New York,
May 2, 1910.
THE VIRGINIA MILITARY INSTITUTE
CHAPTER ONE
Virginia Military Institute. The Flag Raising. Growing War Spirit.
The growing discontent and excitement in 1860 and the early part of 1861 will ever be remembered by those who passed through that period. At and before this time I, then in my teens, was a cadet at the Virginia Military Institute located at Lexington, Virginia.
For some years prior to this, the questions of political difference between the sections of the United States designated as North and South had been discussed in Congress and on the hustings with increasing acrimony and divergence. The two great political parties, Democrat and Whig, had long been contestants for political supremacy, but in 1860 the Republican party, theretofore greatly inferior in numbers and strength to either of the others, elected Abraham Lincoln sixteenth President of the United States. This was attributed to a division in the Democratic party and the nomination of candidates by each of its two factions. This triumph of the Republican party increased anxiety and apprehension in the people of the South as to their institutions and rights.