Excerpt Two February 18, 1861. Conecuh. Ems. I do not allow myself vain regrets or sad foreboding. This Southern Confederacy must be supported now by calm determination and cool brains. We have risked all, and we must play our best, for the stake is life or death. I shall always regret that I had not kept a journal during the two past delightful and eventful years. The delights having exhausted themselves in the latter part of 1860 and the events crowding in so that it takes away one’s breath to think about it all. I daresay I might have recorded with some distinctness the daily shocks — "Earthquakes as usual" (Lady Sale). But now it is to me one nightmare from the time I left Charleston for Florida, where I remained two weeks amid hammocks and everglades, oppressed and miserable, and heard on the cars returning to the world that Lincoln was elected and our fate sealed. Saw at Fernandina a few men running up a wan Palmetto flag and crying, South Carolina has seceded. Overjoyed at the tribute to South Carolina, I said, "So Florida sympathizes." I inquired the names of our few but undismayed supporters in Florida. Heard Gadsden, Holmes, Porcher, &c&c — names as inevitably South Carolina’s as Moses or Lazarus are Jews’.