clergy and other professional men who constituted what in some countries is called the intellectual class.  These influences resulted in a rare uniformity of opinion that slavery was right and all attacks on it were monstrous, that the Southern States were free to secede and form, if they chose, a new Confederacy, and that they ought to do this if the moment should arrive when they could not otherwise safeguard their interests.  Doubtless there were leading men who had thought over the matter in advance of the rest and taken counsel together long before, but the fact seems to be that such leaders now found their followers in advance of them.  Jefferson Davis, by far the most commanding man among them, now found himself—­certainly it served him right—­anxiously counselling delay, and spending nights in prayer before he made his farewell speech to the Senate in words of greater dignity and good feeling than seem to comport with the fanatical narrowness of his view and the progressive warping of his determined character to which it condemned him.  Whatever fundamental loyalty to the Union existed in any man’s heart there were months of debate in which it found no organised and hardly any audible expression.  The most notable stand against actual secession was that which was made in Georgia by Stephens; he was determined and outspoken, but he proceeded wholly upon the ground that secession was premature.  And this instance is significant of something further.  It has been said that discussion and voting were not free, and it would be altogether unlikely that their freedom should in no cases be infringed, but there is no evidence that this charge was widely true.  It is surely significant of the general temper of the South, and most honourable to it, that Stephens, who thus struggled against secession at that moment, was chosen Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy.

By February 4, 1861, the States of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana had followed South Carolina by passing Ordinances of Secession, and on that date representatives of these States met at Montgomery in Alabama to found a new Confederacy.  Texas, where considerable resistance was offered by Governor Houston, the adventurous leader under whom that State had separated from Mexico, was in process of passing the like Ordinance.  Virginia and North Carolina, which lie north of the region where cotton prevails, and with them their western neighbour Tennessee, and Arkansas, yet further west and separated from Tennessee by the Mississippi River, did not secede till after Lincoln’s inauguration and the outbreak of war.  But the position of Virginia (except for its western districts) admitted of very little doubt, and that of Tennessee and North Carolina was known to be much the same.  Virginia took a historic pride in the Union, and its interest in slavery was not quite the same as that of the cotton States, yet its strongest social ties were to the South.  This State was