arcely less intense than that which the same event excited in the
North. At once, in every direction, disappeared all those sober scruples
which, during the hottest excitement of the preceding months, had
quietly controlled the judgment of a small but influential class in
every community. The change in north Alabama and central Tennessee,
where the principles of secession had been steadily rejected by the
people, was almost instantaneous. The excitement and pride of a
sectional victory, and a false sympathy for the individuals who had
ventured their lives in a cause in itself, perhaps, objectionable,
effected what the most cunning fallacies of the leaders had been unable
to accomplish. As this movement of the popular feeling had many points
of resemblance with the revolution of feeling which took place just
after the election of Mr. Lincoln, there were some who believed that it
would be followed by a similar reaction. The excitement of the war into
which the whole country was immediately precipitated, cut off, however,
every chance of any such retrogressive movement. No reaction took place.
The surrender of Fort Sumter completed the change of opinion which had
been so long progressing in the South.

Those who look for an immediate restitution of Union feeling in the
South, as a result of Federal victories, will be disappointed. It will
be the result of a gradual movement--a movement resembling in every
important particular that by which the secession sentiment was
established in the interval between the election of Mr. Lincoln and the
surrender of Fort Sumter. Operating particularly upon that class in
society which is by nature passive rather than active, conservative
rather than headlong, the movement, as in that case, will be at first
slow and attended with many reactions, but the result will not be
uncertain. Already the progress of the war has destroyed nearly all the
motives by which the Union party of the South was formerly led to adopt
the cause of secession. This great party, therefore, stretching through
all parts of the South, forming an important element in the population
of every village and county which threatened at one time with its
passive resistance to overturn the whole scheme of the rebellion, stands
now exposed to the full influence of the reactionary tide which has now
begun to set back toward the Union. The change may not be at once, but
the same motive which led the Union man of Tennessee to return