The
South loves the flag, because she helped create it as much or more than
the North. She will not bear treason to the flag." Thus my father.
"It would be no treason," affirmed Orme, "but duty, if that flag became
the flag of oppression. The Anglo-Saxon has from King John down refused
to be governed unjustly and oppressively."
And so they went on, hour after hour, not bitterly, but hotly, as was
the fashion all over the land at that time. My father remained a Whig,
which put him in line, sometimes, with the Northern men then coming into
prominence, such as Morrill of New England, and young Sherman from
across the mountains, who believed in the tariff in spite of what
England might say to us. This set him against the Jefferson clans of our
state, who feared not a war with the North so much as one with Europe.
Already England was pronouncing her course; yet those were not days of
triumphant conclusions, but of doubtful weighing and hard judgment, as
we in old Virginia could have told you, who saw neighbors set against
each other, and even families divided among themselves.
For six years the war talk had been growing stronger. Those of the South
recoiled from the word treason--it had a hateful sound to them--nor have
they to this day justified its application to themselves.
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