very soon have been back again seeking
readmission to the Union.

Man proposes and God disposes. The ways of Deity to man are indeed past
finding out. Why, the long and dreadful struggle of a kindred people,
the awful bloodshed and havoc of four weary years, leaving us at the
close measurably where we were at the beginning, is one of the mysteries
which should prove to us that there is a world hereafter, since no great
creative principle could produce one with so dire, with so short a span
and nothing beyond.

III

The change of parties wrought by the presidential election of 1860
and completed by the coming in of the Republicans in 1861 was indeed
revolutionary. When Mr. Lincoln had finished his inaugural address and
the crowd on the east portico began to disperse, I reentered the
rotunda between Mr. Reverdy Johnson, of Maryland, and Mr. John Bell, of
Tennessee, two old friends of my family, and for a little we sat upon a
bench, they discussing the speech we had just heard.

Both were sure there would be no war. All would be well, they thought,
each speaking kindly of Mr. Lincoln. They were among the most eminent
men of the time, I a boy of twenty-one; but to me war seemed a
certainty. Recalling the episode, I have often realized how the
intuitions of youth outwit the wisdom and baffle the experience of age.

I at once resigned my snug sinecure in the Interior Department and,
closing my accounts of every sort, was presently ready to turn my back
upon Washington and seek adventures elsewhere.

They met me halfway and came in plenty. I tried staff duty with General
Polk, who was making an expedition into Western Kentucky. In a few
weeks illness drove me into Nashville, where I passed the next winter in
desultory newspaper work. Then Nashville fell, and, as I was making my
way out of town afoot and trudging the Murfreesboro pike, Forrest, with
his squadron just escaped from Fort Donelson, came thundering by, and
I leaped into an empty saddle. A few days later Forrest, promoted to
brigadier general, attached me to his staff, and the next six months it
was mainly guerilla service, very much to my liking. But Fate, if not
Nature, had decided that I was a better writer than fighter, and the
Bank of Tennessee having bought a newspaper outfit at Chattanooga, I was
sent there to edit The Rebel--my own naming--established as the organ of
the Tennessee state government. I made it the organ of the army.

It is not the