"
Eli Saulsbury of Delaware was a very worthy Southern gentleman
of the old school, of great courage, ability and readiness
in debate, absolutely devoted to the doctrines of the Democratic
Party, and possessed of a very high opinion of himself. I
knew him very intimately. He was Chairman of the Committee
on Privileges and Elections, and was a member of it when I
was Chairman. We went to New Orleans together to make what
was called the Copiah investigation. We used to be fond of
talking with each other. He always had a fund of pleasant
anecdotes of old times in the South. He liked to set forth
his own virtues and proclaim the lofty morality of his own
principles of conduct, a habit which he may have got from
his eminent colleague, Senator Bayard, who sometimes announced
a familiar moral principle as if it were something the people
who listened to him were hearing for the first time, and of
which he in his youth had been the original discoverer. I
once told Saulsbury, when he was discoursing in that way,
that he must be descended from Adam by some wife he had before
Eve, who had nothing to do with the fall.
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