Identifier: belleoffiftiesme00clay (find matches)
Title: A belle of the fifties; memoirs of Mrs. Clay of Alabama, covering social and political life in Washington and the South, 1853-66
Year: 1904 (1900s)
Authors: Clay-Clopton, Virginia, 1825-1915 Sterling, Ada, d. 1939
Subjects: Washington (D.C.) -- Social life and customs United States -- History Civil War, 1861-1865 Personal narratives Confederate side
Publisher: New York : Doubleday, Page & Company
Contributing Library: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Digitizing Sponsor: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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evotion, andto our country, whose councils so need its genius andpatriotism. . . . Believe me most sincerely yourfriend, Joseph Holt. In fact, the news of Senator Clays physical sufferingshad been telegraphed far and near, and, merged with thefear for our country, there was, in my own heart, greatanxiety and sadness for him. Our mail was full ofinquiries as to his welfare, many from kindly strangersand even from States that were bitterly inimical to ourcause. One of these came from the far North, from onewho signed himself, A plain New Hampshire minister,Henry E. Parker. Nor can I refrain from quoting aportion of his letter, which bears the never-to-be-forgottendate of January 21st, 1861. He wrote as follows: I am utterly appalled at this projected dissolution ofour Government. To lose, to throw away our place andname among the nations of the earth, seems not merelylike the madness of suicide, but the very blackness of anni-hilation. If this thing shall be accomplished, it will be, to
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CLEMENT C. CLAY, JR.United States Senator, 1853-61 EXODUS OF SOUTHERN SOCIETY 149 my view, the crime of the nineteenth century; the parti-tion of Poland will be nothing in comparison. . . . Born and educated as we are at the North, sensiblemen at the South cannot wonder at the views we entertain,nor do sensible men at the North think it strange that,born and educated as the Southerner is, he should feelvery differently from the Northerner in some things; butwhy should not all these difficulties sink before our com-mon love for our common country? Why, indeed! Yet the cry of disunion had beenheard for forty years* and still our Southern men had for-borne, until the party belligerents, whose encroachmentshad now, at last, become unbearable, had begun to lookupon our protests as it were a mere cry of wolf. Ofthose crucial times, and of that dramatic scene in theUnited States Senate, no Southern pen has written in per-manent words; and such Northern historians as Messrs.Nicolay and Hay el

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