from King John down refused
to be governed unjustly and oppressively."

And so they went on, hour after hour, not bitterly, but hotly, as was
the fashion all over the land at that time. My father remained a Whig,
which put him in line, sometimes, with the Northern men then coming into
prominence, such as Morrill of New England, and young Sherman from
across the mountains, who believed in the tariff in spite of what
England might say to us. This set him against the Jefferson clans of our
state, who feared not a war with the North so much as one with Europe.
Already England was pronouncing her course; yet those were not days of
triumphant conclusions, but of doubtful weighing and hard judgment, as
we in old Virginia could have told you, who saw neighbors set against
each other, and even families divided among themselves.

For six years the war talk had been growing stronger. Those of the South
recoiled from the word treason--it had a hateful sound to them--nor have
they to this day justified its application to themselves. I myself
believe to-day that that war was much one of geography and of lack of
transportation. Not all the common folk of the North or of the South
then knew that it was never so much a war of principle, as they were
taught to think, but rather a war of self-interest between two clashing
commercial parties. We did not know that the unscrupulous kings of the
cotton world, here and abroad, were making deliberate propaganda of
secession all over the South; that secession was not a thing voluntary
and spontaneous, but an idea nourished to wrong growth by a secret and
shrewd commercial campaign, whose nature and extent few dreamed, either
then or afterward. It was not these rich and arrogant planters of the
South, even, men like our kin in the Carolinas, men like those of the
Sheraton family, who were the pillars of the Confederacy, or rather, of
the secession idea. Back of them, enshrouded forever in darkness--then
in mystery, and now in oblivion which cannot be broken--were certain
great figures of the commercial world in this land and in other lands.
These made a victim of our country at that time, even as a few great
commercial figures seek to do to-day, and we, poor innocent fools, flew
at each other's throats, and fought, and slew, and laid waste a land,
for no real principle and to no gain to ourselves. Nothing is so easy to
deceive, to hoodwink, to blind and betray, as a great and innocent
people th