hey went into
exile--stout-heartedly chanting at their departure the 37th Psalm: "Fret
not thyself because of evil-doers."

In the South itself there had been developing recently an antagonism to
the slave power. Its strength lay not in the moral opposition to
slavery, which indeed always existed, but was quiet and apparently
cowed; but rather in the growing class of city residents,--merchants and
professional men,--whose interests and feelings were often antagonistic
to the large planters. The hostility to slavery on economic grounds, and
in the white man's interest, found passionate expression in Helper's
_Impending Crisis_, and in a milder form was spreading widely. But at
the menace of invasion and servile insurrection all classes drew
together. Especially the women of the South became suddenly and
intensely interested in the political situation. The suggestion of
personal peril appealed to them, and to the men who were their natural
defenders. The situation is well described in Prof. J. W. Burgess's _The
Civil War and the Constitution_,--a generally impartial book, written
with personal appreciation of the Southern standpoint: "No man who is
acquainted with the change of feeling which occurred in the South
between the 16th of October, 1859, and the 16th of November of the same
year can regard the Harper's Ferry villainy as anything other than one
of the chiefest crimes of our history. It established and
re-established the control of the great radical slaveholders over the
non-slaveholders, the little slaveholders, and the more liberal of the
larger slaveholders, which had already begun to be loosened. It created
anew a solidarity of interest between them all, which was felt by all
with an intensity which overbore every other sentiment. It gave thus to
the great radical slaveholders the willing physical material for the
construction of armies and navies and for the prosecution of war."

CHAPTER XIX

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Every American may be presumed to be familiar with the external facts of
Abraham Lincoln's early life,--the rude cabin, the shiftless father, the
dead mother's place filled by the tender step-mother; the brief
schooling, the hungry reading of the few books by the fire-light; the
hard farm-work, with a turn now of rail-splitting, now of flat-boating;
the country sports and rough good-fellowship; the upward steps as
store-clerk and lawyer. But the interior qualities that made up his
character