What struck me most, however, in the conversation of all these gentlemen was the utter scorn with which they treated any professions of principle. “A first foreign mission would give McPherson new ideas of his duty as clerk.” “Don’t tell me Southern members won’t get in if Johnson decides that he wants them in. Things have changed mightily if he can’t buy up enough Congressmen to carry his ends.” “It’s as sure as fate, that the Democratic party will carry the next Presidential election. You say it died, in the late New York struggle, for want of principles? Nonsense. It can soon get together all the principles it wants to win on. Remember its old stagers have been hungry eight years, while the Black Republicans have been feeding at the public crib?” Their old prejudices against Northern public men seemed unchanged by the war. Sumner they spoke of with loathing. Chandler was a beast and a blackguard in a breath. Seward had the ability but not the courage to be a first-class devil.[58] Chase was the greatest of Yankee public men, and had subjugated the South by keeping up the Yankee finances, but, d——n him, he would some day get his reward, for taking a side he knew to be wrong, in order to gratify his ambition. Yet in the midst of all this talk, that called up so vividly the Southern politician of five years ago, there was one notable change. You could talk abolition as safely in that Mississippi country-tavern as in Faneuil Hall. Since entering the cotton States I had not seen, on the whole trip, an indication of the slightest desire to interfere with free speech. Off the lines of travel, in remote quarters where neither railroads nor good wagon-roads penetrate, I heard that the case was different; but in all the out-of-the-way places I reached, I felt just as safe as in Washington and just as free to express my opinions.