kson but a Puritan? What were Custer,
Stoneman and Kearny but Cavaliers? Wadsworth was as absolute an
aristocrat as Hampton.

In the old days before the war of sections the South was full of typical
Southerners of Northern birth. John A. Quitman, who went from New York,
and Robert J. Walker, who went from Pennsylvania to Mississippi; James
H. Hammond, whose father, a teacher, went from Massachusetts to South
Carolina. John Slidell, born and bred in New York, was thirty years
old when he went to Louisiana. Albert Sidney Johnston, the rose
and expectancy of the young Confederacy--the most typical of rebel
soldiers--had not a drop of Southern blood in his veins, born in
Kentucky a few months after his father and mother had arrived there from
Connecticut. The list might be extended indefinitely.

Climate, which has something to do with temperament, has not so much to
do with character as is often imagined. All of us are more or less
the creatures of environment. In the South after a fashion the duello
flourished. Because it had not flourished in the North there rose a
notion that the Northerners would not fight. It proved to those who
thought it a costly mistake.

Down to the actual secession of 1860-61 the issue of issues--the issue
behind all issues--was the preservation of the Union. Between 1820 and
1850, by a series of compromises, largely the work of Mr. Clay, its
threatened disruption had been averted. The Kansas-Nebraska Bill put a
sore strain upon conservative elements North and South. The Whig Party
went to pieces. Mr. Clay passed from the scene. Had he lived until
the presidential election of 1852 he would have given his support to
Franklin Pierce, as Daniel Webster did. Mr. Buchanan was not a General
Jackson. Judge Douglas, who sought to play the role of Mr. Clay, was too
late. The secession leaders held the whip hand in the Gulf States. South
Carolina was to have her will at last. Crash came the shot in Charleston
Harbor and the fall of Sumter. Curiously enough two persons of Kentucky
birth--Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis--led the rival hosts of war
into which an untenable and indefensible system of slave labor, for
which the two sections were equally responsible, had precipitated an
unwilling people.

Had Judge Douglas lived he would have been Mr. Lincoln's main reliance
in Congress. As a debater his resources and prowess were rarely equaled
and never surpassed. His personality, whether in debate or p