Feb. 7, 1861.
Night before last a Virginia gentleman said to us: “Don’t be too sanguine. Union does not mean in Virginia what it means in New York. There it means only delay–it means Crittenden’s compromise; it means secession, not today but tomorrow.” The same gentleman said: “Floyd was no gentleman. No Virginia gentleman would ask him to dinner” (the climax of earthly honors I suppose) and that “he was intoxicated at the Richmond dinner and not responsible for his speech.” This Virginian said he would “stake his existence,” or something of the sort, on the honor of the South in paying, to the last cent, everything it owes the North. As an offset to this, Mr. Lockwood last night repeated to us the contents of three letters he had read yesterday, sent to acquaintances of his in answer to requests for payment. One said: “I shall pay, of course, every farthing I owe you, in cash, but not till I pay it in the currency of the Southern Confederacy.” Another sent a note to the effect: “I promise to pay, etc., five minutes after demand, to any Northern Abolitionist the same coin in which we paid John Brown, endorsed by thousands of true Southern hearts.” The third said: “I cannot return the goods, as you demand, for they are already sold, and the money invested in muskets to shoot you– Yankees!” Georgy was at a party last night at Amy Talbot’s, where nothing but politics was talked. Uncle Edward has just popped in, for a minute, and says: “All I am afraid of now is that Virginia and the other Border states will stay in; and we shall have the curse of their slavery on our shoulders without the blessings of a complete union.”
Dr. Roosevelt dined with us on Saturday, and I said: “What do you go for, Doctor?” “I go for gun-powder!” he answered. Mrs. Eliza Reed hears from her brother-in-law, a clergyman in Beaufort, S. C., that she “ought to be very thankful that her property is safely invested at the South” (partly in his own hands) and that he is “sorry he is not able to forward her the interest now due,” the fact being that she has not had a cent of her income this winter.
One more anecdote and then my gossip is over. Mrs. Dulany overheard two negresses talking on a corner in Baltimore. “Wait till the fourth of March,” said one of them, “ and then won’t I slap my missus’ face!”
ABRAHAM LINCOLN was inaugurated President of the United States on the fourth of March, 1861. In closing his inaugural address he said to the Southern seceders:
“In your hands my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of Civil War. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect, and defend it.”