ban of one great sin.
Yet there are two short words whose potent spell
Shall burst with thunder-crash these gates of hell,
Open a vista to celestial light,
Lead us to peace through the eternal Right.
Oh, speak those words, those saving words of power,
In this most pregnant, this supremest hour,--
Words writ in martyr blood, as all may see!--
Commander of the Faithful, say, BE FREE!

* * * * *

CONVERSATIONAL OPINIONS OF THE LEADERS OF SECESSION.

A MONOGRAPH.

The causes of the present Rebellion, the personal history of its
leaders, and the incidents immediately preceding the breaking out of the
conspiracy, will ever remain objects of chief interest to the historian
of the present period of the Republic. Influenced by a desire to obtain
unimpeachable information upon these topics from unprejudiced sources,
the writer of the following article, then a student at Yale College,
availed himself of the vacation in December, 1860, and January, 1861, to
visit the National capital, and while there to improve the reasonably
ready access with which most public men are approached, whenever the
object is either to give or to receive information, for the purpose of
studying a period then promising to exceed in importance anything in the
past history of the nation. It has been suggested to the writer, that
certain interviews, such as younger men, when collegians, were then
allowed with the frank Southern leaders, and which he has occasionally
sketched in conversation, have had the seal of privacy removed by the
tide of events, and should now be described for the public, as aiding to
unmask, from unquestionable authority, the real causes and origin of
the Rebellion, and contributing something, perhaps, to sustain public
sentiment in the defence of the nation against a conspiracy which the
statements of these Southern apologists themselves prove to have been
conceived in the most reckless disregard of honor and law, and which, if
successful, will give birth to a neighboring nation actuated by the same
spirit.

The more important interviews alluded to were with the Honorable Robert
Toombs, the Honorable R.M.T. Hunter, and the Honorable Jefferson Davis,
at that time prominent members, as is well known, of the United
States Senate, from the States respectively of Georgia, Virginia, and
Mississippi. The communications of the Senators are proved to have been
sincere by their subsequ