In Annapolis, the capital of a border slave state, the general sentiment was, as might be expected, a blending of North and South; a desire to maintain the Union, but, distinctly superior in motive, sympathy with the Southern view of the case. In all my fairly intimate acquaintance with the small society of the town outside the Academy walls, there was but one family the heads of which were decisively Union--not Northern; and of it two sons fought in the Southern armies. Between this influence and that of my comrades I remained as I had been brought up--the Union first and above all, but with the conviction that the great danger to the Union lay in the abolition propaganda. My father was by upbringing a Virginian; by life-long occupation an officer of the general government, imbued to the marrow with the principles of military loyalty. Having married and continuously lived in the North, he had escaped all taint of the extreme States'-Rights school; but the memories of his youth kept him broadly Southern in feeling, less by local attachment than by affection for friends. More than twenty years after his death, when I was on court-martial duty in Richmond, an old Confederate general, whom I had never seen, sought me out in memory of the ties that had bound both himself and his wife's family to my father. With these clinging sympathies, the abolition agitation was an attack upon his friends, and, still worse, a wanton endangering of the Union. To save me from being carried away by the swelling tide was one of his chief aims. Regarded by themselves, nothing can well be less important than the political opinions of one boy of eighteen to twenty; but few things are more important, if they are those of the mass of his generation, for then they are the echo from many homes. I believe, from what I saw at the Naval Academy, that mine were those of the large majority of the Northern youth, and that the very greatness of the concession which such were ready to make for the sake of the Union should have warned the disunionists that the same love was capable of equally great sacrifices in the other direction. They failed so to understand; chiefly, perhaps, because they could not appreciate the living force of the simple sentiment. Never in their lifetimes, if ever before, had the Union held the first place in the hearts of men of their section; and such love as had been felt was already moribund, overcome by supposed interest and local pride. Thus misled, it was easy to believe that in the North, controlled by considerations of advantage, yielding would follow yielding, even to permitting a disruption of the Union--a miscalculation of forces more fatal even than that of "Cotton is King." But forces will often be miscalculated by those who reckon interest as more powerful than principle or than sentiment.