitary sojourn in that remote and profound wilderness.

"He proceeded – soon encountered deep snows, which impeded progress upon the highlands – descended into a low country to the left (afterward known to be the Great Basin, from which no water issues to any sea) – skirted an enormous chain of mountain on the right, luminous with the glittering white snow – saw strange Indians, who mostly fled – found a desert – no Buena Ventura; and death from cold and famine staring him in the face. The failure to find the river, or tidings of it, and the possibility of its existence seeming to be forbid by the structure of the country, and hibernation in the inhospitable desert being impossible, and the question being that of life and death, some new plan of conduct became indispensable. His celestial observations told him that he was in the latitude of the bay of San Francisco, and only seventy miles from it. But what miles! up and down that snowy mountain which the Indians told him no men could cross in the winter – which would have snow upon it as deep as the trees, and places where people would slip off, and fall half a mile at a time; – a fate which actually befell a mule, packed with the precious burden of botanical specimens, collected along a travel of two thousand miles. No reward could induce an Indian to become a guide in the perilous adventure of crossing this mountain. All recoiled and fled from the adventure. It was attempted without a guide – in the dead of winter – accomplished in forty days – the men and surviving horses, a woeful procession, crawling along one by one – skeleton men leading skeleton horses – and arriving at Sutter's Settlement in the beautiful valley of the Sacramento; and where a genial warmth, and budding flowers, and trees in foliage, the grassy ground, and flowing streams, and comfortable food, made a fairy contrast with the famine and freezing they had encountered, and the lofty Sierra Nevada which they had climbed. Here he rested and recruited; and from this point, and by way of Monterey, the first tidings were heard of the party since leaving Fort Vancouver.

"Another long progress to the south, skirting the western base of the Sierra Nevada, made him acquainted with the noble valley of the San Joaquin, counterpart to that of the Sacramento; when crossing through a gap, and turning to the left, he skirted the Great Basin; and by many deviations from the right line home, levied incessant contributions to science from expanded lands, not described before. In this eventful exploration, all the great features of the western slope of our continent were brought to light – the Great Salt Lake, the Utah Lake, the Little Salt Lake; at all which places, then deserts, the Mormons now are; the Sierra Nevada, then solitary in the snow, now crowded with Americans, digging gold from its flanks; the beautiful valleys of the Sacramento and San Joaquin, then alive with wild horses, elk, deer, and wild fowls, now smiling with American cultivation, the Great Basin itself, and its contents; the Three Parks; the approximation of the great rivers which, rising together in the central region of the Rocky Mountains, go off east and west, toward the rising and the setting sun – all these, and other strange features of a new region, more Asiatic than American, were brought to light and revealed to public view in the results of this exploration.

"Eleven months he was never out of sight of snow; and sometimes, freezing with cold, would look down upon a sunny valley, warm with genial heat; sometimes, panting with the summer's heat, would look up at the eternal snows which crowned the neighboring mountain. But it was not then that California was secured to the Union – to the greatest power of the new world – to which it of right belonged; but it was the first step toward the acquisition, and the one that led to it. The second expedition led to a third, just in time to snatch the golden California from the hands of the British, ready to clutch it. But of this hereafter. Fremont's second expedition was now over. He had left the United States a fugitive from his Government, and returned with a name that went over Europe and America, and with discoveries bearing fruit which the civilized world is now enjoying."

In 1845, the third expedition of Col. Fremont was made – principally intended to explore the Great Basin and country of Oregon and California.

"He approached these settlements in the winter of 1845-6. Aware of the critical state of affairs between the United States and Mexico, and determined to give no cause of offence to the authorities of the province, with commendable prudence he haulted his command on the frontier, one hundred miles from Monterey, and proceeded alone to that city to explain the object of his coming to the commandant general, Castro, and to obtain permission to go to the valley of the San Joaquin, where there was game for his men and grass for his horses, and no inhabitants to be molested by his presence. The leave was granted; but scarcely had he reached the desired spot for refreshment and repose, before he received information from the American settlements, and by express from our Consul at Monterey, that General Castro was preparing to attack him with a comparatively large force of artillery, cavalry and infantry, upon the pretext that, under the cover of a scientific mission, he was exciting the American settlers to revolt. In view of this danger and to be in a condition to repel an attack, he then took a position on a mountain overlooking Monterey, at a distance of about thirty miles, intrenched it, raised the flag of the United States, and with his own men, sixty-two in number, awaited the approach of the commandant general.

"From the 7th to the 10th of March, Colonel Fremont and his little band maintained this position. General Castro did not approach within attacking distance, and Colonel Fremont, adhering to his plan of avoiding all collisions, and determined neither to compromise his Government nor the American settlers, ready to join him at all hazards, if he had been attacked, abandoned his position, and commenced his march for Oregon, intending by that route to return to the United States. Deeming all danger from the Mexicans to be past, he yielded to the wishes of some of his men who desired to remain in the country, discharged them from his service, and refused to receive others in their stead, so cautious was he to avoid doing anything which would compromit the American settlers or give even a color of offence to the Mexican authorities. He pursued his march slowly and leisurely, as the state of his men and horses required, until the middle of May, and had reached the northern shore of the greater Tlamath Lake, within the limits of the Oregon territory, when he found his further progress in that direction obstructed by impassable snowy mountains and hostile Indians, who, having been excited against him by General Castro, had killed and wounded four of his men, and left him no repose either in camp or on his march. At the same time, information reached him that General Castro, in addition to his Indian allies, was advancing in person against him with artillery and cavalry, at the head of four or five hundred men; that they were passing around the head of the Bay of San Francisco to a rendezvous on the north side of it, and that the American settlers in the valley of the Sacramento were comprehended in the scheme of destruction meditated against his own party.