The Abolition Crusade and Its Consequences

and four years of bloody war. The Federal Government wage

and for the Union of all the States. It is true the States remaining in the Union had with them the army and the navy and the old government, but that government could not, and did not, exercise its functions within the borders of the seceded States until by force of arms in the war that was now waged it had conquered a control. It was a war between the States for such control; for independence on

hich this government was founded, and when you deny them, and when you deny to us the right to withdraw from a Union which thus perverted threatens to be destructive of our rights, we but tread in the path of our fathers when we proclaim our independence and take the hazard

n the path of their fathers when they proclaimed their i

, justifies secession o

secession was right, for any people, prompted by the commonest motives of self-defence and with no moral scruples against slavery, would have followed the same course. The present generation of Northerners, born and reared after the war, must shake off their inherit

elves on higher ground than commercial considerations. The Confederates were defending their inherited right of local self-government and the Fe

Valley Forge and Yorktown. Close as the non-slave-holders of the South were to the slave-holders, of the same British stock, and with the same traditions, blood kinsmen as they were, they might not have been willing to dare all and do all for the protection of property in which they were not interested; but they were ready to, and they did, wage a death struggle to maintain against a hostile sectional major

long to th

for you

The danger of servile insurrections, if nothing else, would prevent it.[83]Many Southerners, on

of 1860, was the statement he had made in his speech at Chicago, preliminary to his great debate with Douglas in 1858, that the Union could not "continue to exist half slave and half free." And he was now the candidate of the

858, he said: "There is a physical difference between the white and black races which, I believe, will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality, and, inasmuc

the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. Other changes were slight. The presidential term was extended to six years and the President was not

ed at Springfield, nor those others, which, at Peoria, Illinois, on October 16, 1854, he had stated thus: "When our Southern brethren tell us they are no more responsible for slavery than we are, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said the institution exists and it is very difficult to get rid of it in any satisfacto

this would better their condition?... What next? Free them and make them politically and socially our equals?" This question he answered in the negative, and cont

open letter to Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862: "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union wi

of the war was the preservation of the Union. In no other way, and for no other pu

each was the creature more or less of his environment. Both were men of commanding ability, but the destiny of each was shaped by agencies that now seem to have been directed by the hand of Fate. Mr. Lincoln, by nature a political genius, was carried to Illinois when a child, reared in the North-west among those to whom, with the Mississippi River as their only outlet to the markets of th

without his seeking, at the head of the Confederacy. He had been prominent among the Southerners at Washington, who had hoped that the South, by threats of secession, might obtain its rights in the Union, as had been done in Jefferson's days by New England. In the movement (1860-61) that

old of his great work of Reconstruction he fell, the victim of a crazy assassin. Martyrdom

ght to bury the cause of the South and its chosen leader in ignominy. But the days of hate and passion are past; reason is reasserting her sway

bright light that day and night disturbed his rest; the heroism with which he endured all this, and the q

as the subject of much abuse, especially at the hands of Southerners who then totally misunderstood him, he was animated always by the philosophy of his own famous words, "With malice towards none, with charity for all." Never for one moment did he forget, amidst even the bittere

engines for its railroads. It had one cannon foundry. The Tredegar Iron Works, at Richmond, Virginia, was a fully equipped cannon foundry. The Confederacy's arms and munitions of war were not sufficient to supply the troops that

of every description, food in abundance,

of the North

3,653,870 were colored. The total white male popul

rate enlistments, places the outside number at 700,000. The estimate of Colonel Henderson, of the staff of the British army, in his "Life of Stonewall Jackson," is 900,000. Colonel Thomas J. Livermore, of Boston, estimates the number of Confederates at a

s. What authority these Confederate writers have relied on is not clear. The enlistments were for the most part directly in the Confederate army and not through State officials. The ca

ore united in its convictions, and practically all her young manhood fell into line,

kable, but there was nothing in the situation in that section that could evoke such a wonderful exhibition of heroism and self-sacri

r horsemen, especially in the beginning of the war, than the Northerners; and the Southerners were fighting not only for the Constitution of their fathers and the defence of their homes, but for the supremacy of their race. They had also another military advantage, that would probably have been decisive but for the United Stat

the method of military experts, the percentage of losses of the victor only, Chickamauga was the bloodiest battle of the world, from and including Waterloo down to the present time. Gettysburg and Sharpsburg also rank

ired in the many victories they won fighting for their homes is not to be overlooked. But the failure of the North with its overwhelming numbers and resources, to overcome the resistance of the half-famished Confederates until nearly four years had elapsed, can only be fully accounted for, in fairness to t

illiant generalship of the Confederates a

gh, the general historians have been so attracted by the gallantry displayed in great land battles, and

blockade, starved the Confederacy to death. The Southern government could not market its cotton, nor could it import or manufacture enough military supplies. Among its extremest needs w

ts of supplies. It assisted in the capture, early in the war, of Forts Henry and Donelson, and it conducted Union troops along the Tennessee River into east Tennessee and north Alabama. It furnished objective points and supplies at Savannah, Charleston, and Wilmington, to Sherman

omac, says that the United States navy was the deciding factor in the Civil War. He even says th

hed in 1905, a foreign expert, Captain Cecil Battine, of the King's Hussars, condenses

esources, excited in Europe; the dazzling genius of some of the Confederate generals, and in some measure jealousy at the power of the United States, have ranged the sympathies of the world during the war and ever since to a large degree on the side of the vanquished. Justice has hardly been done to the armies which arose time and again from sanguinary repulses, and from disasters more demoralizing than any repulse in the field, because they were caused by political and military incapa

on and not for the abolition of slavery. But among these soldiers there was an ab

y lies a moulderi

o march

th, and the pressure upon the President to strike at slavery was increasing. The Union forces were suffering repeated defeats; slaves at home were growing food crops and caring for the families of Confederates who

the whites should not be left together. He therefore sought diligently to find some home for the freedmen in a foreign country. But unfortunately, as already seen, the American negro, a bone of contention at home, was now a pariah to other peoples. Most nations welcome immigrants, but no country was wi

onstruction. Suffrage in the reconstructed States under his plan was to be limited to those who were qualified to vote at the date of secession, which meant the whites. The sole exception he ever made to this r

slavery, that had been the origin of sectional dissensions, was eliminated because it obstructed the success of the Union armies. By their gallantry in battle and conduct toward each other the men

nt of the sword." The North was not seeking to propagate in the South any new institution whatever. Mr. Gladstone'

ses that brought about our terrible war "in a friendly and quiet spirit, without recrimination and without heat, each understan

its ideas of the Constitution, and that the North was equally honest and patriotic in its fidelity to the Union. We need to advance one step further. Somebody was to blame for starting

non-slave-holding States, with the intent to act, within the slave-holding States, on the subject of slavery in those States, without their consent." And further, that it was the creation of these societies, the methods they resorted to, and their explicit defian

New Abolitionists put in the new claim, that slavery in the South was the concern of the North, as well as of the South, and that there was a higher law than the Constitution. If t

he Constitution of the United States was the supreme law of the land, there would have

. They fought for liberty regulated by law, and against the idea that there can be, under our system, any higher law than the Constitution of our country. That the Constitution should always be the supreme law of the land, they still believe, and the philosophic student of past and current history should be gratified to see the tenacity with which Southern people still