those who were conscious of the region as a whole
and those who were not. Explain it as you will, there was a moment just
after the secession movement succeeded when the South seemed to realize
itself as a whole, when it turned intuitively to those men who, as time
was to demonstrate, shared this realization. For the moment it turned
away from those others, however great their part in secession, who
lacked this sense of unity.

At this point, geography becomes essential. The South fell,
institutionally, into two grand divisions: one, with an old and firmly
established social order, where consciousness of the locality went back
to remote times; another, newly settled, where conditions were still
fluid, where that sense of the sacredness of local institutions had not
yet formed.

A typical community of the first-named class was South Carolina. Her
people had to a remarkable degree been rendered state-conscious
partly by their geographical neighbors, and partly by their long and
illustrious history, which had been interwoven with great European
interests during the colonial era and with great national interests
under the Republic. It is possible also that the Huguenots, though
few in numbers, had exercised upon the State a subtle and pervasive
influence through their intellectual power and their Latin sense for
institutions.

In South Carolina, too, a wealthy leisure class with a passion for
affairs had cultivated enthusiastically that fine art which is the pride
of all aristocratic societies, the service of the State as a profession
high and exclusive, free from vulgar taint. In South Carolina all things
conspired to uphold and strengthen the sense of the State as an object
of veneration, as something over and above the mere social order, as the
sacred embodiment of the ideals of the community. Thus it is fair to
say that what has animated the heroic little countries of the Old World
Switzerland and Serbia and ever-glorious Belgium--with their passion to
remain themselves, animated South Carolina in 1861. Just as Serbia was
willing to fight to the death rather than merge her identity in the
mosaic of the Austrian Empire, so this little American community saw
nothing of happiness in any future that did not secure its virtual
independence.

Typical of the newer order in the South was the community that formed
the President of the Confederacy. In the history of Mississippi previous
to the war there are six great names-