CHAPTER the Eleventh.
Andrew Johnson--The Liberal Convention in 1872--Carl Schurz--The "Quadrilateral"-- Sam Bowles, Horace White and Murat Halstead--A Queer Composite of Incongruities I Among the many misconceptions and mischances that befell the slavery agitation in the United States and finally led a kindred people into actual war the idea that got afloat after this war that every Confederate was a Secessionist best served the ends of the radicalism which sought to reduce the South to a conquered province, and as such to reconstruct it by hostile legislation supported wherever needed by force.
Andrew Johnson very well understood that a great majority of the men who were arrayed on the Southern side had taken the field against their better judgment through pressure of circumstance.

They were Union men who had opposed secession and clung to the old order.

Not merely in the Border States did this class rule but in the Gulf States it held a respectable minority until the shot fired upon Sumter drew the call for troops from Lincoln.

The Secession leaders, who had staked their all upon the hazard, knew that to save their movement from collapse it was necessary that blood be sprinkled in the faces of the people.

Hence the message from Charleston: _With cannon, mortar and petard We tender you our Beauregard_-- with the response from Washington precipitating the conflict of theories into a combat of arms for which neither party was prepared.
The debate ended, battle at hand, Southern men had to choose between the North and the South, between their convictions and predilections on one side and expatriation on the other side--resistance to invasion, not secession, the issue.