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twenty years after my first discussion of it, and on going through the original materials again, I have been more firmly convinced than before of the unanimity of the Confederate States after the President’s call for troops. The citations from William H. Russell’s letters to the London Times and from his Diary, which I gave in my third volume, furnish an authoritative corroboration of the other evidence. This intelligent and fair-minded man, who sympathized with the North because he hated slavery and was convinced that the invocation of State-rights was for “protection to slavery, extension of slave territory and free-trade in slave produce with the outer world,” made a journey through the Southern States between April 14 and June 19, 1861, and became convinced that the people of the Confederacy were united. Summing up the results of his tour, he wrote: “I met everywhere with but one feeling, with exceptions which proved its unanimity and force. To a man the people went with their States, and had but one battle-cry, ‘States’-rights and death to those who make war against them!” 33 In spite of his supercilious criticism, Russell wished the North to win because he foresaw in her victory the destruction of slavery. But he did not believe that she could triumph. In April, while in Charleston, he wrote, “I am more satisfied than ever that the Union can never be restored as it was, and that it has gone to pieces, never to be put together again in the old shape, at all events, by any power on earth.” In New Orleans, on May 31, he set down in his Diary, “Now that the separation has come, there is not, in the Constitution, or out of it, power to cement the broken fragments together.” On the steamer on the Mississippi which brought him from a Confederate camp to Cairo, he met an Englishman who was steward of

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