Each felt in its heart the deadly passion of
self-preservation. It was because, in both North and South, men
were subtly conscious that a whole social system was the issue at
stake, and because on each side they believed in their own ideals
with their whole souls, that, when the time came for their trial
by fire, they went to their deaths singing.
In the South there still obtained the ancient ideal of
territorial aristocracy. Those long traditions of the Western
European peoples which had made of the great landholder a petty
prince lay beneath the plantation life of the Southern States.
The feudal spirit, revived in a softer world and under brighter
skies, gave to those who participated in it the same graces and
somewhat the same capacities which it gave to the knightly class
in the days of Roland--courage, frankness, generosity, ability in
affairs, a sense of responsibility, the consciousness of caste.
The mode of life which the planters enjoyed and which the
inferior whites regarded as a social paradise was a life of
complete deliverance from toil, of disinterested participation in
local government, of absolute personal freedom--a life in which
the mechanical action of law was less important than the more
human compulsion of social opinion, and in which private
differences were settled under the code of honor.
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