They are not all Puritans in New England. Catch a Yankee off his base,
quite away from home, and he can be as gay as anybody. Boston and
Charleston were in high party times nearest alike of any two American
cities.

Douglas was a Green Mountain boy. He was born in Vermont. As Seargent
Prentiss had done he migrated beyond the Alleghanies before he came of age,
settling in Illinois as Prentiss had settled in Mississippi, to grow into a
typical Westerner as Prentiss into a typical Southerner.

There was never a more absurd theory than that, begot of sectional aims and
the sectional spirit, which proposed a geographic alignment of Cavalier and
Puritan. When sectionalism had brought a kindred people to blows over
the institution of African slavery there were Puritans who fought on the
Southern side and Cavaliers who fought on the Northern side. What was
Stonewall Jackson but a Puritan? What were Custer, Stoneman and Kearny but
Cavaliers? Wadsworth was as absolute an aristocrat as Hampton.

In the old days before the war of sections the South was full of typical
Southerners of Northern birth. John A. Quitman, who went from New York,
and Robert J. Walker, who went from Pennsylvania to Mississippi; James
H. Hammond, whose father, a teacher, went from Massachusetts to South
Carolina. John Slidell, born and bred in New York, was thirty years old
when he went to Louisiana. Albert Sidney Johnston, the rose and expectancy
of the young Confederacy--the most typical of rebel soldiers--had not a
drop of Southern blood in his veins, born in Kentucky a few months after
his father and mother had arrived there from Connecticut. The list might be
extended indefinitely.

Climate, which has something to do with temperament, has not so much to