abolition
propaganda. My father was by upbringing a Virginian; by life-long
occupation an officer of the general government, imbued to the marrow
with the principles of military loyalty. Having married and
continuously lived in the North, he had escaped all taint of the
extreme States'-Rights school; but the memories of his youth kept him
broadly Southern in feeling, less by local attachment than by
affection for friends. More than twenty years after his death, when I
was on court-martial duty in Richmond, an old Confederate general,
whom I had never seen, sought me out in memory of the ties that had
bound both himself and his wife's family to my father. With these
clinging sympathies, the abolition agitation was an attack upon his
friends, and, still worse, a wanton endangering of the Union. To save
me from being carried away by the swelling tide was one of his chief
aims.

Regarded by themselves, nothing can well be less important than the
political opinions of one boy of eighteen to twenty; but few things
are more important, if they are those of the mass of his generation,
for then they are the echo from many homes. I believe, from what I saw
at the Naval Academy, that mine were those of the large majority of
the Northern youth, and that the very greatness of the concession
which such were ready to make for the sake of the Union should have
warned the disunionists that the same love was capable of equally
great sacrifices in the other direction. They failed so to understand;
chiefly, perhaps, because they could not appreciate the living force
of the simple sentiment. Never in their lifetimes, if ever before, had
the Union held the first place in the hearts of men of their section;
and such love as had been felt was already moribund, overcome by
supposed interest and local pride. Thus misled, it was easy to believe
that in the North, controlled by considerations of advantage,
yielding would follow yielding, even to permitting a disruption of the
Union--a miscalculation of forces more fatal even than that of "Cotton
is King." But forces will often be miscalculated by those who reckon
interest as more powerful than principle or than sentiment.

Singularly enough, considering the exodus of States'-Rights officers
from the navy at the outbreak of the War of Secession, my first
service during it brought me into close relations with two captains,
both Southerners, whose differing points of view shed interesting
light upo