Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/82

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his funeral amused by the fact that McClernand had been buried in the full uniform of a major-general, which he had not worn, I suppose, since Vicksburg. When some member of Senator Palmer's household asked him if he should like to be buried in his uniform, he shook his head against it, but added:

"It was all right for Mac; it was like him."

But the end was in his thoughts; Oglesby was gone, and now McClernand as the last of the men with whom he had fought in the great crisis, and he went, pretty soon after that, himself. He had participated in two great revolutionary epochs of his nation, going through the one and penetrating though not so far into the second, a long span of life and experience.

It was perhaps natural that he should not have divined the implications of the second phase as clearly as he did those of the first; and though he had helped to inaugurate the new movement, the latest urge toward democracy in this land, he could not go so far. He was young in '56 and old in '96, and as we grow old we grow conservative, whether we would or not, and much, I suppose, in the same way.



XII


Senator Palmer's victory in 1891, however, had raised the hopes of the Illinois Democracy for 1892, and it was early in that year that I came to know one of the most daring pioneers of the neo-demo-