rary, as in
the universities of the Middle Ages, groups were formed in accordance
with nativity; and sectional lines, though effaced at certain points,
were strengthened at others. There may have been a certain broadening of
view; there was no weakening of the home ties. West Point made fewer
converts to this side and to that than did the Northern wives of
Southern husbands, the Southern wives of Northern husbands.

All this is doubtless controvertible, and what has been written may
serve only to amuse or to disgust those who are better versed in the
facts of our history and keener analysts of its laws. All that I vouch
for is the feeling; the only point that I have tried to make is the
simple fact that, right or wrong, we were fully persuaded in our own
minds, and that there was no lurking suspicion of any moral weakness in
our cause. Nothing could be holier than the cause, nothing more
imperative than the duty of upholding it. There were those in the South
who, when they saw the issue of the war, gave up their faith in God, but
not their faith in the cause.

It is perfectly possible to be fully persuaded in one's own mind without
the passionate desire to make converts that animates the born preacher,
and any one may be excused from preaching when he recognizes the
existence of a mental or moral color-blindness with which it is not
worth while to argue. There is no umpire to decide which of the
disputants is color-blind, and the discussion is apt to degenerate into
a wearisome reiteration of points which neither party will concede. Now
this matter of allegiance is just such a question. Open the October
number of The Atlantic and read the sketch of General Thomas, whom many
military men on the Southern side consider to have been the ablest of
all the Federal generals. He was, as every one knows, a Virginian, and
it seemed to us that his being a Virginian was remembered against him in
the Federal councils. "His severance," says the writer in The Atlantic,
"from family and State was a keen trial, but 'his duty was clear from
the beginning.' To his vision there was but one country,--the United
States of America. He had few or no friends at the North. Its political
policy had not seemed to him to be wise. But he could serve under no
flag except that which he had pledged his honor to uphold." Passing over
the quiet assumption that the North was the United States of America,
which sufficiently characterizes the view of the w