David Terry, out loud, called Lincoln ‘a nigger’s lackey’, and John Frémont, at an eggnog party, referred to Jefferson Davis as ‘the lowest form of treacherous pond life’.

But it was all so far away that it seemed like a theatrical performance, rather than a real political crisis. Even Collis, who was desperately anxious to hear that the nation’s wrangles over slavery had taken a decisive turn one way or the other, so that he could plan ahead for the Sierra Pacific Railroad — even Collis found that the bulletins from Washington had a sense of melodramatic dread that was all heavy piano music and vibrato violins, and it was hard for him to believe that secession had come at last.

He felt as if he were sitting in the upper balcony of a theatre, peering through the wrong end of his opera glasses while a stage musician ostentatiously sawed a pretty young lady in half. It was all too distant to be able to make out if the pretty young lady was really being dismembered; and even if she were, he was too far away to be able to do anything about it.

All the same, there was a great deal of what Andy Hunt called ‘secesh madness’ in San Francisco, and a lot of rash talk about war. The Southerners in particular could think of almost nothing else but fighting, and several dinner parties became positively bellicose, with bread rolls being thrown, and even knives. On the night that San Francisco heard that Texas had seceded, the wintry streets were electric with fright, and bristling with joyous aggression. Shots were fired into the sky, and even on Sacramento Street, in Chinatown, there was a ringing of gongs.

America was on the brink of the grimmest and most glorious military spectacle of the century. More than 2,250,000 men were to fight in the coming war; and more than one out of every four of them were to die. Between them, the secessionist states formed a Confederacy which covered 750,000 square miles, a greater empire than Napoleon had been able to subdue with his armies in fifteen years. What was more, the statesmen and soldiers and ordinary people of that Confederacy shared a love of the South which was fierce, and deep, and enduring; and from the day that it was announced that Abraham Lincoln had carried the electoral college, they knew that their love was on the line. It was time at last to put up, or bow down. It was time for Bull Run, and Shiloh, and Antietam, and Gettysburg. It was also time for the railroads.