Striking Historical Contrasts of professed Virtue and cruel Enforcement.—The American Fetich; its strange, passionate Worship and armed Adoration.—The Freshet of Slavery traced from its small Beginnings.—Mr. Lincoln over its Ridges lands in Washington.—A Striking Announcement, and who it struck.—Of Seward, Cameron, and Chase.—A Naval Joke.—A Wry Fort makes Wry Faces.—An American Nightmare.—Watching with the Sleeper.—Sparing the Rod and getting the Ramrod.—Call for Seventy-five Thousand Ramrods.—Massachusetts Boys and Baltimore Hards.—Busses and Blunderbusses.—Few Office-Seekers, but many Gun-Holders in Washington in April, 1861.—The English Telescope and the Wonders it discovered.—A Dual View.—An Official Talk between two Lords.—A Proclamation to restrain Englishmen.—A Parallel.—War Materials, Forts, etc., generously given away by Loose-handed Custodians.—Twiggs inclined as Tree is bent.—Cotton Curtain before Washington; and a near View of it by General Mansfield.—Colonel Ellsworth.—Butler and Bethel.—Lyons in Missouri.—McClellan moves into Virginia; what he found.—A Wise Man flees when a real Man pursueth.—Bull’s Run and General Run.—A Discovery and Noise over it.—Stonewall Jackson and Praying Soldiers.—Piety and Powder.—A Drill-Ground near Washington.—General Lee’s First Kicks against the Pricks.—Du Pont at Port Royal.—Mason, Slidell, and Vigilant Friends.—John C. Breckenridge a striking Sign-Board.—War in the Mississippi Valley.—Kentucky and her coy Ways.—A Spartan Leonidas and Greek Ulysses.—Christmas Eve, 1861. “Robespierre,” says a terse, sentence-packing essayist, “would slay one half of France to get the other half to follow his principles of virtue.” The cotton rebellion is another illustration of the same horrible tenderness, the same selfish loveliness, the same unsentimental sentimentalism. Like the strange histories of Scylla, of Marius, of Simon de Montfort and his helmed soldiery against the Waldenses, of Alva in the Netherlands, of Philip II., and of Claverhouse, in Scotland, it exhibits a courage, endurance, sacrifices, and heroism which exalt, to compass ends which debase and brutalize human nature. Setting up in the second half of the nineteenth century, and in free, much-reading America, a fetich for worship, brought from Africa, slimy with snakes, foul, cruel, deformed, and misshapen, its singularly enthusiastic votaries, after insisting by books, tracts, primers, by philosophic essay, bound treatise, and unbound poetry, in Congress, conventions, lecture-rooms, prayer-meetings, horse-races, and in all places, seasonable or unseasonable, thirsty or wet, that the fetich, though repudiated by all civilized people, was the true and undoubted patron of government, society, wealth, progress, and human, i. e. white-skinned happiness, at last seized musket and sword to maintain and perpetuate her horrid rites, although this maintenance should overturn and waste all other shrines.