This set him against the Jefferson clans of our state, who feared not a war with the North so much as one with Europe.
Already England was pronouncing her course; yet those were not days of triumphant conclusions, but of doubtful weighing and hard judgment, as we in old Virginia could have told you, who saw neighbors set against each other, and even families divided among themselves.
For six years the war talk had been growing stronger.

Those of the South recoiled from the word treason--it had a hateful sound to them--nor have they to this day justified its application to themselves.

I myself believe to-day that that war was much one of geography and of lack of transportation.

Not all the common folk of the North or of the South then knew that it was never so much a war of principle, as they were taught to think, but rather a war of self-interest between two clashing commercial parties.

We did not know that the unscrupulous kings of the cotton world, here and abroad, were making deliberate propaganda of secession all over the South; that secession was not a thing voluntary and spontaneous, but an idea nourished to wrong growth by a secret and shrewd commercial campaign, whose nature and extent few dreamed, either then or afterward.