Charles O'Conor. inability to read the signs of the times, that within three years from the time when he so confidently pronounced that " negro slavery cannot be abolished," it was abolished, and that nobody to speak of, North or South, wishes to see it reinstated! Although Mr. O'Conor's argument seems to imply his conviction of the utter unfitness offree negroes to participate in civil govern ment, yet in the constitutional convention of 1846 he had introduced the article on the elective franchise which was adopted, pro viding that these inferior creatures might vote if they were freeholders to the amount of $250 and taxed therefor, and freeing all others from direct taxation. At that time, therefore, he seems to have conceded that all privileges in which a negro might reason ably share were not embraced in the system of slavery. At that time Mr. O'Conor seems to have been more liberal than some other members, for one pronounced negroes "merely an excrescence upon our society"; another invoked the " curse of Canaan" against them; another said that giving them the elective franchise would be joining "the cow and the ass in the same yoke "; and still another " believed that slavery had been permitted, in the providence of God, as a means of preparing a portion of the Ethiopian race for the great mission of civilizing the tribes of Africa." During the civil war Mr. O'Conor favored the cause of the South. So well understood were his sentiments on this subject, that when the Democratic party nominated Horace Greeley for the presidency in 1872, a bolting convention at Louisville nominated Mr. O'Conor. This was against his earnest and sincere protests, but as some ardent Whigs in Massachusetts persisted in voting for Daniel Webster, although he had not been nominated by any party, and in' fact, was dead, so 21,559 gentlemen of Mr. O'Conor's way of thinking voted for him in spite of his protests. To do Mr. O'Conor justice, it must be
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owned that he never sought nor desired public office of any kind. I say this in spite of Mr. Bigelow's statement that in conversation with him, Mr. O'Conor seemed to think it strange that he had not oftener been taken up for office. He may have thought so and yet not have cared for office. Mr. Bigelow, in his paper in " The Cen tury " on O'Conor, narrates that Aaron Burr believed that Chancellor Walworth decided all his causes against him from personal pique, because of Burr's advice to him not to publish his rather egotistical address. When the Chancellor's grandson was in late years indicted for murdering his own father, Mr. O'Conor saved his neck (without fee) on the grounds that the de ceased treated his wife very badly and the son was subject to epilepsy! I hope Mr. O'Conor was not consciously avenging Burr, who would probably have thought it venial to kill a Walworth, and I do not think he was, for he paid the Chancellor great com pliments in the constitutional convention of 1846. That however was when he was getting rid of him and his court. Mr. O'Conor was above the middle height, spare and erect. His head was well-balanced and fine, his mouth large and compressed, his eyes (I should say) a steely blue, — or perhaps most people would call them gray, — very brilliant and intelligent, severe at will, but ordinarily not unkind. He wore a fringe of beard all around his face. He gave much less thought to the suit he wore than to any of his other suits. He generally went in rather rusty black, and I should guess that a contractor might have made money by agreeing to pay his tailor's bill for $100 a year. He was no believer in Dr. Holmes's aphorism that " the hat is always felt," for he wore one that looked as if it might have come in with the Forrest cases, although it indubitably sur vived them. He wore this well back on his head, in this resembling Horace Greeley, with whom he probably disagreed in every
