With his friends and acquaintances, Handerson joined a company of
"homeguards" consisting mostly of planters and their sons, formed
for the purpose of maintaining "order among the negroes and other
suspicious characters of the vicinity."

Many years afterward Dr. Handerson wrote, in a narrative for his
family, concerning this period of his life: "Without any disposition
to violent partisanship, I had favored the party of which the
standard-bearers were Bell and Everett and the battle cry 'The
Constitution and the Union,' and I had grieved sincerely over the
defeat by the Radicals of the North, aided by the 'fire-eaters' of
the South."

And again: "Born and educated in the North, I did not share in
any degree the fears of the Southerners over the election to the
Presidency of Mr. Lincoln. I could not but think the action of the
seceding States unwise and dangerous to their future prosperity. On
the other hand, this action had already been taken, and without any
prospect of its revocation. Indeed, in the present frame of mind of
the North, any steps toward recession seemed likely to precipitate
the very evils which the secession of the states had been designed
to anticipate. I believed slavery a disadvantage to the South, but
no sin, and, in any event, an institution for which the Southerners
of the present day were not responsible. An inheritance from their
fore-fathers, properly administered, it was by no means an unmitigated
evil, and it was one, moreover, in which the North but a few years
before had shared. All my interests, present and future, apparently
lay in the South and with Southerners, and if the seceding States, in
one of which I resided, chose deliberately to try the experiment of
self-government, I felt quite willing to give them such aid as lay