Mr.Raymond was nearly forty-six when he made his first speech in the House.

While he still exhibited the intellectual acuteness and alertness which had always been his characteristics, there was apparent in his face the mental weariness which had come from the prolonged and exacting labor of his profession.
His parliamentary failure was a keen disappointment to him, and was not improbably one among many causes which cut short a brilliant and useful life.

He died in 1869, in the forty-ninth year of his age.
This first debate on reconstruction developed the fact that the Democrats in Congress would endeavor to regain the ground they had lost by their hostility to Mr.Lincoln's Administration during the war.

The extreme members of that party, while the war was flagrant, adhered to many dogmas which were considered unpatriotic and in none more so than the declaration that even in the case of secession "there is no power in the Constitution to coerce a State." They now united in the declaration, as embodied in the resolution of Mr.Voorhees, that "no State or number of States confederated together can in any manner sunder their connection with the Federal Union." This was intended as a direct and defiant answer to the heretical creed of Mr.Stevens, that the States by their attempted secession were really no longer members of the Union and could not become so until regularly re-admitted by Congress.

By antagonizing this declaration the Democrats strove to convince the country that it was the accepted doctrine of their political opponents, and that they were themselves the true and tried friends of the Union.
The great majority of the Republican leaders, however, did not at all agree with the theory of Mr.Stevens and the mass of the party were steadily against him.