Mississippi, rising among the hills and lakes of the far North,
flowing through the fertile valleys of the South, was to all our
"Mother Nile." The great Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada chained our
Western border together from Oregon to the Rio Grande. The Cumberland,
the Allegheny, and the Blue Ridge, lifting their heads up from among
the verdant fields of Vermont, stretching southward, until from their
southern summit at "Lookout" could be viewed the borderland of
the gulf. In the sceneries of these mountains, their legends and
traditions, they were to all the people of the Union what Olympus was
to the ancients. Where the Olympus was the haunts, the wooing places
of the gods of the ancient Greeks, the Appalachian was the reveling
grounds for the muses of song and story of the North and South
alike. And while the glories of the virtues of Greece and Rome, the
birthplace of republicanism and liberty, may have slept for centuries,
or died out entirely, that spirit of national liberty and personal
freedom was transplanted to the shores of the New World, and nowhere
was the spirit of freedom more cherished and fostered than in the
bright and sunny lands of the South. The flickering torch of freedom,
borne by those sturdy sons of the old world to the new, nowhere took
such strong and rapid growth as did that planted by the Huguenots on
the soil of South Carolina. Is it any wonder, then, that a people
with such high ideals, such lofty spirits, such love of freedom, would
tamely submit to a Union where such ideals and spirits were so lightly
considered as by those who were now in charge of the government--where
our women and children were to be at the mercies of a brutal race,
with all of their passions aroused for rapine and bloodshed; where we
would be continually threatened or subjected to a racial war, one of
supremacy; where promises were made to be broken, pledges given to be
ignored; where laws made for all were to be binding only on those who
chose to obey? Such were some of the conditions that confronted South