The Charleston _Mercury_ proclaimed: “This is War.” New York bankers and merchants realized that they must, then, assume the chief burden of furnishing men, munitions, and money. RoBards’ heart sank within him. The great war had found him fifty-five years old. He would never get to a war, never fight for his country. But Patty’s heart leaped like a doe startled from a covert. It leaped with a cry: “My boy is in the first regiment that will go!” CHAPTER XLV The forty million Africans who had been raped from the Dark Continent and distributed among the Christian nations at so much per head, had made little active resistance to being swallowed, but had proved hard to digest. The missionary movements just begun had made little progress in Africa and some thought it an advantage to bring the Africans to the country where they could have the benefits of training in the true religion. But this training had a little too much to do with an education in the arts of bloodhounds, in the vigor of overseers’ whips and in the dramatic experiences of the auction block. This transplanted race threw off such myriads of mulattoes, quadroons and octoroons that the situation had social complications: involving the future life as well as this. While most of the Americans were undoubtedly going to hell, those who were going to heaven were not comfortable at the prospect of flying around with black saints whose haloes might get caught in their kinky hair. People were saying that America “could not exist half black and half white”; some doubted if even heaven could exist half black and half white. The pestiferous abolitionists had survived mobs, courts, and the horror of being unfashionable. Even the churches could not keep infidels in their congregations from questioning the manifest will of God, who in Mosaic law had imposed and regulated slavery, and in the New Testament had commanded the return of a runaway slave. Numerous individual clergymen had taken a conspicuous part in this form of sacrilege, but the great majority were true to their creeds, and denounced the heretics. The Methodist and other churches in official assemblies repeatedly disciplined their anarchic parsons and forbade the attempt to stir up useless hostility by advocating “emancipation.” But the trouble-mongers would not be quieted. In spite of the efforts of the respectables, there was, as one New York writer put it, a “lamentable squandering of vast sums of money in an improbable and visionary crusade, which might have conferred inestimable benefits had they not been diverted from the legitimate channels of Christian benevolence.”