The Union was a sentiment, but not much more, and in December,
1860, the sentiment about the Capitol was chiefly hostile, so far
as it made itself felt. John Adams was better off in Philadelphia
in 1776 than his great-grandson Henry in 1860 in Washington.
Patriotism ended by throwing a halo over the Continental
Congress, but over the close of the Thirty-sixth Congress in
1860-61, no halo could be thrown by any one who saw it. Of all
the crowd swarming in Washington that winter, young Adams was
surely among the most ignorant and helpless, but he saw plainly
that the knowledge possessed by everybody about him was hardly
greater than his own. Never in a long life did he seek to master
a lesson so obscure. Mr. Sumner was given to saying after
Oxenstiern: "Quantula sapientia mundus regitur!" Oxenstiern
talked of a world that wanted wisdom; but Adams found himself
seeking education in a world that seemed to him both unwise and
ignorant. The Southern secessionists were certainly unbalanced in
mind -- fit for medical treatment, like other victims of
hallucination -- haunted by suspicion, by idees fixes, by violent
morbid excitement; but this was not all. They were stupendously
ignorant of the world. As a class, the cotton-planters were
mentally one-sided, ill-balanced, and provincial to a degree
rarely known. They were a close society on whom the new fountains
of power had poured a stream of wealth and slaves that acted like
oil on flame.
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