kind of dazed stupor, laid himself down to die. With Richmond in flames and
the exultant shouts of the detested yet victorious Yankees in his ears, he
did die.

Wigfall survived but a few years. He was less a dreamer than Yancey. A man
big of brain and warm of heart he had gone from the ironclad provincialism
of South Carolina to the windswept vagaries of Texas. He believed wholly
the Yancey confession of faith; that secession was a constitutional right;
that African slavery was ordained of God; that the South was paramount,
the North inferior. Yet in worldly knowledge he had learned more than
Yancey--was an abler man than Jefferson Davis--and but for his affections
and generous habits he would have made a larger figure in the war, having
led the South's exit from the Senate.



VI


I do not think that either Hammond or Chestnut, the Senators from
South Carolina, both men of parts, had at bottom much belief in the
practicability of the Confederate movement. Neither had the Senators from
Arkansas and Alabama, nor Brown, of Mississippi, the colleague of Jefferson
Davis. Mason, of Virginia, a dogged old donkey, and Iverson, of Georgia,
another, were the kind of men whom Wigfall dominated.

One of the least confident of those who looked on and afterward fell in
line was the Vice President, John C. Breckenridge, of Kentucky. He was the
Beau Sabreur among statesmen as Albert Sidney Johnston, among soldiers.
Never man handsomer in person or more winning in manners. Sprung from a