thereby be weakened or broken up. It sometimes seems to be held that
when a decided majority of the people whose voices can be heard, in a
more or less defined area, elect to live for the future under a
particular government, all enlightened men elsewhere would wish them to
have their way. If any such principle could be accepted without
qualification, few movements for independence would ever have been more
completely justified than the secession of the Southern States. If we
set aside the highland region of which mention has already been made, in
the six cotton-growing States which first seceded, and in several of
those which followed as soon as it was clear that secession would be
resisted, the preponderance of opinion in favour of the movement was
overwhelming. This was not only so among the educated and governing
portions of society, which were interested in slavery. While the negroes
themselves were unorganised and dumb and made no stir for freedom, the
poorer class of white people, to whom the institution of slavery was in
reality oppressive, were quite unconscious of this; the enslavement of
the negro appeared to them a tribute to their own dignity, and their
indiscriminating spirit of independence responded enthusiastically to the
appeal that they should assert themselves against the real or fancied
pretensions of the North. So large a statement would require some
qualification if we were here concerned with the life of a Southern
leader; and there was of course a brief space, to be dealt with in this
chapter, in which the question of secession hung in the balance, and it
is true in this, as in every case, that the men who gave the initial push
were few. But, broadly speaking, it is certain that the movement for
secession was begun with at least as general an enthusiasm and maintained
with at least as loyal a devotion as any national movement with which it
can be compared. And yet to-day, just fifty-one years after the
consummation of its failure, it may be doubted whether one soul among the
people concerned regrets that it failed.

English people from that time to this have found the statement
incredible; but the fact is that this imposing movement, in which rich
and poor, gentle and simple, astute men of state and pious clergymen,
went hand in hand to the verge of ruin and beyond, was undertaken simply
and solely in behalf of slavery. Northern writers of the time found it
so surprising that they took