station, and of sharing in any danger which he might encounter.  It is hardly necessary to say that I apprehended none.”  To the “great astonishment” of Mr. Brown, however, the train brought only “Mrs. Lincoln and her three sons,” and “it was then announced that he had passed through the city incognito in the night train.”  This is a small bit of evidence to set against the elaborate stories of the believers in the plot, yet to some it will seem like the little obstruction which suffices to throw a whole railway train from the track.  I would rather let any reader, who is sufficiently interested to examine the matter, reach his own conclusion, than endeavor to furnish one for him; for I think that a dispute more difficult of really conclusive settlement will not easily be found.

[127] Some of the Southern members of Congress collected and recited sundry noteworthy utterances of Republicans concerning slavery, and certainly there was little in them to induce a sense of security on the part of slaveholders.  Wilson, Rise and Fall of Slave Power, iii. 97, 154.

[128] Toombs declared, as Lincoln had said, that what was wanted was that the North should call slavery right.  Wilson, Rise and Fall of Slave Power, iii. 76.  Stephens declared the “corner-stone” of the new government to be “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery ... is his natural and normal condition;” and said that it was the first government “in the history of the world based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”  N. and H. iii. 203; and see his letter to Lincoln, ibid. 272, 273.  Mississippi, in declaring the causes of her secession, said:  “Our position is thoroughly identical with the institution of slavery,—­the greatest material interest in the world.”  N. and H. iii. 201.  Senator Mason of Virginia said:  “It is a war of sentiment, of opinion; a war of one form of society against another form of society.”  Wilson, Rise and Fall of Slave Power, iii. 26.  Green of Missouri ascribed the trouble to the “vitiated and corrupted state of public sentiment.” Ibid. 23.  Iverson of Georgia said it was the “public sentiment” at the North, not the “overt acts” of the Republican administration, that was feared; and said that there was ineradicable enmity between the two sections, which had not lived together in peace, were not so living now, and could not be expected to do so in the future. Ibid. 17.

[129] Historians generally seem to admit that the South had to choose between making the fight now, and seeing its favorite institution gradually become extinct.

[130] Sometimes, though very rarely, the word was used.

[131] See Lincoln’s message to Congress, July 4, 1861.

CHAPTER VIII

THE BEGINNING OF WAR