Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/232

 civilization of free society on the one side, and of master-and-slave society on the other, by their long and bitter disputes over the slavery question, and, finally, by the four years of a civil war, in which the two contending parties were divided, not only by diverging sentiments and interests but by a geographical line, the estrangement between the peoples of the North and of the South had become so deep, that the attack upon Southern territory by the Northern armies had been resented by a large part of the Southern whites, almost as a foreign invasion, and the occupation of the South by Northern forces almost like a foreign conquest. Many of the older men, with whom the Union-sentiment which prevailed throughout the country before the slavery dispute became acute and critical, and was in a large sense traditional, found something congenial and sympathetic in the thought of a restored union, and therefore submitted to the result of the war in this aspect with comparatively good grace. But to the younger Southerners, who had grown up in the heated atmosphere of the political feud about slavery, to whom the threat of disunion as a means of saving slavery had been like a household word, and who had always regarded the bond of Union as a shackle to be cast off, the thought of being “reunited” to “the enemy,” the hated Yankee, was distasteful in the extreme. I speak here not of the “poor whites,” who, aside from their animosity against the negro, had no distinct feelings or aspirations of any kind, but suffered developments to pass by them with stolid indifference; but I speak of young Southerners of the educated or semi-educated class whose talk one heard on the streets, in the hotels, and on public conveyances.

They smarted keenly under the sense of defeat. But they would let it be understood that their spirit was unbroken. It was a current phrase among them that the South was indeed