"True; but do you suppose they could stand for a single week against the popular feeling which war would arouse?"
"Perhaps you are right," he replied, thoughtfully, "but it never occurred to me before."
My other friend also talked with great frankness:
"We can get along very well with the New England Yankees who are permanently settled here. They make the strongest Secessionists we have; but the Kentuckians give us a great deal of trouble. They were born and raised where Slavery is unprofitable. They have strong proclivities toward Abolitionism. The constituents of Rozier and Roselius, who fought us so persistently in the Convention, are nearly all Kentuckians.
Two Chief Causes of Secession.
"Slavery is our leading interest. Right or wrong, we have it and we must have it. Cotton, rice, and sugar cannot be raised without it. Being a necessity, we do not mean to allow its discussion. Every thing which clashes with it, or tends to weaken it, must go under. Our large German population is hostile to it. About all these Dutchmen would be not only Unionists, but Black Republicans, if they dared."
Perhaps it is the invariable law of revolutions that, even while the revolters are in a numerical minority, they are able to carry the majority with them. It is certain that, before Sumter was fired on, a majority in every State, except South Carolina, was opposed to Secession. The constant predictions of the Rebel leaders that there would be no war, and the assertions of prominent New York journals, that any attempt at coercion on the part of the Government would be met with armed and bloody resistance in every northern city and State, were the two chief causes of the apparent unanimity of the South.
The masses had a vague but very earnest belief that the North, in some incomprehensible manner, had done them deadly wrong. Cassio-like, they remembered "a mass of things, but nothing distinctly; a quarrel, but nothing wherefore." The leaders were sometimes more specific.
"The South," said a pungent writer, "has endured a great many wrongs; but the most intolerable of all the grievances ever thrust upon her was the Census Report of 1860!" There was a great deal of truth in this remark. One day I asked my New Orleans friend: