My ride with Major Fairbairn made me unsettled. Or else it was
my seeing Mr. Thorold at his drill. A certain impatience
seized me; an impatience of the circumstances and position in
which I found myself privately, and of the ominous state and
position of affairs in public. The horizon black with clouds,
the grumble of the storm, and yet the portentous waiting and
quiet which go before the storm's burst. It irked me to see
Mr. Thorold as I had seen him yesterday; knowing ourselves
united, but standing apart as if it were not so, and telling a
lie to the world. It weighed on me, and I half felt that
Christian was right and that anything openly acknowledged was
easier to bear. And then Major Fairbairn's talk had filled me
with fears. He represented things as being so very
threatening, and the outbreak of the storm as being so very
near; I could not regain the tranquillity of the days past, do
what I would. I did a very unwise thing, I suppose, for I went
to reading the papers. And they were full of Northern
preparations and of Southern boastings; I grew more and more
unsettled as I read. Among other things, I remember, was a
letter from Russell, the Times correspondent, over which my
heart beat wearily. For Mr. Russell, I thought, being an
Englishman, and not a party to our national quarrel, might be
expected to judge more coolly and speak more dispassionately
than our own writers, either South or North. And the speeches
he reported as heard from Southern gentlemen, and the feelings
he observed to be common among them, were most adverse to any
faint hope of mine that the war might soon end, or end
advantageously for the North, or when it ended, leave my
father and mother kindly disposed for my happiness. All the
while I read, a slow knell seemed to be sounding at my heart.
"We could have got on with those fanatics if they had been
either Christians or gentlemen" - "there are neither
Christians nor gentlemen among them." "Nothing on earth shall
ever induce us to submit to any union with the brutal, bigoted
blackguards of the New England States, who neither comprehend
nor regard the feelings of gentlemen." That was like what
Preston said. I recognised the tone well. And when it was
added, "Man, woman, and child, we'll die first" - I thought it
was probably true. What chance then for Christian and me?
"There is nothing in all the dark caves of human passion," Mr.
Russell wrote, "so cruel and deadly as the hatred the South
Carolinians profess for the Yankees." The end of the letter
contained a little comfort in the intimation of more moderate
counsels just then taking favour; but I went back to my father
and mother, and aunt, and Preston, and others; and comfort
found no lodgment with me. Then there was an extract from a
Southern paper, calling Yankees "the most contemptible and
detestable of God's creation" - speaking of their "mean,
niggardly lives - their low, vulgar and sordid occupations" -
and I thought, How can peace be? or what will it be when it
comes?