CLEMENT C. CLAY, JR.
United States Senator, 1853–61

“Born and educated as we are at the North, sensible men at the South cannot wonder at the views we entertain, nor do sensible men at the North think it strange that, born and educated as the Southerner is, he should feel very differently from the Northerner in some things; but why should not all these difficulties sink before our common love for our common country?”

Why, indeed! Yet the cry of “disunion” had been heard for forty years[[19]] and still our Southern men had forborne, until the party belligerents, whose encroachments had now, at last, become unbearable, had begun to look upon our protests as it were a mere cry of “wolf.” Of those crucial times, and of that dramatic scene in the United States Senate, no Southern pen has written in permanent words; and such Northern historians as Messrs. Nicolay and Hay elide, as if their purpose were to obscure, the deliberate and public withdrawal of those representatives, our martyrs to their convictions, their institutions and their children’s heritages; and would so bury them under the sweeping charges of “conspiracy” and “treason” that the casual reader of the future is not likely to realise with what candour to their opponents, with what dignity to themselves, out of what loyalty to their States, and yet again with what grief for the nation and sacrifice of life-time associations, the various seceding Senators went out at last from that august body!

For months the struggle of decades had been swiftly approximating to its bloody culmination. Our physical prosperity, no less than the social security we enjoyed, had caused us to become objects of envy to the rough elements in the new settlements, especially of the Northwest.[[20]] So inimical was the North to us that though the South was the treasury of the nation; though she had contributed from her territory the very land upon which the Federal City was built; though her sons ranked among the most brilliant of whom the young Republic could boast—it was impossible for the South to get an appropriation of even a few hundred thousand dollars, to provide for the building of a lighthouse on that most dangerous portion of the Atlantic coast, the shore of North Carolina!

An era of discovery and expansion preceded the outbreak of the war. By means of costly embassies to the Eastern countries, new avenues of commerce had been opened. The acquisition of Cuba and of the Mexican States became an ambition on the part of Mr. Buchanan, who was anxious to repeat during his Administration the successes of his predecessors, Presidents Fillmore and Pierce. So long ago as ’5, the question of the purchase of the island of St. Thomas from the Danish Government was a subject that called for earnest diplomacy on the part of Mr. Raasloff, the Danish Minister; and the gold fever which made Northern adventurers mad carried many to rifle the distant Pacific coast of its treasures. By this time the cotton gin had demonstrated its great worth, and the greed of acquisition saw in our cotton fields a new source of envy, for we had no need to dig or to delve—we shook our cotton plants and golden dollars dropped from them. Had the gathering of riches been our object in life, men of the South had it in their power to have rivalled the wealth of the fabled Midas; but, as was early observed by a statesman who never was partisan, the “Southern statesmen went for the honours and the Northern for the benefits.” In consequence, wrote Mr. Benton (1839), “the North has become rich upon the benefits of the Government; the South has grown lean upon its honours.”

From the hour of this exodus of Senators from the official body, all Washington seemed to change. Imagination can scarcely conjure up an atmosphere at once so ominous and so sad. Each step preparatory to our departure was a pang. Carriages and messengers dashed through the streets excitedly. Farewells were to be spoken, and many, we knew, would be final. Vehicles lumbered on their way to wharf or station filled with the baggage of departing Senators and Members. The brows of hotel-keepers darkened with misgivings, for the disappearance from the Federal City of the families of Congressional representatives from the fifteen slave-holding States made a terrible thinning out of its population; and, in the strange persons of the politicians, already beginning to press into the capital, there was little indication that these might prove satisfactory substitutes for us who were withdrawing.

“How shall I commence my letter to you?” wrote the wife of Colonel Philip Phillips to me a month or two after we had left Washington. “What can I tell you, but of despair, of broken hearts, of ruined fortunes, the sobs of women, and sighs of men!... I am still in this horrible city ... but, distracted as I am at the idea of being forced to remain, we feel the hard necessity of keeping quiet.... For days I saw nothing but despairing women leaving [Washington] suddenly, their husbands having resigned and sacrificed their all for their beloved States. You would not know this God-forsaken city, our beautiful capital, with all its artistic wealth, desecrated, disgraced with Lincoln’s low soldiery. The respectable part [of the soldiers] view it also in the same spirit, for one of the Seventh Regiment told me that never in his life had he seen such ruin going on as is now enacted in the halls of our once honoured Capitol! I cannot but think that the presentiment that the South would wish to keep Washington must have induced this desecration of all that should have been respected by the mob in power.... The Gwins are the only ones left of our intimates, and Mrs. G—— is packed up ready to leave. Poor thing! her eyes are never without tears.... There are 30,000 troops here. Think of it! They go about the avenue insulting women and taking property without paying for it.... Such are the men waged to subjugate us of the South.... We hear constantly from Montgomery. Everything betokens a deep, abiding faith in the cause.

“I was told that those giant intellects, the Blairs, who are acting under the idea of being second Jacksons, wishing to get a good officer to do some of their dirty work (destroying public property), wished Colonel Lee sent for. ‘Why, he has resigned!’ ‘Then tell Magruder!’ ‘He has resigned, too.’ ‘General Joe Johnston, then!’—‘He, too, has gone out!’ ‘Smith Lee?’ Ditto!

“‘Good God!’ said Blair. ‘Have all our good officers left us?’