main-top of the ship with a member of the class
immediately before mine, the son of a North Carolina member of
Congress. "Yes," he said to me, "Buchanan [inaugurated four months
before] will be the last President of the United States." He was
entirely unmoved, simply repeating certitudes to which familiarity had
reconciled him; I, to whom such talk was new, as much aghast as though
I had been told my mother would die within the like term. This outlook
was common to them all. The Union still was, and they continued in
it; but to them the warning had sounded, they were ready and
acquiescent in its fall; regretful, but resigned--very much resigned.
This attitude was more marked among the younger men, those at the
school. In the service outside I found somewhat the same point of
view, but repulsion was keener. The navy then, even more than now,
symbolized the exterior activities of the country, which are committed
by the Constitution to the Union. Hence, the life of the profession
naturally nurtured pride in the nation; and while States'-Rights had
undermined the principle of loyalty to the Union, it had been less
successful in destroying love for it. But to most the prospect was
gloomy. That Massachusetts and South Carolina should be put into a pen
together, and left to fight it out, was the solution expressed to me
by a lieutenant who afterwards fell nobly, in command, on a Union deck
in the war; the gallant Joe Smith, concerning whom runs a story that
cannot be too widely known, even though often repeated. When it was
reported to his father that the _Congress_ had surrendered, he said,
simply, "Then Joe's dead." Joe was dead; but it is only fair to the
survivors to say that ninety out of her crew of four hundred were also
dead, the ship aground, helpless, and in flames.

In Annapolis, the capital of a border slave state, the general
sentiment was, as might be expected, a blending of North and South; a
desire to maintain the Union, but, distinctly superior in motive,
sympathy with the Southern view of the case. In all my fairly intimate
acquaintance with the small society of the town outside the Academy
walls, there was but one family the heads of which were decisively
Union--not Northern; and of it two sons fought in the Southern armies.
Between this influence and that of my comrades I remained as I had
been brought up--the Union first and above all, but with the
conviction that the great danger to the Union lay in the