Volume 1 — CHAPTER I SLAVERY: ITS POLITICAL HISTORY IN THE UNITED STATES (I.) Introductory—(II.) Introduction of Slavery into the Colonies —(III.) Declaration of Independence—(IV.) Continental Congress: Articles of Confederation—(V.) Ordinance of 1787—(VI.) Constitution of the United States—(VII.) Causes of Growth of Slavery—(VIII.) Fugitive-Slave Law, 1793—(IX.) Slave Trade Abolished—(X.) Louisiana Purchase—(XI.) Florida—(XII.) Missouri Compromise—(XIII.) Nullification—(XIV.) Texas—(XV.) Mexican War, Acquisition of California and New Mexico—(XVI.) Compromise Measures, 1850—(XVII.) Nebraska Act—(XVIII.) Kansas Struggle for Freedom—(XIX.) Dred Scott Case—(XX.) John Brown Raid—(XXI.) Presidential Elections, 1856-1860—(XXII.) Dissolution of the Union—(XXIII.) Secession of States—(XXIV.) Action of Religious Denominations—(XXV.) Proposed Concessions to Slavery—(XXVI.) Peace Conference—(XXVII.) District of Columbia—(XXVIII.) Slavery Prohibited in Territories—(XXIX.) Benton's Summary—(XXX.) Prophecy as to Slavery and Disunion. (continued 4)

(What a contrast between this proposed Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution and the Thirteenth Amendment adopted four years later! The former proposed to establish slavery forever; the latter abolished it forever.)

The resolutions of John J. Crittenden in the Senate proposed various amendments to the Constitution, among others to legalize slavery south of 36 deg. 30'; to admit States from territory north of that line, with or without slavery; to prohibit the abolition of slavery in the States and also in the District of Columbia so long as it existed in Virginia or Maryland, such abolition even then to be only with the consent of the inhabitants of the District and with compensation to the slave owners; to require the United States to pay for fugitive slaves who were prevented from arrest or return to slavery by violence and intimidation, and to make all the provisions of the Constitution, including the proposed amendments, unchangeable forever. The Crittenden resolutions, at the end of much debate, and after various votes on amendments proposed thereto, failed (19 to 20) in the Senate, and therefore were never considered in the House.(115)

It was claimed at the time that had the Congressmen from the Southern States remained and voted for the Corwin and Crittenden propositions the Constitution might have been amended, giving slavery all these guarantees.

(114) Joint resolution of ratification, Ohio Laws, 1861, p. 190.

(115) Hist. of Rebellion (McPherson), pp. 57-67.

XXVI PEACE CONFERENCE—1861

By appointments of governors or legislatures, commissioners from each of twenty States, chosen at the request of the Legislature of Virginia, met in Washington, February 4, 1861, in a "Peace Conference."(116) Ex-President John Tyler of Virginia was made President, and Crafts J. Wright of Ohio Secretary.(117)

It adjourned February 27th, having agreed to recommend to the several States amendments to the Constitution, in substance: That north of 36 deg. 30' slavery in the Territories shall be, and south of that line it shall not be, prohibited; that neither Congress nor a Territorial Legislature shall pass any law to prevent slaves from being taken from the States to the Territories; that no Territory shall be acquired by the United States, except by discovery and for naval stations, without the consent of a majority of the Senators from the slave and also from the free States; that Congress shall have no power to abolish slavery in any State, nor in the District of Columbia without the consent of Maryland; nor to prohibit Congressmen from taking their slaves to and from said District; nor the power to prohibit the free transportation of slaves from one slave State or Territory to another; that bringing slaves into the District of Columbia for sale, or to be placed in depot for transfer and sale at other places, is prohibited; that the clauses in the Constitution and its amendments relating to slavery shall never be abolished or amended without the consent of all the States; and that Congress shall provide by law for paying owners for escaped slaves where officers, whose duty it was to arrest them, were prevented from arresting them or returning them to their owners after being arrested.

"The Peace Conference" was composed of 133 members, among whom were some of the most eminent men of the country, though generally, however, only conservatives from each section were selected as members. Its remarkable recommendations were made with considerable unanimity, voting in the conference being by States, the Continental method.

Wm. Pitt Fessenden and Lot M. Morrill of Maine, Geo. S. Boutwell of Massachusetts, David Dudley Field and Erastus Corning of New York, Frederick T. Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, David Wilmot of Pennsylvania, Reverdy Johnson of Maryland, John Tyler, Wm. C. Rives, and John A. Seddon of Virginia, Wm. O. Butler, James B. Clay, James Guthrie, and Charles A. Wickcliffe of Kentucky, C. P. Wolcott, Salmon P. Chase, John C. Wright, Wm. S. Groesback, Franklin T. Backus, Reuben Hitchcock, Thomas Ewing (Sen.), and Valentine B. Horton of Ohio, Caleb B. Smith and Godlove S. Orth of Indiana, John M. Palmer and Burton C. Cook of Illinois, and James Harlan and James W. Grimes of Iowa were of the number. Many of them were then, or afterwards, celebrated as statesmen; and some of them subsequently held high rank as soldiers.

March 2, 1861, the "Peace Conference" propositions were offered twice to the Senate, and each time overwhelmingly defeated, as they had been, on the day preceding, by the House.(118)

There were many other propositions offered, considered, and defeated, to wit: Propositions from the Senate Committee of thirteen appointed December 18, 1860; propositions of Douglas, Seward, and others; also propositions from a meeting of Senators and members from the border, free, and slave States, all relating to slavery, and proposed with a view of stopping the already precipitated secession of States.(119)

Some of these propositions were exasperatingly humiliating, and only possibly justifiable by the times.

Though Lincoln's election as President was claimed to be a good cause for secession, and though much of the compromise talk was to appease his party opponents as well as the South, he was opposed to bargaining himself into the office to which the people had elected him. With respect to this matter (January 30, 1861) he said:

"I will suffer death before I will consent, or advise my friends to consent, to any concession or compromise which looks like buying the privilege of taking possession of the government to which we have a constitutional right."

We have now done with legislation, attempted legislation, and constitutional amendments to protect and extend slavery in the Republic. Slavery appealed to war, and by the inexorable decree of war its fate must be decided.

The Emancipation Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln (January 1, 1863) and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1865) freed all slaves in the Union; the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) provided that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside"; and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) gave the right to vote to all citizens of the United States regardless of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude." These are all simply the decrees of war, written in the organic law of the United States at the end of the national four years' baptism of blood. Embodied in them are no concessions or compromises; the evil was torn out by the roots, and the Christian world, the progressive civilization of the age, and the consciences of enlightened mankind now approve what was done.

The war, with its attendant horrors and evils, was necessary to terminate the deep-seated, time-honored, and unholy institution of human slavery, so long embedded in our social, political, and commercial relations, and sustained by our prejudices, born of a selfish disposition, common to white people, to esteem themselves superior to others.

The history of emancipation and of these constitutional amendments belongs, logically, to periods during and at the end of the war.

There are, however, two important acts relating to slavery which passed Congress during the War of the Rebellion, not strictly the result of that war, though incident to it, which must be mentioned.

(116) Kansas joined later, and Michigan, California, and Oregon were not represented; nor were the then seceded Southern States, or Arkansas, represented.

(117) Blaine (Twenty Years of Congress, vol. i., p. 269), says: "Puleston, a delegate from Pennsylvania, a subject of Queen Victoria, later (1884) of the British Parliament, was chosen Secretary of the Conference."—This is an error. He was not a delegate: only one of several assistant secretaries.

On the next page of Blaine's book he falls into another error in saying the Wilmot Proviso was embodied (1848) in the Oregon territorial act. It was never embodied in any act. The sixth section of the Ordinance of 1787 is embodied in that act word for word.

(118) Hist. of Rebellion (McPherson), pp. 68-9.

(119) Ibid., p. 76.

XXVII DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA—SLAVERY ABOLISHED—1862

The District of Columbia, acquired by the United States in 1791 for the purpose of founding the city of Washington as the permanent Federal Capital, was, by the laws of Virginia and Maryland, slave territory. The District was originally ten miles square, and included the city of Alexandria. Later (1846) the part acquired from Virginia (about forty square miles) was retroceded to that State. Congress had complete jurisdiction over it, though the laws of Maryland and Virginia, for some purposes, were continued in force. It was, however, from the beginning claimed that Congress had the right to abolish slavery within its boundaries.

Congress is given the right "to exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever over such District."(120) But slavery was claimed to be excepted because of its peculiar character.

The institution of slavery was therefore perpetuated in the District, and in the Capital of the Republic slave-marts existed where men and women were sold from the auction block, and families were torn asunder and carried to different parts of the country to be continued in bondage. In the shadow of the Capitol the voice of the auctioneer proclaiming in the accustomed way the merits of the slave commingled with that of the statesmen in the Halls of Congress proclaiming the boasted liberty of the great American Republic! Daniel Drayton (1848) was tried in the District for the larceny of seventy-four human beings, his crime consisting of affording means (in the schooner Pearl) for their escape to freedom.(121)

Under the laws of the District many others were punished for like offences.

As late as 1856, when the sculptor Crawford furnished a design for the Statue of Liberty to crown the dome of the Capitol, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis ordered the "liberty cap" struck from the model, because in art it had an "established origin in its use as a badge of the freed slave."(122)

We have seen how much the consciences of just men were shocked, and how assiduously such men labored to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, and with what tenacity the slave party fought to maintain it there, and even by constitutional amendments to fix it there forever.

But when slavery had brought the country to war, the emancipation of slaves in the District was early considered.

Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, December 16, 1861, introduced a bill in the Senate, which, after a most memorable debate in both Houses of Congress, passed, and on April 16, 1862, became a law, with the approval of President Lincoln. This act emancipated forthwith all the slaves of the District, and annulled the laws of Maryland over it relating to slavery and all statutes giving the cities of Washington and Georgetown authority to pass ordinances discriminating against persons of color.

(120) Con. U. S., Art. I., Sec. 8, par. 17.

(121) Drayton did not succeed in the attempt to afford these slaves means to escape. He was tried on two indictments for larceny, convicted, and on each sentenced to ten years in the penitentiary. The Circuit Court reversed these convictions on the erroneous charge of the trial judge (Crawford), to the effect that a man might be guilty of larceny of property—slaves—without the intent to appropriate it to his own use. On re-trial Drayton was acquitted on the larceny indictments; but verdicts were taken against him on seventy-four indictments for transporting slaves—not a penitentiary offense—and he was sentenced to pay a fine of $10,000, and to remain in prison until paid. He was most ably defended by Horace Mann of Boston, and J. M. Carlisle of Washington, D. C., either as volunteer counsel or employed by Drayton's friends, he being poor. There were 115—41 for larceny, 64 for transportation—indictments against Drayton, which led Mr. Mann to remark of the threatened penalty: "Methuselah himself must have been caught young in order to survive such a sentence."—Slavery, Letters, etc. (Mann), p. 93.

President Fillmore, being defeated in 1852 for nomination for President, pardoned Drayton after four years' and four months' imprisonment, which pardon, it was claimed, defeated Scott, the Whig nominee, at the polls.—Memoir of Drayton, p. 118.

(122) Correspondence in War Department between Davis and Quartermaster- General Meigs.

The present nondescript hood, giving the statue crowning the dome its appearance, in some views, of a wild Indian, was substituted for the Liberty cap.

XXVIII SLAVERY PROHIBITED IN THE TERRITORIES—1862

Growing out of the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, the question was raised by Lovejoy of Illinois and others as to the duty of Congress to declare freedom national and slavery sectional; and also to prohibit slavery in all the Territories of the Union.

A bill was passed, which (June 19, 1862) was approved by the President, and became the last general law of Congress on the subject of slavery in the Territories. It reads:

"That from and after the passage of this act there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the Territories of the United States, now existing, or which may at any time hereafter be formed or acquired by the United States, otherwise than in punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted."

By this act the principles of the Ordinance of 1787 (sixth section) were applied universally to all existing and to be acquired territory of the United States.

It was only, in effect, Jefferson's Ordinance of 1784, defeated by one vote in the old Congress, the loss of which he deplored so much. His benign purpose to restrict slavery was delayed seventy- eight years—until blood flowed to sanction it.

XXIX BENTON'S SUMMARY

We close this already too long history of human slavery in the United States with Thomas H. Benton's summary of the "cardinal points" in the aggressive policy of the impetuous South in pushing forward slavery as a cause for disunion. He wrote, four years anterior to the Rebellion of 1861, with a prophetic pen, nibbed by the experience of a Senator for thirty years, and as a slaveholder. He had actively participated in most of the events of which he speaks, and was personally familiar with all of them.(123)

"But I am not now writing the history of the present slavery agitation—a history which the young have not learnt, and the old have forgotten, and which every American ought to understand. I only indicate cardinal points to show its character; and of these a main one remains to be stated. Up to Mr. Pierce's administration the plan had been defensive—that is to say, to make the secession of the South a measure of self-defence against the abolition encroachments, aggressions, and crusades of the North. In the time of Mr. Pierce, the plan became offensive—that is to say, to commence the expansion of slavery, and the acquisition of territory to spread it over, so as to overpower the North with new slave States, and drive them out of the Union. In this change of tactics originated the abrogation of the Missouri Compromise, the attempt to purchase one half of Mexico, and the actual purchase of a large part; the design to take Cuba; the encouragement to Kinney and to Walker in Central America; the quarrels with Great Britain for outlandish coasts and islands; the designs upon the Tehuantepec, the Nicaragua, the Panama, and the Darien routes; and the scheme to get a foothold in the Island of San Domingo. The rising in the free States in consequence of the abrogation of the Missouri Compromise checked these schemes, and limited the success of the disunionists to the revival of the agitation which enables them to wield the South against the North in all the Federal elections and Federal legislation. Accidents and events have given this part a strange pre-eminence— under Jackson's administration proclaimed for treason; since, at the head of the government and of the Democratic party. The death of Harrison, and the accession of Tyler, was their first great lift; the election of Mr. Pierce was their culminating point. It not only gave them the government, but power to pass themselves for the Union party, and for democrats; and to stigmatize all who refused to go with them as disunionists and abolitionists. And to keep up this classification is the object of the eleven pages of the message which calls for this Review—unhappily assisted in that object by the conduct of a few real abolitionists (not five per centum of the population of the free States); but made to stand, in the eyes of the South, for the whole."

(123) Hist., etc., Ex., Dred Scott Case, pp. 184-5.

XXX PROPHECY AS TO SLAVERY'S FATE: ALSO AS TO DISUNION

We are approaching the period for the fulfilment of prophecy in relation to the perpetuity of human slavery in the United States.

We summarize a few of the prophecies made by distinguished American statesmen and citizens. George Washington, Patrick Henry, and other Virginia statesmen and slaveholders at the close of the Revolution predicted that slaves would be emancipated, or they would acquire their freedom violently. These patriots advocated emancipation. The stumbling-block to abolition in Virginia at that time was, what to do with the blacks. The white population could not reconcile themselves to the idea of living on an equality with them, as they deemed they must if the blacks were free. As early as 1782 Jefferson expressed his serious forebodings:

"Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. . . .

"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever. The way, I hope, is preparing, under the auspices of Heaven, for a total emancipation."

The anti-slavery societies when they first met in annual convention (1804) proclaimed that

"Freedom and slavery cannot long exist together."

John Quincy Adams, in 1843, prophesied:

"I am satisfied slavery will not go down until it goes down in blood."(124)

Abraham Lincoln, at the beginning of his celebrated debate with Douglas (1858) expressed his belief that this nation could not exist "half slave and half free." He had, however, made the same declaration in a letter to a Kentucky friend to whom he wrote:

"Experience has demonstrated, I think, that there is no peaceful extinction of slavery in prospect for us. . . .

"On the question of liberty as a principle, we are not what we have been. When we were the political slaves of King George, and wanted to be free, we called the maxim that 'all men are created equal' a self-evident truth; but now, when we have grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves, we have become so greedy to be masters that we call the maxim 'a self-evident lie.' The Fourth of July has not quite dwindled away; it is still a great dy for burning fire-crackers. That spirit which desired the peaceful extinction of slavery has itself become extinct with the occasion and the men of the Revolution. . . . So far as peaceful, voluntary emancipation is concerned, the condition of the negro slave in America, scarcely less terrible to the contemplation of the free mind, is now as fixed and hopeless of change for the better as that of lost souls of the finally impenitent. The autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown, and proclaim his subjects free Republicans, sooner than will our masters voluntarily give up their slaves.

"Our political problem now is, 'Can we as a nation continue together permanently—forever—half slave, and half free'? The problem is too mighty for me. May God in his mercy superintend the solution."

(Under God, within ten years after this was written, Lincoln was the instrument for the solution of the mighty problem!)

This was a fitting prelude to his speech on slavery at Springfield, Illinois (June, 1858), wherein he said:

"In my opinion it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. 'A house divided against itself cannot stand.'

"I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other."(125)

Seward of New York compressed the issue between freedom and slavery into a single sentence in his Rochester speech (October 25, 1858):

"It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either an entirely slave holding nation or entirely a free labor nation."(126)

But statesmen were not the only persons who predicted the downfall of slavery in the Republic; not the only persons who contributed to that end, nor yet the only persons who foretold its overthrow in blood.

The institution had grown to arrogant and intolerant as to brook no opposition, and its friends did not even seek to clothe its enormities.

A leading Southern journal, in 1854, honestly expressed the affection in which slavery was held:

"We cherish slavery as the apple of our eye, and we are resolved to maintain it, peaceably, if we can, forcibly, if we must."(127)

The clergy and religious people of the North came to believe slavery must, in the mill of justice, be ground to a violent death, in obedience to the will of God.

Theodore Parker, the celebrated Unitarian divine, a personal friend of John Brown, on hearing, in Rome, of his failure, trial, and sentence to the scaffold, in a letter to Francis Jackson of Boston, November 24, 1859, gave vent to what was then regarded as fanatical prophecy, but now long since fulfilled:

"The American people will have to march to rather severe music, I think, and it is better for them to face it in season. A few years ago it did not seem difficult, first to check slavery, and then to end it without bloodshed. I think this cannot be done now, nor ever in the future. All the great charters of Humanity have been writ in blood. I once hoped that American Democracy would be engrossed in less costly ink; but it is plain, now, that our pilgrimage must lead through a Red Sea, wherein many a Pharoah will go under and perish. . . .

"Slavery will not die a dry death. It may have as many lives as a cat; at last, it will dies like a mad dog in a village, with only the enemies of human kind to lament its fate, and they too cowardly to appear as mourners."(128)

Parker was fast descending, from broken health, into the grave, but in the wildest of his dreams he did not peer into futurity far enough to see that within a single decade the "sin of the nation" would be washed out, root and branch, in blood; and that in Virginia —the State that hung John Brown—at the home of its greatest Governor, Henry A. Wise, there would be seen "a Yankee school-marm" teaching free negroes—sons of Africa—to read and write—to read the Holy Bible, and she the humble daughter of "Old John Brown."(129)

One sample of prophecy of what disunion would be, we give from a speech of Henry Winter Davis of Maryland:

"It would be an act of suicide, and sane men do not commit suicide. The act itself is insanity. It will be done, if ever, in a fury and madness which cannot stop to reason. Dissolution means death, the suicide of Liberty, without a hope of resurrection—death without the glories of immortality; with no sister to mourn her fall, none to wrap her decently in her winding-sheet and bear her tenderly to a sepulchre—dead Liberty, left to all the horrors of corruption, a loathsome thing, with a stake through the body, which men shun, cast out naked on the highway of nations, where the tyrants of the earth who feared her living will mock her dead, passing by on the other side, wagging their heads and thrusting their tongues in their cheeks at her, saying, 'Behold her now, how she that was fair among the nations is fallen! is fallen!'— and only the few wise men who loved her out of every nation will shed tears over her desolation as they pass, and cast handfuls of earth on her body to quiet her manes, while we, her children, stumble about our ruined habitations to find dishonorable graves wherein to hide our shame. Dissolution? How shall it be? Who shall make it? Do men dream of Lot and Abraham parting, one to the east and the other to the west, peacefully, because their servants strive? That States will divide from States and boundary lines will be marked by compass and chain? Sir, that will be a portentous commission that shall settle that partition, for cannon will be planted at the corners and grinning skeletons be finger- posts to point the way. It will be no line gently marked on the bosom of the Republic—some meandering vein whence generations of her children have drawn their nourishment—but a sharp and jagged chasm, rending the hearts of commonwealths, lacerated and smeared with fraternal blood. On the night when the stars of her constellation shall fall from heaven the blackness of darkness forever will settle on the liberties of mankind in this Western World. This is dissolution! If such, Sir, is dissolution seen in a glass darkly, how terrible will it be face to face? They who reason about it are half crazy now. They who talk of it do not mean it, and dare not mean it. They who speak in earnest of a dissolution of this Union seem to me like children or madmen. He who would do such a deed as that would be the maniac without a tongue to tell his deed, or reason to arrest his steps—an instrument of mad impulse impelled by one idea to strike his victim. Sir, there have been maniacs who have been cured by horror at the blood they have shed."(130)

This eloquent, patriotic, word-picture of dissolution, intended to deter those who so impetuously and glibly talked of it, was not, as the sequel proved, overdrawn. When delivered it was not generally believed that a dissolution of the Union could or would be attempted. In the Presidential campaigns of 1856 and 1860, as well as in Congress, there was much eloquence displayed in line with the above; few of the orators, however, believed that dissolution, with all the wild terrors of war, was near at hand. But there were some men in public life who early comprehended the destiny awaiting the politically storm-racked Republic, and as it approached, boldly gave the opinion that "a little blood-letting would be good for the body politic."(131)

The story of the war which secession inaugurated remains to be in part narrated in succeeding chapters, portraying the impetuous rush to battle; the unparalleled heroism of the mighty hosts on either side; the slaughter of men; the hell of suffering; the bitter tears; the incalculable sorrow; the billions expended; the destruction of property; the alternating defeats and triumphs; the final victory of the Union arms; the overthrow of state-rights, nullification, secession—disunion; the emancipation of four million human slaves, and the annihilation in the United States of the institution of slavery, including all its baleful doctrines, whether advanced by partisan, pro-slavery statesmen, or advocated by learned politicians, or upheld by church or clergy in the name of the prophets of Holy Writ or of Christ and his Apostles, or expounded by a tribunal clothed in the ermine, majesty, dignity, and power of the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

Abraham Lincoln, whose beautiful character is illumined in the intense light of a third of a century of heightened civilization, will be immortalized through all time as God's chiefest instrument in accomplishing the end.

In closing this chapter we desire again to remind the reader that in 1861 the Congress of the United States, by a two thirds majority in each branch, voted to so amend the Constitution as to make forever unalterable its provisions for the recognition and perpetuation of human bondage; that if the amendment thus submitted had been ratified by three fourths of the States, this nation would have been the first and only one in the history of the world wherein the right to enslave human beings was fundamental and decreed to be eternal.

This amendment, guaranteeing perpetual slavery, was the tender made by Union men in 1861 to avert disunion and war. It was the humiliating and unholy pledge offered to a slave-loving people to induce them to remain true to the Constitution and the Union. In the providence of God the amendment was not ratified, nor was a willingness to accept it shown by the defiant South. On the contrary, it was spurned by it with singular unanimity and deserved contempt. A nation to be wholly slave was alone acceptable to the disunionists; and to establish such a nation the hosts were arrayed on the one side; to preserve and perpetuate the Union and to overthrow the would-be slave nation, they were also, thank God, arrayed on the other.

This was the portentous issue made up—triable by the tribunal of last resort from which there is no earthly appeal.

Promptly, even enthusiastically, did the South respond to the summons to battle, and with a heroism worthy of a better cause did it devote life and property to the maintenance of the Confederacy. But from mountain, hillside, vale, plain, and prairie, from field, factory, counting-house, city, village, and hamlet, from all professions and occupation alike came the sons of freedom, with the cry of "Union and Liberty," under one flag, to meet the opposing hosts, heroically ready to make the necessary sacrifice that the unity of the American Republic should be preserved.

The effort to establish a slave nation in the afternoon of the nineteenth century resulted in a civil war unparalleled in magnitude, and the bloodiest in the history of the human race. In the eleven seceding States the authority of the Constitution was thrown off; the National Government was defied; former official oaths of army, navy, and civil officers were disregarded, and other oaths were taken to support another government; the public property of the United States was seized in the seceding States as of right, Cabinet officers of the President assisting in the plunder; Senators and Representatives in Congress, while yet holding seats, making laws, and drawing pay, plotted treason, and, later, defiantly joined the Confederacy; sequestration acts were passed by the Confederate Congress, and citizens of the United States were made aliens in the Confederacy, and their property there was confiscated, and debts due loyal men North were collected for the benefit of the Confederate Treasury; piratical vessels, with the aid and connivance of boastful civilized monarchies of Europe, destroyed our commerce and drove our flag from the high seas; above a half million of men fell in battle, and another half million died of wounds and disease incident to war; above sixty thousand Union soldiers died in Southern prisons; the direct cost of the Rebellion, paid from the United States Treasury, approximated seven billions of dollars, and the indirect cost to the loyal people, in property destroyed, etc., was at least equal to seven billions more. Fairly estimated, slaves not considered, the people of the seceding States expended and lost in the prosecution and devastations of the war more than double the expenditures and losses of the North; imagination cannot compass or language portray the suffering and sorrow, agony and despair, which pervaded the whole land. All this to settle the momentous question, whether or not human slavery should be fundamental as a domestic, social, and political institution.

Thus far slavery has been our theme, and the war for the suppression of the Rebellion only incidentally referred to, but in succeeding chapters slavery will only be incidentally referred to, and the war will have such attention as the scope of the narrative permits.

(124) Life of Seward, vol. i., p. 672.

(125) A. Lincoln, Complete Works, vol. i., pp. 215, 240, 251.

(126) Seward's Works, vol. iv, p. 289.

(127) Hist. U. S. (Rhodes), vol. i, p. 469.

(128) Life of Parker (Weiss), vol. ii., p. 172-4 (406).

(129) Civil War in America (Draper), vol. i, 565-6.

(130) Speech of Henry Winter Davis, House of Representatives, Aug. 7, 1856.

(131) Zachariah Chandler, 1860.