Out west there was a good deal of confusion in men's minds duringthe first months of the great trouble, a good deal ofunsettledness, of leaning first this way then that, and then theother way. It was hard for us to get our bearings. I call to mindan example of this. I was piloting on the Mississippi when thenews came that South Carolina had gone out of the Union on the20th of December, 1860. My pilot mate was a New Yorker. He wasstrong for the Union; so was I. But he would not listen to mewith any patience, my loyalty was smirched, to his eye, because myfather had owned slaves. I said in palliation of this dark factthat I had heard my father say, some years before he died, thatslavery was a great wrong and he would free the solitary Negro hethen owned if he could think it right to give away the propertyof the family when he was so straitened in means. My materetorted that a mere impulse was nothing, anyone could pretend toa good impulse, and went on decrying my Unionism and libelling myancestry. A month later the secession atmosphere hadconsiderably thickened on the Lower Mississippi and I became arebel; so did he. We were together in New Orleans the 26th ofJanuary, when Louisiana went out of the Union. He did his fairshare of the rebel shouting but was opposed to letting me domine. He said I came of bad stock, of a father who had beenwilling to set slaves free. In the following summer he waspiloting a Union gunboat and shouting for the Union again and Iwas in the Confederate army. I held his note for some borrowedmoney. He was one of the most upright men I ever knew but herepudiated that note without hesitation because I was a rebel andthe son of a man who owned slaves.