Effectively, the South had lost this love of the Union. In this respect the two sections, I fancy, had parted company, unwittingly, soon after the War of 1812; through which, as we all well know, in many quarters sectional feeling had still prevailed over national. The North had since moved towards national consciousness, the South towards sectional, on paths steadily and rapidly diverging. As I recall those days, when I first awoke to political observation, I should say that the feeling of my Southern associates towards the Union was that which men have towards a friend lately buried. Affection had not wholly disappeared; but life called. Let the dead bury their dead. I remember on my first practice cruise, in 1857, standing in the main-top of the ship with a member of the class immediately before mine, the son of a North Carolina member of Congress. "Yes," he said to me, "Buchanan [inaugurated four months before] will be the last President of the United States." He was entirely unmoved, simply repeating certitudes to which familiarity had reconciled him; I, to whom such talk was new, as much aghast as though I had been told my mother would die within the like term. This outlook was common to them all. The Union still was, and they continued in it; but to them the warning had sounded, they were ready and acquiescent in its fall; regretful, but resigned--very much resigned. This attitude was more marked among the younger men, those at the school. In the service outside I found somewhat the same point of view, but repulsion was keener. The navy then, even more than now, symbolized the exterior activities of the country, which are committed by the Constitution to the Union. Hence, the life of the profession naturally nurtured pride in the nation; and while States'-Rights had undermined the principle of loyalty to the Union, it had been less successful in destroying love for it. But to most the prospect was gloomy. That Massachusetts and South Carolina should be put into a pen together, and left to fight it out, was the solution expressed to me by a lieutenant who afterwards fell nobly, in command, on a Union deck in the war; the gallant Joe Smith, concerning whom runs a story that cannot be too widely known, even though often repeated. When it was reported to his father that the _Congress_ had surrendered, he said, simply, "Then Joe's dead." Joe was dead; but it is only fair to the survivors to say that ninety out of her crew of four hundred were also dead, the ship aground, helpless, and in flames.