Thus the issue was made up. Eleven states, namely, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee and Florida, had formally seceded. Kentucky had absurdly and futilely declared an impossible neutrality, Missouri had entered upon a program of civil war within her own borders. Maryland adhered to the Union but sent the flower of her young manhood into the rival camps with an almost equal hand. Delaware, though nominally a slave state, was so situated as to be out of the reckoning of secession. The rest of the states adhered to the Union and were prepared to support its cause with unnumbered men and unstinted means. It is true nevertheless that in most of the Northern States there was a strongly hostile and pro-Southern sentiment that must be reckoned with, and in New York and some other states the reckoning was a difficult one, but in no state did that sentiment at any time during the war so far secure control of affairs as to produce disastrous results to the Federal arms or cause. Yet how dangerously and threateningly strong that sentiment was, is easily illustrated by statistics. In the presidential election of November, 1864, after the war had been in active and very bloody progress for more than three years and a half, and after the power of the Confederates to resist had been enormously reduced by battle, by blockade and by the wearing lapse of time, there was a comparatively narrow majority of votes cast in the Northern States in behalf of the Union cause. McClellan was the Democratic candidate for president. He was running upon a platform the dominant note of which was a declaration that the war for the restoration of the Union had proved itself a failure and should be brought to an end. This could mean only that the United States Government should recognize the Confederate Government as a separate, independent and equal power, and make peace with it on such terms as could be secured. There is no other construction possible that would be accepted anywhere outside the pages of _Alice in Wonderland_. It was a distinct and definite proposal that the United States Government should give up all its contentions, withdraw its armies from the South, raise its blockade, admit that its efforts had failed, recognize the independent sovereignty of the Confederate States, and make the best peace it could with that Republic as a conquering power. Yet so strong was the anti-war sentiment at the North that, with only the people of the Northern States voting, the Democratic candidate received no less than 1,808,795 votes against 2,216,067 for his adversary. In other words the proposal to abandon the struggle, recognize Confederate independence and acknowledge the United States beaten after three and a half years of strenuous, costly and very bloody war, was defeated by only 407,349 votes in the Northern States, in a total vote in those states of no less than 4,024,865.