Very few. It was such an unpopular stance to take that most people shied well away from it. There may have been many people who privately said that the North and the South were two devils that could hang each other, but such words were not bandied about.

The poetry submitted to newspapers and magazines had an unabashedly patriotic feel, and this is true whether one lived in Maine, Iowa, or Texas. There was no shame in calling oneself an ardent patriot; indeed, Americans from all sections tended to believe they were fulfilling the mandates of an earlier generation. What George Washington and the founding fathers had failed to accomplish, the men and women of 1861 would fulfill.