About a thousand persons were already assembled on the ground, and a more motley gathering I never beheld.  All sorts of costumes and all classes of people were there; but the genuine back-woods corn-crackers composed the majority of the assemblage.  As might be expected, much the larger portion of the audience were men; still I saw some women and not a few children, many of the country people having taken advantage of the occasion to give their families a holiday.  Some occupied benches in front of the stand, though a larger number were seated around in groups, within hearing of the speaker, but paying very little attention to what he was saying.  A few were whittling, a few pitching quoits, or playing leap-frog, and quite a number were having a quiet game of whist, euchre, or ‘seven-up.’

The speaker was a well-dressed, gentlemanly-looking man, and a tolerably good orator.  He seemed accustomed to addressing a jury, for he displayed all the adroitness in handling his subject, and in appealing to the prejudices of his hearers, that we see in successful special pleaders.  But he overshot his mark.  To nine out of ten of his audience, his words and similes, though correct and sometimes beautiful, were as unintelligible as the dead languages.  He advocated immediate, unconditional secession; and I thought from the applause which met his remarks, whenever he seemed to make himself understood, that the large majority of those present were of the same way of thinking.

He was succeeded by a heavy-browed, middle-aged man, slightly bent, and with hair a little turned to gray, but still hale, athletic, and in the prime and vigor of manhood.  His pantaloons and waistcoat were of the common home-spun, and he used, now and then, a word of the country dialect; but as a stump-speaker, he was infinitely superior to the more polished orator who had preceded him.

He, too, advocated secession as a right and a duty—­separation, now and forever from the dirt-eating, money-loving Yankees, who, he was ashamed to say, had the same ancestry, and worshiped the same God as himself.  He took the bold ground that slavery is a curse to both the black and the white, but that it was forced upon this generation before it was born, by these same greedy, grasping Yankees, who would sell not only the bones and sinews of their fellowmen, but—­worse than that—­their own souls, for gold.  It was forced upon them without their consent, and now that it had become interwoven with all their social life, and was a necessity of their very existence, the hypocritical Yankees would take it from them, because, forsooth, it was a sin and a wrong—­as if they had to bear its responsibility, or the South could not settle its own account with its Maker!