Thus, after the loss of New Orleans, one thing with another
operated to confine the area of full political life to Virginia
and her three neighbors to the South. And yet even among these
States there was no political solidarity or unanimity of opinion,
for the differences in their past experience, social structure,
and economic conditions made for distinct points of view. In
South Carolina, particularly, the prevailing view was that of
experienced, disillusioned men who realized from the start that
secession had burnt their bridges, and that now they must win the
fight or change the whole current of their lives. In the midst of
the extraordinary conditions of war, they never talked as if
their problems were the problems of peace. Brown, on the other
hand, had but one way of reasoning--if we are to call it
reasoning--and, with Hannibal at the gates, talked as if the
control of the situation were still in his own hands.

While South Carolina, so grimly conscious of the reality of war
and the danger of internal discord, held off from the issue of
state sovereignty, the Brown faction in Georgia blithely pressed
it home. A bill for extending the conscription age which was
heartily advocated by the Mercury was as heartily condemned by
Brown. To the President he wrote announcing his continued
opposition to a law which he declared "encroaches upon the
reserved rights of the State and strikes down her sovereignty at
a single blow." Though the Supreme Court of Georgia pronounced
the conscription acts constitutional, the Governor and his
faction did not cease to condemn them. Linton Stephens, as well
as his famous kinsman, took up the cudgels. In a speech before
the Georgia Legislature, in November, Linton Stephens borrowed