had just brought the glorious news to
Barrington, and the students at the military academy were in a state of
intense excitement over it.

Even at this late day there are boys--bright fellows, too--who believe
that when the war broke out every one who lived in the South was a
rebel; but this was by no means the case. The South was divided against
itself, and so was the North. Horace Greeley, in his "Recollections of a
Busy Life," tells us that in the beginning there were not more than half
a million "Simon-pure" secessionists to be found among the five millions
and more of whites who lived south of Mason and Dixon's line. Of course
subsequent events, like the War and Emancipation proclamations, added to
this number; but even at the end there were Union-loving people
scattered all through the seceded States, and they clung to their
principles in spite of everything, fighting the conscript officers, and
resisting all the efforts that were made to force them into the rebel
army. The Confederates called these plucky men and boys traitors,
although they denied that they were traitors themselves. They hated them
with an undying hatred, and when they captured them with arms in their
hands, as Forrest captured the garrison at Fort Pillow, they made short
work with them.

If it is true that a majority of the Southern people believed that a
State had the right to withdraw from the Union when things were not
managed in a satisfactory way, it is equally true that there was a party
in the North who held the same opinion. They said, "Let the erring
sisters go" if they want to, and declared that "Whenever any
considerable section of our Union shall deliberately resolve to go out,
we shall resist all coercive measures designed to keep it in." These
were the rabid Abolitionists, who were perfectly willing that the nation
should be destroyed rather than that it should continue to exist
half-slave and half-free. One of their leaders, who afterward became a
Union general, declared, "If slavery is the condition of the perpetuity
of the Union, let the Union _slide,_" for slavery must in no case be
allowed to continue. The Southern planters wanted that their "peculiar
institution" should be taken into the territories, while the
Abolitionists demanded that it should be blotted out altogether; and to
these two parties we are indebted for our four years' war.

There was still another secession party on both sides of the line, who
thought the