Thus the strain of the situation was somewhat relieved by the interposition of the Federal authority between clashing elements, but by no means as much as was required to produce a feeling of security. The labor puzzle, aggravated by race antagonism, was indeed the main distressing influence, but not the only one. 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 to save 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. Such sentiments of the "unconquered" found excited and exciting expression in the Southern press, and were largely entertained by many Southern clergymen of different denominations and still more ardently by Southern women. General Thomas Kilby Smith, commanding the southern districts of Alabama, reported to me that when he suggested to Bishop Wilmer, of the Episcopal diocese of Alabama, the propriety of restoring to the Litany that prayer which includes the President of the United States, the whole of which he had ordered his rectors to expurge, the bishop refused, first, upon the ground that he could not pray for a continuance of martial law, and, secondly, because he would, by ordering the restoration of the prayer, stultify himself in the event of Alabama and the Southern Confederacy regaining independence. _Pickles and Patriotism_