"This day is the culmination of long years of bitterness, of suffering and of struggle. We are performing a great deed, which holds in its magic not only the stirring present, it embraces the ages yet to come. I am content with what has been done to-day. I shall be content with it to-morrow. We have lowered the body of the old Union to its last resting place. We drop the flag over its grave."
When the vote was announced, without a single dissenting voice, the crowd rose to their feet with a shout of applause which shook the building to its foundations. It died away at last only to rise again with redoubled fury.
Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and Florida had followed in rapid succession, Louisiana's Convention was to meet on the twenty-sixth, Texas on February first. On this the twenty-first day of January the Senators from Florida, Mississippi and Alabama had announced their farewell addresses to the Old Union.
The girl's eyes swept the crowded tiers of the galleries packed with beautifully gowned Southern women. Every glove, fan, handkerchief, bonnet or dress--every dainty stocking and filmy piece of lingerie had been imported direct from the fashion centers of Europe. Gowns of priceless lace and velvets had been woven to order in the looms of Genoa, Venice and Brussels.
And yet not one of her representatives held his office in Washington because of his money. Her ruling classes were without exception an aristocracy of brains--yet they were distinctly an aristocracy.
The election of Abraham Lincoln was more than a threat to confiscate three thousand millions of dollars which the South had invested in slaves. The homely rail splitter from the West was the prophecy of a new social order which threatened the foundations of the modern world. He himself was all unconscious of this fact. And yet this big reality was the secret of the electric tension which strangled men into silence and threw over the scene the sense of ominous foreboding.
The debates in Congress during the tempestuous session had been utterly insincere and without meaning. The real leaders knew that the time for discussion had passed. Two absolutely irreconcilable moral principles had clashed and the Republic was squarely and hopelessly broken into two vast sectional divisions on the issue.