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[442] seclusion also gave a color to his feelings. His uppermost thought seemed always to be, that the greatest troubles for the country would come after the North had triumphed and the war was over; his deepest feeling always for the success of the Northern armies and the predominance of Northern civilization. In writing to a young friend who was, for the moment, carried along with the tide of bitter and resentful feelings, he says1:—

I heard with great pain the tone of your remarks about the Southern Secessionists and their leaders. They are in revolt, no doubt, or in a state of revolution, and we must resist them and their doctrines to the death. We can have no government else, and no society worth living in. But multitudes of men in all ages of the world have been under delusions equally strange and strong, and have died loyally and conscientiously in defence of them. Multitudes more will follow. Both sides in such cases fight for their opinions, and I had hoped that the day had gone by, even in France since 1848, when the prevailing party would resort to executions for treason, after they should have established their own position by victory or even before it.

But, besides this, we should, I think, recollect, in dealing with our present enemies, not only that they are fighting for what they believe to be their rights, in open, recognized warfare, but that, whether we are hereafter to be one nation or two, we must always live side by side, and must always have intimate relations with each other for good or for evil to both; and I, therefore, sincerely deprecate, as for twenty years I have deprecated, all bitterness and violence towards the Southern States, as of the worst augury for ourselves, and for the cause of civilization on this side of the Atlantic. Such insane hatreds as are now indulged by both parties in this contest—still more at the South than with us—can, I fear, only end in calamities which none of the present generation will live long enough to survive. . . . .

I have lately seen, by accident, many letters from the South— chiefly mercantile—which breathed this spirit fully. I have seen it placarded in the streets of Boston that we should hang the secession leaders as fast as we can get them into our power. I have found this course openly urged in leading papers of New York and Boston. It is even said that the government at Washington is now considering


1 This letter is printed from a draft, or copy, in Mr. Ticknor's writing, found among his papers.

Boston, J. R. Osgood and company, 1876.

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