There were two other marked differences between the sections. The first was the greater concentration of interest in the South on national politics, and the leadership conceded to the political class. In the North, the general occupation in laborious and gainful pursuits, and the wide variety of social interests which competed for attention,--education, reform, the debating society, the town-meeting,--all acted to hold men in other fields than those of national politics. The best brains were invited by commerce, the factory, the railroad, the college, the laboratory, the newspaper,--as well as by the Capitol. But to the Southern planter and his social compeer no pursuit compared in attraction with the political field, and above all the public life of the nation. The mass of the people, especially in the country districts, found in the political meeting an interest whose only rival was the camp-meeting. Besides, when the burning political question was slavery, it came home to the business and bosoms of the South, while to the North it was remote. And thus, when the secession movement broke upon the land, the Southern people grasped it with a concentration, energy, and response to their habitual leaders, in strongest contrast to the surprise, hesitation, and division, which at first characterized the North. And, as the last distinction to be here noted, one section was far more habituated than the other to methods of physical force in private and public affairs. It was an instance of this that the duel was in common practice at the South up to the Civil War, while at the North it had disappeared sixty years earlier, after the encounter of Burr and Hamilton. At the South the street affray was common. There is a picture of Southern life which ought to have a wide reading, in _Kate Beaumont_, a story of South Carolina, written by J. W. De Forest, a Northerner and a Union soldier. Its tone is sympathetic, and neither the negro nor the sectional question plays a part. It portrays admirable and delightful people; old Judge Kershaw is indeed "the white rose of South Carolina chivalry," and the Beaumonts and McAllisters, with all their foibles, are a strong and lovable group. But the pistol is the ready arbiter of every quarrel; the duelist's code is so established that it can hardly be ignored even by one who disapproves it; and the high-toned gentleman is no whit too high for the street encounter with his opponent. Old-time Southerners know how faithful is that picture. So, too, the Southern people turned readily to public war. They supplied the pioneers who colonized Texas and won by arms its independence of Mexico. They not only supported the Mexican war by their votes, but many of the flower of their youth enlisted for it. From their young men were recruited the "filibusters" who, from time to time, tried to revolutionize or annex Cuba or some Central American State. The soldier figured largely in the Southern imagination.