“I do not think the South would fight the North over slavery alone.  The South loves the flag, because she helped create it as much or more than the North.  She will not bear treason to the flag.”  Thus my father.

“It would be no treason,” affirmed Orme, “but duty, if that flag became the flag of oppression.  The Anglo-Saxon has from King John down refused to be governed unjustly and oppressively.”

And so they went on, hour after hour, not bitterly, but hotly, as was the fashion all over the land at that time.  My father remained a Whig, which put him in line, sometimes, with the Northern men then coming into prominence, such as Morrill of New England, and young Sherman from across the mountains, who believed in the tariff in spite of what England might say to us.  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.  It was not these rich and arrogant planters of the South, even, men like our kin in the Carolinas, men like those of the Sheraton family, who were the pillars of the Confederacy, or rather, of the secession idea.  Back of them, enshrouded forever in darkness—­then in mystery, and now in oblivion which cannot be broken—­were certain great figures of the commercial world in this land and in other lands.  These made a victim of our country at that time, even as a few great commercial figures seek to do to-day, and we, poor innocent fools, flew at each other’s throats, and fought, and slew, and laid waste a land, for no real principle and to no gain to ourselves.  Nothing is so easy to deceive, to hoodwink, to blind and betray, as a great and innocent people that in its heart loves justice and fair play.

I fear, however, that while much of this talk was going on upon the galleries at Cowles’ Farms, I myself was busier with the training of my pointer than I was with matters of politics.  I was not displeased when my mother came to me presently that afternoon and suggested that we should all make a visit to Dixiana Farm, to call upon our neighbors, the Sheratons.