irst day of January the
Senators from Florida, Mississippi and Alabama had announced their
farewell addresses to the Old Union.

The girl's eyes swept the crowded tiers of the galleries packed with
beautifully gowned Southern women. Every glove, fan, handkerchief,
bonnet or dress--every dainty stocking and filmy piece of lingerie had
been imported direct from the fashion centers of Europe. Gowns of
priceless lace and velvets had been woven to order in the looms of
Genoa, Venice and Brussels.

The South was rich.

And yet not one of her representatives held his office in Washington
because of his money. Her ruling classes were without exception an
aristocracy of brains--yet they were distinctly an aristocracy.

The election of Abraham Lincoln was more than a threat to confiscate
three thousand millions of dollars which the South had invested in
slaves. The homely rail splitter from the West was the prophecy of a new
social order which threatened the foundations of the modern world. He
himself was all unconscious of this fact. And yet this big reality was
the secret of the electric tension which strangled men into silence and
threw over the scene the sense of ominous foreboding.

The debates in Congress during the tempestuous session had been utterly
insincere and without meaning. The real leaders knew that the time for
discussion had passed. Two absolutely irreconcilable moral principles
had clashed and the Republic was squarely and hopelessly broken into two
vast sectional divisions on the issue.

Beyond the fierce and uncompromising hatred of Slavery which had grown
into a consuming passion throughout the North and had resulted in the
election of Lincoln as a purely sectional candidate--behind and
underneath this apparent moral rage lay a bigger and far more elemental
fact--the growing consciousness of the laboring man that the earth and
the fullness thereof were his.

And bigger than the fear of the confiscation of their property and the
destruction of the Constitution their fathers had created loomed before
the Southern mind the Specter of a new democracy at the touch of whose
fetid breath the soul of culture and refinement they believed must die.
In the vulgar ranks of this democracy must march sooner or later four
million negroes but yesterday from the jungles of Africa.

This greater issue was felt but dimly by the leaders on either side but
it was realized with sufficient clearness to make compromise imp