"We were not the first to break the peace That blessed our happy land; We loved the quiet calm and ease, Too well to raise a hand, Till fierce oppression stronger grew, And bitter were your sneers. Then to our land we must be true, Or show a coward's fears! We loved our banner while it waved An emblem of our Union. The fiercest dangers we had braved To guard that sweet communion. But when it proved that 'stripes' alone Were for our Sunny South, And all the 'stars' in triumph shone Above the chilly North, Then, not till then, our voices rose In one tumultuous wave: 'We will the tyranny oppose, Or find a bloody grave.'" It was Southern devotion to the Union which led so many men of Kentucky and Tennessee into the Federal army. It was the same traditional love for the Union of the fathers that held back Virginia and the other border States from secession too long. It led them to make the mistake of the crisis. The writer, like nearly all the Southern men of his ultra Unionism, at the time thought South Carolina made the mistake of too much haste in her secession. He does not think so now. He has not thought so since calmly and thoroughly studying the history of those times. The new party in the North was in a triumphant majority and was determined to deprive the minority States of the South of their share in the government. Delay on the part of Southern border States did no good. It did harm. It misled the Northern people as to the true feeling in Virginia and the other border States. Had they all seceded on the same day with South Carolina there would have been no war. Now that the Northern people, through the broad, patriotic administrations of Cleveland, McKinley and Roosevelt, have restored the Union, and Florida is again a coequal State with New York, and Texans once more fellow-citizens with Pennsylvanians, what section shows more loyalty to the Union and the common country than the South? Our patriot mothers and grandmothers of 1860 loved the Union. Those who yet survive, and their children, love the Union in 1905. No State is under the ban now. The captured battle flags of Confederate States have been restored to the States by a Republican Congress. The Federal government volunteers to take care of Confederate soldiers' graves. President, and Congress and Army and Navy follow General Wheeler's coffin to an honored grave. A Republican President publicly avows his attachment to Confederate veterans and shows his faith by his appointments. Thank God, our Union to-day is again _the_ Union of equal States. THE NORTHERN STATES SECEDE FROM THE UNION [By J. L. Underwood.]