L 4oa 
 .1415 
 
 CAUSES THAT 
 
 WAR BETWEEN THE STAT 
 
 liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiniiiiiiiiii 
 
CAUSES THAT LED 
 TO THE 
 
 War Between the States 
 
 BY 
 
 J. O. McGEHEE 
 
 Fifty-third Virginia PsCgiment 
 Armistead's Brigade 
 
 Picket's Division 
 
 Longstreet's Corps 
 
 Army Northern Virginia 
 
 1915 
 
 A. B. CALDWELL PUBLISHING CO., 
 
 ATLANTA, GA. 
 

 copy RIOHT 
 
 B CAUDWELL 
 
 leiB - 
 
 NOV 26*915 
 
 PCI.A4Mi7;).'} 
 
DEDICATION 
 
 To the United Daughters of the Confederacy, 
 whose older members can testify out of their own 
 faithful and loving memories and heroic experi- 
 ences, to the real facts of history herein contained, 
 this little book is affectionately dedicated in the 
 hope and belief that the Truth, pure and undefiled, 
 will be, by them, forever preserved and handed 
 down, unshorn and unperverted, to all the gener- 
 ations of our sons and daughters yet unborn. 
 
 The Author. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 Root of Causes that Led to War 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 Union Saved From Early Dissolution by Conservative Men 
 of All Sections 25 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 ERRATA AND ADDENDA. 
 
 For "Good Speed" in 16th line from top of page 11 read 
 God Speed. 
 
 For "South" in 11th line from bottom of page 45 read 
 North. 
 The Chicago Convention, Lincoln's Nomination, Bitterness 
 of Campaign 49 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 Lincoln's Election 57 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 Virginia Legislature and Effort at Peace 69 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 The Virginia Convention and What Followed 75 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 Lincoln's Call for Troops, etc 95 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 Conclusion 101 
 
J. (). McGEHEE 
 Sept. 1915 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 This paper, or series of papers, originated in a 
 request, seconded by an ardent desire on the part 
 of the writer, to place in the hands of the Daugh- 
 ters of the Confederacy in succinct and convenient 
 form the imperishable truths and incontrovertible 
 facts pertaining to the spirit and origin of the 
 causes that led to the war between the States; 
 thus enabling them more fully to grasp and dis- 
 seminate those truths among their own member- 
 ship and hand them down unalloyed and unper- 
 verted to future generations of our sons and 
 daughters. 
 
 The task, once undertaken, was found to be 
 so wide in scope and so comprehensive in char- 
 acter, both as to time and events, that it was im- 
 practicable to handle it properly and satisfactorily 
 within the prescribed limits of a single paper and, 
 hence, the treatise has, perforce, grown and 
 amplified into its present form and dimensions. 
 No sadder and more humiliating spectacle pre- 
 sents itself to the men and women of ''The Sixties" 
 than to see and hear their children or children's 
 children deprecating or apologizing for the heroic 
 course of action followed by their parents and 
 grandparents during the trying and eventful years 
 of those glorious but terrible times. 
 
 Our whole country, indeed the English speak- 
 ing world, during the half century that has 
 elapsed since the close of that great struggle, has 
 been flooded with so-called Histories of what they 
 
10 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 choose to term "The Civil War." Most of those 
 books, especially of those which emanated from 
 the North in the years immediately subsequent 
 to the war, and before Southern writers be^an to 
 revive and breathe freely after the bloody and 
 crushing defeat and overthrow of the great cause 
 for which they fought, were written from a bit- 
 terly partizan standpoint. During the horrible 
 nightmare of "Reconstruction" many of those 
 books invaded or crept into our public and private 
 schools, breathing into the ears of our sons and 
 daughters the insidious i^oison of the fanatical 
 hate and murderous passions that prepared the 
 way and finally precipitated the awful strife that 
 deluged the country with blood, teaching, or seek- 
 ing to teach, them to regard their fathers and 
 mothers as rebels and traitors. Now that sucli 
 perfidious agents and such pernicious teaching 
 have been happily expelled from our schools and 
 eliminated from our educational system, it is 
 vitally necessary that our boys and girls should 
 be calmly and dispassionately instructed as to the 
 real and true causes that led up to and forced an 
 unjust and cruel war ui)on the South, and with 
 that end in view this short and very incomplete 
 paper has been prepared with the hope that it 
 may inspire and lead others to give a more full 
 and exhaustive ti'catnu'nt to a sul)ject that is here- 
 in but barely bi'oachcd. What, then, were the true 
 causes that lt:d up to ami (inally precipitated that 
 momentous and ruinous struggle; who were the 
 real authors of it, and wliat were its objects and 
 purposes? 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 11 
 
 To seek the source and understand the animus 
 of those causes will carry us back to the very be- 
 ginning of our country's history. Indeed, to reach 
 the root of the incipient enmity and jealousy and 
 final estrangement that culminated in the rending 
 asunder of the sections we must cross the Atlantic 
 and study the widely dissimilar character and 
 sentiment, religious, political and social, of the 
 separate and distinct classes of people, who, in 
 emigrating to America, divided themselves be- 
 tween the New England and the Southern States. 
 The germs of discord and dissolution sported in 
 the antagonistic blood that warmed the hostile 
 veins of Roundhead and Cavalier and lurked 
 among the timbers of the "May Flower" and the 
 "Good Speed." r.-^-V - &oc/ S^^^t 
 
 New England was a community founded to be 
 the home of a creed with its discipline, and for a 
 century after the landing of the Pilgrims, re- 
 mained a frontier settlement closed in and hedged 
 about by primeval forests infested by roving 
 bands of prowling savages. Having no contact, 
 therefore, no intercourse with the other colonies 
 and actuated by a single standard of conduct, she 
 became "one community from end to end and her 
 people one people,"' standing apart and com- 
 pact, soberly cultivating a life and character all 
 her own. Col. William Byrd, of Westover, in his 
 quaint descriptive writing says of her : "Though 
 these people may be ridiculed for some of the 
 Pharisaical particularities of their worship and 
 
 iGeorge Washington, Woodrow Wilson, page 12. 
 
12 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 behavior, yet they are very useful subjects as be- 
 ing frugal and industrious, giving no scandal or 
 bad example. "- 
 
 The great body of the people who emigrated to 
 Virginia in the first seventy years of the colony's 
 existence "had left Englancl as much because they 
 hated the Puritans as because they desired Vir- 
 ginia. They were drawn out of that great ma- 
 jority at home to whom Cromwell had not dared 
 resort to get a new Parliament in place of the one 
 he had 'purged', and many of them were of the 
 hottest blood of the Cavaliers.'" From such a 
 source Virginia got her character and received 
 the blood from which was to spring her future 
 race of gentlemen and statesmen, eminent church- 
 men, profound lawyers, polemic orators and dash- 
 ing soldiers of valor unsurpassed in any age or 
 country. The tidewater counties of the Old Do- 
 minion thus peopled were backed and buttressed 
 by that life — and character-giving tide of sturdy 
 and matchless Scotch-Irish yeomanry which 
 spread itself along the Eastern slope of the Ap- 
 palachian range of V^irginia and North Carolina 
 and surged over into the fertile and teeming val- 
 leys beyond the Blue Ridg<\ Alexander Spots- 
 wood, who had seen service under Marlborough 
 and with "our army in Flanders;" had tra\('led 
 much through the then i\nown world on embassies 
 and other impoi'iant errands, having dealings 
 with all manner of peoples, at last finding him- 
 self in Virginia, where he was sent by the home 
 
 'George WashinKton, VVoodrow Wilson, page 13. 
 -History of the Dividing Line, VVni. Bynl, page A. 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 13 
 
 government as Colonial Governor of the Old Do- 
 minion, said of these people that he found among 
 them "less swearing, less profaneness, less drunk- 
 enness and debauchery, less uncharitable feuds 
 and animosity, and less knavery and villainy than 
 in any part of the world" he had ever been.- 
 
 None will pretend that all who came to Vir- 
 jrinia to seek their fortune or better their con- 
 dition in this land of promise were gentlemen in 
 the Enirlish accontation of the term, and few 
 could afford to send their sons to England to be 
 educated, but "there were, at least, the traditions 
 of culture in the colony and enough men of educa- 
 tion and refinement to leaven the mass ;" strong, 
 thinking, highbred men who showed a mastery and 
 leadership in all that tends to make a people good 
 and great were found on all the great plantations 
 that lined the rivers and streams and inlets of 
 tidewater; and as Virginia rose from the condi- 
 tion of a mere colony to that of a sturdy common- 
 v/ealth she "could boast her own breed of gentle- 
 man, merchants, scholars and statesmen." 
 
 The widely differing political views and opin- 
 ions held by the leading men of the North and 
 South began to show their legitimate fruits in 
 feelings and arts of enmity, hostility and 
 estrangement alm.ost immediately after the for- 
 mation of thf^ Union. This difference may be best 
 understood by reviewing the political sentiments 
 and doctrines entertained by Alexander Hamilton 
 nnd Thomas Jefforsfm, the idols, respectively, of 
 the New England or Monarchical party, and of 
 the Southern, or Democratic, party. 
 
 ZQfficial Letters of Alexander Spotswood, page 28. 
 
14 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 Hamilton was a monarchist pure and simple, 
 desiring and laboring to establish in this country 
 a government th;it should be in everything, ex- 
 cept its name, a tcingdom instead of a republic. 
 
 Luther Martin said of Hamilton and his fol- 
 lowers: "It was a party whose object and wish 
 was to abolish and annihilate all the State Gov- 
 ernments and bring forward one general govern- 
 ment over all this extended continent of a Mon- 
 archical nature." 
 
 Throughout the writings of Jefferson we find 
 frequent allusions to and consideration of the 
 Monarchical views held and disseminated by 
 Hamilton. He and Hamilton were in Washing- 
 ton's Cabinet together, and thirty years after- 
 wards, while calmly reviewing the many stirring 
 and often exciting incidents of debate and clash- 
 ing of opinions and principles around the Council 
 Table, he tells us: "Hamilton was not only a 
 Monarchist, but for a Monarchy bottomed on cor- 
 ruption." And Hamilton, himself, declared: "I 
 have no objection to a trial of this thing called a 
 republic, but for my part I avow myself a Mon- 
 archist." And in August. 170L three years after 
 the adoption of the Constitution under which we 
 are now living. Hamilton, in conversation with 
 Mr. Jefferson, declared: "I own it is my opinion 
 that the present Government is not that which 
 will answer, and that it will be found expedient 
 to go into the British form." In other and plainer 
 words, to become a Monarchy. 
 
 Washington, who had previously been in sym- 
 pathy and affiliation with the Federalist party, 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 15 
 
 as the followers of Hamilton were called, shared 
 the alarm of his Cabinet and the friends of his 
 Administration caused by such treasonable senti- 
 ments and utterances of his Secretary of the 
 Treasury, and. in July. 1792. wrote to Hamilton 
 asking for an explanation of those rumors with 
 which the countrv was fillod. Wnshinsfton, like 
 Jefferson, was a Virsrinian, and had no sympathy 
 with the Monarchical principles of Hamilton and 
 his followers, as is plainly shown when he says, 
 after his correspondence with his Secretary. 
 "Those who lean to a Monar^'hir'al Government 
 have either not consulted the public mind, or they 
 live in a roffion which is more productive of Mon- 
 at-chical ideas than is the case in the Southern 
 States." Thus, it is seen that as early as 1790 
 there existed jrreat difference and antagonism be- 
 tween the Statesmen of the North and South on 
 the subject of jrovernment: and if we po back 
 still farther we find those same parties and prin- 
 eiples pitted ajrainst each other in the Conven- 
 tion that formed the Constitution. There we see 
 tho Jpffersonian and Hamil^onian parties sharply 
 and clearly aligned aganist each other; the one 
 in fnvor of a jrovernment bv the people with 
 powers cautiously limited and clearly defined in 
 the Constitution : the other in favor of what they 
 called, and v/hat their successors, the Republican 
 party of todav. still call "a strone- Government" 
 with all the arbitran'^ powers of a Monarchy with- 
 out its name. "The Jefferson I'an idea was that 
 ■^V(p people are the masters of the Government. 
 The Hamiltonian idea was that the Government is 
 
16 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 the Master of the people." The struggle between 
 the friends and supporters of these opposing and 
 conflicting ideas was earnest and obstinate, caus- 
 ing long and sometimes bitter debates which called 
 out all the fiery eloquence for which the Consti- 
 tutional Convention was noted. In the end the 
 Jeffersonian Party prevailed and gave to the 
 country a Democratic Constitution. 
 
 Hamilton expressed his bitter disappointment 
 in a letter to Morris in 1802 in which he said: 
 "No man has done more to uphold the present 
 Constitution than myself, and I am still laboring 
 to prop the frail and worthless fabric ; yet, I have 
 nothing but the murmurs of its friends and the 
 curses of its foes for my reward. Every day 
 proves to me more and more that this American 
 world was not made for me. and what better can 
 I do than withdraw from the scene." If he had 
 withdrawn before he inculcated his baleful doc- 
 trines and formed his party of de.struction. history 
 would not have had to record three-(iuarters of a 
 century later the sad spectacle of a country torn 
 asunder by fratricidal strife, and that section of it 
 which always plead for peace deluged with blood 
 and ovcrwhi^lmed with desolation. 
 
 'i'he Hamilton ian or Federalist Party embraced, 
 as the Republican Party of today has always done, 
 a vast majority of the men of wealth and high 
 social position in the North. General Washing- 
 ton served the country eight years as President, 
 and his over-shadowing popularity with his well- 
 known and undoubted Southern sentiments over- 
 ruled and held down everything like the ambition 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 17 
 
 of cliques and sectional bitterness. But as soon 
 as his presidency was at an end, and his succes- 
 sor had to be chosen the Federalists, the sworn 
 enemies of Democratic principles of government 
 and Jeffersonian simplicity of public administra- 
 tion, again showed the cloven foot of their Mon- 
 archical, or "strong government" ideas, and near- 
 ly every safeguard which the Constitution throws 
 around the liberties of the people was threatened 
 or overthrown. Then it was that the slumbering 
 anta.gonism between the political principles of the 
 leading statesmen of the North and South began 
 to assume a v^'ell"defined shape in the division of 
 parties. 
 
 John Adams, of Massachusetts was an original 
 Domocrat, and his great and valuable services to 
 the country during the Revolution are well-known 
 and acknowledged. President Washington had 
 sent him as Minister to England, and his residence 
 there had completely dazzled and fascinated him 
 with the pomp and glare and glitter of Royalty 
 and Nobility, and he conceived those attributes of 
 Monarchy to be a necessary ingredient of Gov- 
 ernment. He was taken up and flattered and 
 cajoled by the Federalists in his absence and, on 
 his return to the United States, was made their 
 candidate for President; just as, in our own day. 
 General Grant, who had been a lifelong Democrat 
 and a slaveholder, was seduced to follow the loaves 
 and fishes of Federal patrona5re and, deserting his 
 real political principles, bowed down to the god 
 of pomp and power and emolument, whose shrine 
 is public office. 
 
18 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 Under the Adams Administration the most 
 foolish and oppressive laws were enacted by the 
 Federalist majority in Cong-ress. Among those 
 acts were the famous, or rather infamous "Alien 
 and Sedition Laws" which gave the President 
 power to banish all aliens from the United States, 
 or lock them up in prison during his pleasure, an^^ 
 to cause the arrest and imprisonment of any per- 
 son who should dare to write or speak anything 
 against the President or Congress, thus putting 
 in the President's hands as arbitrary and despotic 
 power as was ever wielded by the "Czar of all the 
 Russias." 
 
 Under the exercise of such shameful and des- 
 potic authority, which jeopardized the liberty of 
 every citizen of the United States, the Honorable 
 Matthew Lyon, a Democrat and public-spirited 
 citizen, for daring to criticize "the ridiculous and 
 idle parade" of the President, was seized and 
 thrust into a cold dungeon six feet square to starve 
 and freeze during one whole winter, and was 
 liberated only on the payment of a fiine of one 
 thousand dollars. As another specimen of the 
 exercise of this kingly pr)wer which ran riot in 
 cruelty and mob violence. General Sumter, an atred 
 veteran and one of the most distinguished patriots 
 of the country, was knocked down and brutally 
 beaten by an officer of the Admijiistration at a 
 theater in Philadelphia because he netrlected to 
 fakr off his hat when it was announced that the 
 President was coming in.' As expressive of the 
 monarchical spirit of the Party in power, an ad- 
 
 iWritings of John Wood, historian of tlic times. 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 19 
 
 dress to the President dated May 1st, 1798, de- 
 clared : "We, the subscribers, inhabitants and 
 citizens of Boston, beg leave to express to you, the 
 Chief Magistrate and Supreme Ruler of the United 
 States, our fullest approbation of all the measures 
 you have been pleased to adopt under direction of 
 Divine Aufhorifi/.'' Surely that was the doctrine 
 of the Divine Right of Kings unadulterated! 
 
 The defeat and overthrow of the despotic and 
 unconstitutional regime of the Federalist Party 
 was accomplished by the wisdom and patriotism 
 of the United South under the leadership of Jef- 
 ferson and Madison. Those pure patriots and 
 incorruptible statesmen drew up the famous "Vir- 
 ginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798," which 
 were adopted by the Legislatures of Virginia and 
 Kentucky and accepted by the entire South with 
 the same unanimity with which they were con- 
 demned and rejected by the North. 
 
 These Resolutions "pointedly condemn all the 
 despotic and revolutionary acts of the Adams Ad- 
 ministration as subversive of the free Govern- 
 ment of the United States, and clearly set forth 
 all the powers of the Federal Government as re- 
 sulting from a compact or agreement between 
 sovereign and independent States, each State pos- 
 sessing 'an equal right to decide for itself as well 
 of infractions as of the mode and manner of re- 
 dress.' " 
 
 The Federalists, thus attacked in their strong- 
 hold, raised a wild cry of alarm and desperation, 
 but the friends of Democracy everywhere. North 
 as well as South, adopted the resolutions as their 
 
20 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 written creed of political faith, and on that plat- 
 form Jefferson was elected President and the Fed- 
 eralists were hurled from power. The wildest 
 excesses of violent language and actions marked 
 the downfall of the defeated Federalists. Jeffer- 
 son was denounced as "an infidel," "a Jacobin," "a 
 traitor" and "a scoundrel." These vile epithets 
 were hurled at the head of the author of the 
 Declaration of Independence from pulpits, ros- 
 trums and letrislative halls all over the North, and 
 from the Editorial rooms of every Federalist 
 newspaper in the country. 
 
 The hatred of Jefferson and all the leading 
 statesmen of the South did not die with that gen- 
 eration, but parents taught their children to hate, 
 not only the leaders, but the whole Southern peo- 
 ple, thus sowing the seeds of that "irrepressible 
 conflict" which should, in the coming years, either 
 df\siroy the Union, which they hated, or crush the 
 Soiiih under a deluge of murder and rapine. 
 
 Thus defeated in their purpose to lead or drive 
 the people into a form of government administered 
 on Monarchical n)'inciples, and igiiominioiisly 
 driven from powt^r by the election of JefTer.son, 
 the Federalist leaders set to work with renewed 
 dofevmination and envenomed hate to excite the 
 resentment and infhime the passions of their fol- 
 lowers to such a pitch of fanaticism as would 
 enable them to disrupt the Union and destroy the 
 Constitution, both of whu-h they had always hafed 
 and reviled. Abundant histr)rical and irrefutable 
 proof of this fact could bo compiled from many 
 sources, but the limits of this paper will not ad- 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 21 
 
 mit such voluminous records. In a letter dated 
 in 1796 Mr. Jefferson says: "The Alien and 
 Sedition Laws are working hard. For my own 
 part I consider the laws merely as an experiment 
 on the American mind to see how far it will bear 
 an avowed violation of the Constitution. If this 
 goes down we shall immediately see another act 
 of Congress declaring that the President shall 
 continue in office during life, reserving to another 
 occasion the transfer of the succession to his heirs 
 and the establishment of a Senate for life." In a 
 letter to Samuel Ringgold, written from Ports- 
 mouth, New Hampshire, in 1800, John Langdon 
 says: "In a conversation between Mr. Adams, 
 Mr. Taylor and myself, Mr. Adams certainly ex- 
 pressed a hope or expectation that his friend, 
 Giles, would see the day when he would be con- 
 vinced that the people of America would not be 
 happy without an hereditary Chief Magistrate 
 and Senate, or, at least, for life." In another 
 letter Jefferson says : "A weighty minority of 
 the Federalist leaders, considering a voluntary 
 conversion into a Monarchy as too distant, if not 
 too desperate, wish to break off from our Union 
 its eastern fragment, as being in fact the hotbed 
 of American Monarchism, with a view to the com- 
 mencement of their favorite government, from 
 which other States may gangrene by degrees and 
 the whole, thus by degrees be brought to the de- 
 sired point." 
 
 Matthew Cary, an eminent author in his day, 
 compiles a volume of facts in his great work, "The 
 Olive Branch," showing a conspiracy in New Eng- 
 
22 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 land to break up the Union as early as 1796. The 
 following extract is a sample of the well attested 
 facts he there records: 
 
 "A Northern Confederacy has been their object 
 for a number of yeai\s. They have repeatedly ad- 
 vocated in the public prints a separation of the 
 States on account of pretended discordant views 
 and interests of the different sections. This 
 project of separation was formed shortly after the 
 adoption of the Federal Constitution, Whether it 
 was ventured before the pul)lic earlier than 179G 
 I know not, but of its promulgation that year 
 there is most indubitable evidence. To sow dis- 
 cord, jealousy and hostility between different sec- 
 tions of the Union was the first grand step in 
 their career in order to accomplish the favorite 
 object of a separation of the States. For eighteen 
 years, therefore, from 1796 to 1814, the most un- 
 ceasing endeavors have been used to poison the 
 minds of the people of the Eastern States towards, 
 and to alienate them from their fellow citizens of 
 the Southern States. Nothing can exceed the 
 violence of these caricatures, some of which 
 would have suited the ferocious inhabitants of 
 New Zealand rather than a civilized and polished 
 nation.'" 
 
 In that same year of 1796 there were published 
 in Hartford, Connecticut, a series of papers over 
 the signature of 'Telham" which, Cary tells us. 
 "were the joint production of men of the finest 
 talent in New Itlngland." This extract from the 
 first number of those papers will amply show that 
 
 'The <)liv<- liraiu'li, Miiltlicw (aiy, l.ilirary o( (."oiigrcss. 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 23 
 
 they were launched for the sole and undisguised 
 purpose of destroying the Union, of which unpar- 
 donable sin the South was afterwards, and is still, 
 so bitterly accused and reviled, by the children 
 and descendants of those same people: 
 
 "The Northern States can exist as a nation 
 without any connection with the Southern. It 
 cannot be contested that if the Southern States 
 were possessed of the same political ideas, our 
 Union would be more close, but when it becomes 
 a serious question whether we must give up our 
 government or part with the States south of the 
 Potomac no man north of that river whose heart 
 is not thoroughly Democratic can hesitate what 
 decision to make." And this was written in 1796. 
 
 It shows the fealty of the South to Democratic 
 principles of government, and her love and vener- 
 ation for the Constitution was the cause of all 
 the cunning hatred and abuse heaped upon her 
 by the Federalist Monarchy loving leaders of New 
 England. They deliberately plotted and planned 
 to overthrow and destroy the Union, which had 
 been established by the adoption of the Constitu- 
 tion only eight years before, because the South 
 was so thoroughly Democratic. 
 
 Thus was inaugurated at that early day an un- 
 relenting political and social war upon the South 
 by the Federalists of the New England States 
 which raged with increasing estrangement and 
 hatred until the threatening war cloud burst at 
 last upon the country in a deluge of blood. 
 
THE PERRY Pictures. i i 6. 
 
 BOSTON EDITION. 
 
 COPYRIGHT, '909, BY EUGENE A. PERRY 
 
 THOMAS J E F F E R S .N 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 During the troubled period of nearly seventy- 
 years, from 1796 to 1860, while the muttering 
 thunders of discord and dissolution were gather- 
 ing increasing force and intensity, if all the vile 
 abuse and vituperation of the South which was 
 published in Northern papers and books were 
 gathered into one stupendous work it would form 
 an encyclopedia of a hundred folio volumes. 
 
 But the complete triumph and ascendancy of 
 the Democratic Party over that pernicious South 
 hating, Union reviling faction saved the country 
 from open rupture for the long period of over 
 sixty years. 
 
 The political, moral and social peace of the 
 country was broken and destroyed by the old Fed- 
 eralist Party nearly three quarters of a century 
 before the Union was finally torn asunder as an 
 inevitable result of their traitorous teachings and 
 perpetual wrangling. But there existed through- 
 out the Northern States, both in and out of New 
 England, a weighty minority of patriotic men 
 whose true Democratic principles could not be 
 shaken or swerved or seduced from their loyalty 
 and devotion to the Government established by 
 the wisdom of the fathers and cemented by the 
 blood of the Revolution and they, standing 
 squarely with the solid South under the leader- 
 ship of such men as Jefferson and Madison and 
 Monroe and Mason and a host of others tried and 
 true, both north and south of the Potomac, made 
 it possible to protect, defend and preserve the 
 
20 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 integrity ol the Uniuii and tlic Cunstitutiun until 
 the lateful year of 1860. 
 
 In 1809 a conspiracy was discovered, between 
 the agents of the British Government in Canada 
 and the leading Federalists of New England, to 
 disrupt the Union and establish a Northern Con- 
 federacy in political alliance with the Government 
 of England. Mr. Madison was then President and, 
 in a message to Congress, he said: "I lay before 
 Congress copies of certain documents which re- 
 main in the Department of State. They prove 
 that, at a recent period, on the part of the British 
 CJovernment, through its public ministry here, a 
 secret agent of that Government was employed 
 in certain States, more especially at the seat of 
 (Jovernment in the State of Massachusetts, in 
 fomenting disaffection to the constituted authori- 
 ties of the country ; and intrigued with the dis- 
 affected for the purpose of bringing about resist- 
 ance to the laws ; and eventually, in concert with 
 a British force, of destroying the Union, and 
 forming the eastern part thereof into a political 
 connection with Great Britain.'" 
 
 This astonishing message to Congress created a 
 great flutter and wild consternation among the 
 New England Federalists and traitors to the Un- 
 ion. It established, by unmistakable and indis- 
 putable proofs, that they had guiltily and traitor- 
 ously conspired with a foreign power to disrupt 
 and overthrow the Union because they had failed 
 to subvert the Democratic form of Government 
 established by the people. The British conspira- 
 
 'MfSbUKts of the rrc'suiciits. 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 27 
 
 tor who was sent to inaugurate and conduct this 
 shameful conspiracy to overthrow and destroy the 
 Government established by the Fathers of the 
 country wrote back to those who employed him 
 that he found the leaders of New England ripe 
 and ready for anything which could be made to 
 sever the Union, but that love for the Union was 
 so strong among the masses of the people who 
 had fought and suffered to establish it that he 
 doubted if it could be dissolved at the time and in 
 the manner in which it has been undertaken ; and 
 suggested that the only feasible way in which 
 disunion could be successfully accomplished would 
 be to start some sectional question or dispute by 
 which the prejudices and passions of the people 
 could be excited and embroiled to the point of 
 physical strife and, thus, accomplish the object of 
 dissolution. 
 
 In the war of 1812 between the United States 
 and England the Federalists of New England sym- 
 pathized with England as far as they could pos- 
 sibly go without actually taking up arms against 
 the United States. John Quincy Adams, a Mas- 
 sachusetts man of the straightest sect, but one 
 who is given credit for the honesty of his utter- 
 ances, is forced to declare that: "In the Eastern 
 States curses and anathemas were liberally hurled 
 from the Pulpits on the heads of all those who 
 sided, directly or indirectly, in carrying on the 
 war." Caleb Strong was then Governor of Mas- 
 sachusetts. The following resolution was intro- 
 duced in the Legislature of that State: "And, 
 therefore, be it resolved that we recommend to 
 
28 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 his Excellency, Caleb Strong, to take the revenue 
 of the State into his own hands, arm and equip 
 the militia and declare us independent of the 
 Union." 
 
 At the same time Fisher Ames, one of the most 
 distinguished leaders of political thought in New 
 England, said: "Our country is too big for Un- 
 ion, too sordid for patriotism, too Democratic for 
 liberty. Our disease is Democracy ; it is not the 
 skin, only, that festers, our very bones are cari- 
 ous, and their marrow blackens with gangrene." 
 
 The Rev, Dr. Dwight, a grandson of Jonathan 
 Edwards, President of Yale University and ac- 
 counted one of the ablest theologians of New 
 England, said: "The Declaration of Independence 
 is a wicked thing. I thought so when it was pro- 
 claimed, and I think so still." 
 
 One of the leading papers of Boston declared as 
 the sentiment of the Party: "We never fought 
 for a republic. The form of our Government was 
 the result of necessity, not the offspring of 
 choice." 
 
 The Boston Gazette threatened President Mad- 
 ison with death if he attempted to compel the 
 Eastern States to fight against^ England at that 
 time. 
 
 And yet, in after years, those same people, or 
 their descendants, raised a howl of Pharisaical in- 
 dignation and hurled an avalanche of abuse at Vir- 
 ginia because when their idol, Lincoln, required 
 her to "level her guns on her Southern sisters," 
 she refused and exercised her reserved and uii- 
 
 *S«e filet of Bottoii Gaz«tt« i> Library of Coiigreti. 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES £9 
 
 questioned right to withdraw from the Union, 
 rather than violate the Constitution under which 
 we lived. 
 
 Time was now fully ripe for those scheming dis- 
 unionists to put in effect the threats, and bring to 
 fruition the plots which, for twenty years, they 
 had been breathing and incubating ; and this orig- 
 inal secession movement reached its culmination 
 in the famous Hartford Convention. 
 
 As previously noted, this movement was first 
 set in motion by the publication of the Pelham 
 Papers in the Hartford Courant commencing in 
 1798.' Moved by the spirit and led by the teach- 
 ings of these publications, various acts and utter- 
 ances, both by legislative enactment and the pop- 
 ular voice, paved the way for the assembling of 
 that body of secessionists at Hartford. In the 
 Massachusetts Legislature on June 15, 1813, Jo- 
 siah Quincy offered a resolution which declared 
 that "in a war like the present, waged withop' 
 justifiable cause and prosecuted in a manner 
 which indicates that conquest and ambition are 
 its real motives, it is not becoming a moral and 
 religious people to express any approbation of 
 military or naval exploits which are not immedi- 
 ately connected with the defence of our seacoast 
 and soil." On February 18, 1814, a report to the 
 Massachusetts Legislature declared, almost in the 
 exact language of Madison's Virginia Resolution 
 in 1798. that, "Whenever the National Compact is 
 violated and the citizens of the State oppressed 
 by cruel and unauthorized laws, the Legislature 
 
 JScvidder's American Commonwealths— Connecticut, pp. 350-52. 
 
30 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 is bound to interpose its power and wrest from 
 the oppressor its victim.'" On October 16, the 
 Legislature of Massachusetts voted to raise a 
 million dollars to support a State army of ten 
 thousand men to protect her own borders inde- 
 pendent of the National Government and to re- 
 quest the New England States to meet in conven- 
 tion for the furtherance of her scneme to estab- 
 lish a government apart from, and independent of, 
 the existing Union. 
 
 Two days later, on the 18th day of October, the 
 Legislature in joint session, by the overwhelming 
 vote of 226 to 67, appointed twelve delegates to 
 represent the State of Massachusetts in the seces- 
 sion convention. By similar joint action the 
 Legislature of Connecticut appointed seven dele- 
 gates, and the Legislature of Rhode Island ap- 
 pointed four. New Hampshire sent two delegates 
 and Vermont one, all of whom were appointed by 
 Conventions of the people.- 
 
 The Convention met at Hartford, Connecticut, 
 on December 15, 1814, and remained in session 
 three weeks, adjourning on the 5th of January, 
 1815. Bishop Chase, of the Episcopal Church, 
 was requested to open the Convention with prayer 
 but refused, saying he "knew no form of prayer 
 for rebellion." 
 
 All the deliberations of the Convention were 
 conducted in secret session behind closed doors, 
 therefore contemporary histories contain no de- 
 tailed accounts of the debates and deliberative 
 
 iProf. Hart, Epochs of American History, pp. 216-17. 
 SDwiK'lifs History of flic Hartford Convention. 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 31 
 
 actions of the body. Its sessions, however, were 
 closely watched by the loyal and conservative ele- 
 ment on the outside and at intervals a file of sol- 
 diers were marched around the building, followed 
 by the usual j^atherinj? of boys and young men, 
 with fife and drum in derision and contempt play- 
 ing the "Rogue's March." 
 
 Mr. Jefferson, in his correspondence wrote of 
 the Convention while in session, "It is a disagree- 
 able circumstance, but not a dangerous one. If 
 they become neutral we are sufficient for one 
 enemy without them ; and, in fact, we get no aid 
 from them now." 
 
 Although all its deliberations had been in 
 secret, the Convention, on adjournment, adopted 
 a final and full report which was widely published. 
 This report submitted a long list of proposed 
 amendments to the Federal Constitution which 
 were so sweeping and radical in their demands 
 that compliance therewith would have stripped 
 the General Government of practically all finan- 
 cial and military support and effected a virtual 
 dissolution of the Constitution. Thinly veiled 
 behind the whole report was an implied deter- 
 mination to withdraw from the Union unless 
 those demands were met and complied with. 
 Thus, the report declared that the Constitution 
 had been violated and that "States which have 
 no common umpire must be their own judges and 
 execute their own decisions."^ 
 
 Provision was also made for another Conven- 
 
 iMcDonald's Select Documents, pp. 189-207; Jiart's Epochs of 
 American History, pp. 217-18. 
 
32 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 tion to meet in Boston on the second Thursday 
 in June following, to put in effect the line of 
 action marked out by the Hartford Convention, 
 such action, of course, to be determined by the 
 disposition made of the report by Congress, before 
 which body it was to be laid. 
 
 The Legislatures of Massachusetts and Con- 
 necticut appointed three Commissioners to pro- 
 ceed to Washington and lay this ultimatum before 
 the General Government, but before they arrived 
 at the Capital news reached them that peace with 
 England had been declared and the report was 
 never submitted. I have dwelt thus upon these 
 purely historical facts and incidents for two rea- 
 sons, first, to show that up to the time when the 
 Southern States quietly seceded, thus doing ex- 
 actly what the New England States had so early, 
 so often and so persistently threatened to do, but 
 had not the moral courage to put into effect, no 
 party of men, and no section of the country had 
 ever thought of denying or questioning the legal 
 and moral right of the States to withdraw from 
 the Union whenever their Constitutional rights 
 were violated or disregarded by the general Gov- 
 ernment ; the right of secession had, in the superb 
 language of John W. Daniel, "been preached upon 
 the hustings, enunciated in political platforms, 
 proclaimed in the Senate and in the House of 
 Representatives, embodied in our literature, 
 taught in schools and Colleges, interwoven with 
 the texts of our jurisprudence and maintained by 
 scholars, statesmen and constituencies of all States 
 and sections of the country," the States, them^ 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 83 
 
 selves, to be the Judges of when and how those 
 rights were violated; and, secondly, to show and 
 impress upon our children, what all the world 
 now knows, that the New England States were 
 the hotbed from which sprang the original doc- 
 trine of secession, and their soil the fruitful field 
 in which were propagated the noxious and noi- 
 some weeds of sectional hatred and political dis- 
 solution. 
 
 Thus foiled and headed off, as we have seen, 
 in their nefarious scheming and intrigue to an- 
 tagonize the sections and overthrow the Govern- 
 ment established by Washington and Jefferson 
 and Madison, and finding themselves permanent- 
 ly driven from power by the Jeffersonian, or 
 Democratic Party, the old disunion Party of Ham- 
 ilton and Adams, following the suggestion of the 
 British conspirator, Henry, who was exposed and 
 driven from the country by President Madison, 
 set about to find some sectional and social issue 
 on which they could rally and keep alive their 
 waning partisan strength. 
 
 They settled upon Negro Slavery, that "Hion of 
 all our woes." The Southern States, and especial- 
 ly Virginia, had always opposed slavery, and 
 struggled hard to resist and prevent its introduc- 
 tion into the Colonies. "Again and again," ac- 
 cording to the historian, Bancroft, "they had 
 passed laws restraining the importation of slaves 
 from Africa, but all their laws were disallowed"^ 
 and set aside by the ruling powers, both at home 
 and across the sea. Finally, in 1772, the House of 
 
 iHistory United States, Bancroft, Vol. 3, p. 410. 
 
34 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 Burgesses of Virjjfinia addressed a pathetic peti- 
 tion directly to the Kinj^ of Enghind imploring 
 "Your Majesty's paternal assistance in averting a 
 calamity of the most alarming nature. The im- 
 portation of slaves from the coast of Africa hath 
 long been considered as a trade of great inhuman- 
 ity, and under its present encouragement we have 
 too much reason to fear will endanger the very 
 existence of your Majesty's American domin- 
 ions."- But the King and his Ministers continued 
 to turn a deaf ear to all such appeals, and George 
 the Third issued instructions under his own hand 
 commanding the Governor of the Colony "upon 
 pain of the highest displeasure to assent to no 
 laws by which the importation of slaves should 
 be in any respect prohibited or obstructed." 
 
 That the wild rage of New England fanaticism 
 aroused and exhibited by the leaders of the old 
 disunion party in prosecuting their newly dis- 
 covered fad of abolitionism arose from any love 
 for, or sympathy with, the negro is too shallow 
 and transparent a pretense to need serious refuta- 
 tion. Slavery had existed in every one of the 
 Northern States, and the wealthy ship owners of 
 New England were actively engaged in the in- 
 famf)us but lucrative slave trade, and many of the 
 leaders of their party had grown rich by bringing 
 negroes to our shores and selling them to the 
 Southern planters. But the climate of the North- 
 ern States was so cold, and the main industries 
 of New England being directed to manufactures 
 and commerce, the savage and untutored negro 
 
 -Journal of the Uousc of Burgcssis, p. IJl. 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 35 
 
 from the hot jungles of Africa was found to be 
 unprofitable, and after the most salable and valu- 
 able had been run off and sold to the South, and 
 the money securely pocketed, the few remaining 
 were declared free. 
 
 The most convincing and damning proof of the 
 insincerity and hypocrisy of New England's pre- 
 tended love for the negro and abhorence of slavery 
 was shown in the framing and adoption of the 
 Federal Constitution in 1787. Then was the su- 
 preme opportunity for the suppression of the 
 abominable slave trade thus paving the way for 
 gradual and final emancipation. Virginia lal3ored 
 earnestly, entreated, implored and voted for its 
 immediate suppression, in which she was joined 
 by New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware, but 
 the votes of New Hampshire, Massachusetts and 
 Connecticut caused its defeat and secured a pro- 
 longation of the infamous traflftc for twenty years, 
 from 1787 to 1808.' Thus the avarice and in- 
 humanity of New England obtained for her a 
 twenty years' extension of license to prey upon a 
 harmless and inoffensive race, and fill her coffers 
 with blood money wrung from the helpless Afri- 
 can, while she had ample time either to dispose 
 of her ships or direct her commerce into other 
 channels. 
 
 'Critical Periods in American History, p. 264. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 After the adoption of the "Missouri Compro- 
 mise" and the admission of that State into the 
 Union, by which measures slavery was restricted 
 to the territory south of a line running thirty-six 
 degrees and thirty minutes North, a season of 
 comparative quiet ensued during which period ex- 
 tending from 1820 to 1840, arose the great issues 
 of Bank, Tariff and other questions of internal 
 policy upon which parties divided and which were 
 fought out under the leadership of such men as 
 Jackson, Clay, Calhoun, Webster, Hayne and other 
 patriots and statesmen of national fame. 
 
 But all that while the leaven of abolitionism 
 was working quietly and insidiously among the 
 masses of New England, and fanatics sprang up 
 all over the country, proclaiming "the enormity 
 of slavery as a sin and a crime against God." 
 
 In 1821 was commenced the publication of the 
 first Abolition paper called "The Genius of Uni- 
 versal Emancipation." In 1823 the first Abolition 
 Society was organized, and similar societies 
 sprang up in rapid succession all over New Eng- 
 land. Money was lavished to spread the new 
 doctrine that slavery was "a crime," and slave- 
 holders were "thieves" and "murderers." These 
 slanders upon such men as Washington, Jeffer- 
 son, Madison and many other great and good men, 
 statesmen whose valor and patriotism and wis- 
 dom had achieved the independence of the country 
 and established th« Government, all of whom 
 
38 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 were slaveholders, at first provoked difficulties 
 and riots all over the North, the people being, as 
 yet, unperverted by the abominable and disgust- 
 ing teachings of negro equality and miscegena- 
 tion. In 1884 the house of an abolition leader was 
 mobbed in New York; the church of an abolition 
 preacher was attacked, and a hall in which an 
 abolition meeting was being held in Philadelphia, 
 was burned down.' 
 
 Still, those raving fanatics continued their work 
 of printing books, tracts, pamphlets, magazines 
 and newspapers and scattering them broadcast 
 over the country without money and without 
 price. They had, at last, found a "sectional issue" 
 and a "social question" upon which they could 
 vent all their fanatical rage, and enlist and com- 
 bine all their powers and resources — hate-inspired 
 falsehood and misrepresentations — to drive the 
 South from a Union which they, themselves, had 
 always hated, and from which, for seventy years, 
 had been longing and threatening to withdraw. 
 
 No question could have been better suited to 
 their purpose. The great body of the negroes 
 were in the Southern States, and the Northern peo- 
 ple outside of New England, in those states where 
 slavery had never found a foothold, or, long since, 
 had ceased to exist, did not, and could not under- 
 stand the real facts and the true conditions of the 
 slaves of the South. They, therefore, were de- 
 pendent on, and fain to accei>t, the reports and 
 pamphlets and newspapers published mostly by 
 unprincipled men and ambitious politicians, and 
 
 l\'oulli's History ot the (irc-at Civil War, p. 445. 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 39 
 
 such books as Uncle Tom's Cabin, itself a vile 
 slander and misleading libel on the whole South- 
 ern people. 
 
 It is a simple historical fact now recognized 
 everywhere, and which no well-informed, un- 
 prejudiced and truth-loving man or woman will 
 wish or dare to deny, that the four million slaves 
 of the South were the best cared for, best con- 
 ditioned and most contented and happy body of 
 negroes that ever existed on earth ; and our form 
 of society had civilized and Christianized them as 
 no section of the negro race had ever been civil- 
 ized and Christianized before. 
 
 But the abolitionists screamed and shouted 
 from the housetops, and proclaimed with blare of 
 trumpets through the land that the Constitution 
 framed, and the Government established by Wash- 
 ington and Jefferson and Madison and Mason pro- 
 tected the Southern people in the most shameful 
 and sinful and cruel system of oppression ever 
 inflicted on a helpless and downtrodden people. 
 
 William Lloyd Garrison, who has the unenvi- 
 able distinction of being the father of the abolition 
 societies, commenced his great abolition move- 
 ment by publicly burning the Constitution of the 
 United States. And years afterwards he declared 
 in a speech that: "No act of ours do we regard 
 with more conscientious approval or higher satis- 
 faction than when, sevei-al years ago, on the 
 Fourth of July, in the presence oi' a great as- 
 sembly we committed to the flames the Constitu- 
 tion of the United States." 
 
 And he said on another occasion : "This Union 
 
40 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 is a lie! The American Union is an imposture — 
 a covenant with death and an agreement with 
 hell. I am for its overthrow. Up with the flag 
 of disunion !" 
 
 Wendell Phillips, perhaps the ablest of all the 
 abolition leaders, said : "The Constitution of our 
 fathers was a mistake. Tear it to pieces and make 
 a better one. Our aim is disunion, breaking up 
 of the States." At an annual abolition convention 
 a resolution was adopted which reads : "Resolved, 
 that the abolitionists of this country should make 
 it one of the primary objects of this agitation to 
 dissolve the American Union." And these same 
 people and their descendants have since had the 
 brazen effrontery to declare that John C. Calhoun, 
 of South Carolina, was the father of disunion. 
 
 Mr. Calhoun, in a speech in the United States 
 Senate on March 7, 1850, said: "No man would 
 feel more happy than myself to believe that this 
 Union, formed by our ancestors, should live for- 
 ever. Looking back to the long course of forty 
 years service here, I have the consolation to believe 
 that I have never done one act to weaken it — that 
 I have done full justice to all sections. And if I 
 have ever been exposed to the imputation of a 
 contrary motive, it is because I have been willing 
 to defend my section from unconstitutional en- 
 croachments." And in another speech the same 
 great statesman said : "Abolition is the only ques- 
 tion of suiiiciont magnitude and potency to divide 
 this Union, and divide it, it will, or drench the 
 country in blood, if not arrested. There are those 
 who see no danger to the Union in the violation 
 
HE PERRY PICTURES. 
 
 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 
 1 757-1804. 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 41 
 
 of all its fundamental principles, but are full of 
 apprehension when danger is foretold. If my 
 attachment for the Union were less, I might 
 tamper with the deep disease that now afflicts the 
 body politic, and keep silent until the patient was 
 ready to sink under the mortal blows." 
 
 Thus this great Southern statesman, when he 
 knew that he was nearing the end of his career 
 and of his life, yet thrilling with undying love for 
 the Union and the Constitution, heard the mut- 
 tering thunders, saw with prophetic ken the gath- 
 ering storm, and warned his countrymen, both 
 North and South, to rise up in their might and 
 suppress it. 
 
 Jefferson Davis, who was a member during the 
 same term of the United States Senate, said in a 
 speech delivered in that body on June 27, 1850: 
 "If I have a superstition, Sir, which governs my 
 mind and holds it captive, it is a superstitious 
 reverence for the Union. If one can inherit a sen- 
 timent I may be said to have inherited this from 
 my revolutionary father." 
 
 By all the preceding facts and utterances, culled 
 from the authentic histories of the times, it is 
 clearly established beyond doubt or cavil, that the 
 wicked doctrine of disunionism had its birth and 
 origin in the North; and while the abolitionists 
 were boldly and wickedly preaching up a mad cru- 
 sade against the Union, and educating a genera- 
 tion to hate the Government of our fathers, South- 
 ern men and the great leaders of the South were 
 begging, imploring and pleading for "Union, Con- 
 stitution and Enforcement of the Laws." 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 After the great questions of Bank and Tariff, 
 which, for twenty years had arrayed the two great 
 parties of the country, the Whig and the Demo- 
 cratic parties, against each other in fiery debate, 
 though without sectional bitterness, had been, as 
 it was hoped, finally disposed of, and during the 
 season of quiet which followed the Whig party 
 commenced gradually to dissolve and disintegrate, 
 although they put a national ticket for President 
 in the field in 1860. After that campaign, and 
 during the momentous events which followed the 
 party disappeared entirely, as an organization, 
 from the arena of American politics. 
 
 But during the latter part of the period men- 
 tioned, from 1850 to 1854, a shrewd and unscru- 
 pulous politician, William H. Seward, of New 
 York, conceived the plan of creating a new po- 
 litical party on which he could, himself, ride into 
 power. Seward commenced life as a "Yankee 
 Schoolmaster" in the South, where he was treated 
 with that kind but condescending indifference ac- 
 corded to all of his hireling class of adventurers 
 by the proud and highminded planters and landed 
 proprietors of that section. General Donn Piatt, 
 who rose to a position of prominence in the Fed- 
 eral Army, was a personal friend of Seward, 
 whom he thus describes in his character sketches 
 after the war : "Seward looked down on the white 
 men of the South in the same cynical way that he 
 did upon the slaves. He had no pity for the slaves 
 
44 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 and no hatred for the master. He had contempt 
 for them all, which he concealed as carefully as he 
 did his contempt for the United States Constitu- 
 tion. Seward had trained himself to believe that 
 worldly wickedness indicated ability. He thought 
 to be bad was to be clever. He thought devotion 
 to wine, women and infidelity gave proof of su- 
 perior intelligence. He affected a wickedness he 
 did not always feel because such wickedness, in his 
 estimation, was good form.'" 
 
 In politics Seward was a Hamiltonian Federal- 
 ist, who had been Governor of the State of New 
 York and was now in the United States Senate. 
 The old Federalist party, long ago crushed and 
 driven from power, had lain broken and helpless 
 for more than two decades. Seward knew that 
 the abolitionists of New England had, by thirty 
 years of education of the public mind and the 
 persistent training of a rising generation, created 
 throughout the North a passionate and undying 
 liatred of the South and her institutions, and he 
 determined, by uniting that element with the 
 broken remains of the old Federalist organization, 
 to create a new sectional party which should sweep 
 itself into power and secure the darling and long 
 cherished purpose of both factions — the overthrow 
 of the Constitution and the destruction of the 
 labor system of the South. 
 
 With that wicked programme in view this wily 
 politician, William II. Seward, who afterwards 
 became Secretary of State in Lincoln's Cabinet, 
 and, as such, the real head of the Federal Govern- 
 
 iThc iMcn Who Saved the I'nion. Doiin Pratt, pp. 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 45 
 
 ment, issued a call for a Convention to meet at 
 Auburn, New York, on September 26, 1854, "to 
 organize a Republican Party which shall represent 
 the friends of freedom." This meeting of de- 
 structionists determined to issue a call for a Con- 
 vention to be composed of delegates from the 
 Northern states only, to meet on July 4, 1856, and 
 nominate a candidate for President of the United 
 States. The Convention met according to pro- 
 gramme and nominated John C. Fremont. 
 
 Thus was born that purely sectional party 
 which arbitrarily assumed the honored name 
 previously borne by the followers of Jefferson, and 
 was known throughout the War and the darker 
 Reconstruction Period which followed, as the 
 Black Republican Party; a party which deluged 
 the country with blood, sacrificed a million lives 
 and destroyed untold billions of property — an ap- 
 palling hecatomb piled on the altar of sectional 
 hate and unreasoning fanaticism. 
 
 Then arose the great Kansas excitement. 
 Kansas was a territory lying west of the State of 
 Missouri, and, therefore, south of the extended 
 line of 36 degrees and 30 minutes which was 
 agreed upon by the "Missouri Compromise" as the 
 northern limit of slavery. When this territory 
 After the word "slavery" in 8th line from bottom of 
 page 45 read: But that provision of the "Missouri Com- 
 promise" was automatically repealed by the passage, in 
 1854. of the "Kansas-Nebraska Bill" which gave to the 
 people of those territories the right to decide for them- 
 selves the question of "slavery" or "no slavery" whenever 
 they should organize state governments and make applica- 
 tion for admission as states into the Union. When, under 
 those circumstances, Kansas was thrown open to settle- 
 ment it became at once apparent that the territory would 
 be occupied largely by Southern people moving into the 
 new El Dorado and taking their slaves with them. The 
 abolitionists, etc. 
 
46 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 tionists were rushed out to take possession of the 
 country and prevent it from becoming a "Slave 
 State." 
 
 One of the leaders of those adventurers was 
 John Brown, whose aim and ambition was to get 
 up a war if he could. The abolition preachers 
 all over New England were active and zealous in 
 exciting their people to deeds of violence and 
 bloodshed. 
 
 Henry Ward Beecher. the idolized and lionized 
 pastor of the famous "Plymouth Congregation," 
 told his people that in dealing with slaveholders 
 "Sharp's rifles are better than Bibles," and that 
 "it is a crime to shoot at a slaveholder and not hit 
 him." 
 
 All over New England and largely in the North- 
 ern States this fanaticism prevailed. Ministers 
 of the Gospel of Peace bought and distributed 
 guns and rifles for the Devil's work of crime and 
 l)loodshod. The North was being slowly but sure- 
 ly educated for the carnival of slaughter and arson 
 that speedily followed. 
 
 I have shown indisputably all through this 
 paper that there had always existed at the North 
 a powerful element opposed to the Union as it was 
 formed and the Government as it was administ- 
 ered. Yet, throughout that long period from the 
 formation of the Government, in 1787. to Lin- 
 coln's election in 1860. not one single Southern 
 statesman ever raised his voice against the Union 
 as it was organized by our patriotic forefathers. 
 The South was solid in its admiration of, and its 
 devotion to the principles of Government on which 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 47 
 
 the Union was founded. But on this vital subject 
 the North was divided. The Democratic party 
 was attached to the Union and devoted to its 
 principles. The Black Republican party was an 
 enemy to both the Union and the Constitution. 
 
 As already shown, there were in the Republican 
 party as organized, two factions, the fanatical 
 abolitionists, and the survivors or representatives 
 of the old Federalist or Hamiltonian party. But 
 they were united in their desire and aim to trample 
 upon the Constitution and revolutionize the Gov- 
 ernment; and nothing that the South could have 
 done less than an entire and absolute surrender 
 of her institutions and all her rights as separate 
 and independent states would have satisfied them. 
 Their plans and intentions were plainly set forth 
 in a speech by Governor Banks, of Massachusetts, 
 in 1856, in which he said : "I can conceive of a 
 time when this Constitution shall not be in exist- 
 ence — when we shall have an absolute dictatorial 
 government transmitted from age to age, with 
 men at its head who are made rulers by military 
 commission, or who claim an hereditary right to 
 govern those over whom they are placed." When 
 the war which those unreasoning fanatics forced 
 upon the South did finally burst in all its fury, this 
 same Banks became a General in the invading 
 army, and after his flight across the Potomac from 
 the Shenandoah Valley to escape the pursuing 
 vengeance of Stonewall Jackson's "foot cavalry," 
 in another speech at Arlington he said, pointing 
 to the Capitol in Washington : "When this war is 
 over, that will be the Capitol of a great nation. 
 
48 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 Then there will be no longer New Yorkers, Penn- 
 sylvanians and Virginians, but we shall all be 
 simply Americans." Senator Cameron, of Penn- 
 sylvania, expressed the same views and sentiments 
 at a public dinner in Washington and those views 
 were echoed and re-echoed all over the North by 
 the henchmen and mouthpieces of the new party, 
 l)lainly showing that the aim and object of that 
 party was to crush the South into submission, de- 
 stroy the autonomy of all the States and consoli- 
 date thom all into one great despotic Government. 
 And that is exactly the kind of government they 
 did force upon the country in the Administration 
 of Abraham Lincoln. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 Lincoln was nominated for the Presidency by 
 the Convention which met in Chicago in 1860, and 
 the campaign which resulted in his election was 
 conducted with such a spirit of violence and ma- 
 lignity towards the South that our people were 
 thoroughly alarmed and fully convinced that their 
 society and their lives would not be safe in the 
 Union if that party should come into power. 
 
 An infamous book breathing sedition and mur- 
 der had been published the year before known as 
 "The Helper Book,'" and a hundred thousand 
 copies of it were circulated with money raised by 
 subscription among the Black Republican mem- 
 bers of Congress. This abominable book boldly 
 threatened the people of the South with assassina- 
 tion and death by any means that would enable 
 those vandals to liberate the slaves and subvert 
 the society of the Southern States. A few extracts 
 from its murder-breathing pages will suffice to 
 fix its infamy forever in the memory of ourselves 
 and our children : "Against slaveholders as a 
 body we wage exterminating war." "We contend 
 that slaveholders are more criminal than common 
 murderers." "The negroes, nine cases out of ten, 
 would be delighted at the opportunity to cut their 
 Masters' throats." 
 
 "Smallpox is a nuisance; strychnine is a nuis- 
 ance; mad-dogs are a nuisance, and so are slave- 
 
 iSo called from the name of its author, H. R. Helper, a renegade 
 North Carolinian who "left his country for his country's good." — The 
 Impending Crisis Dissected, Wolfe, pp. 1-45. 
 
50 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 holders ; it is our business, nay it is our impera- 
 tive duty to abate nuisances ; we propose, there- 
 fore, with the exception of strychnine, to extermi- 
 nate this catalogue from beginning to end.'" 
 
 This outrageous book contained three hundred 
 pages of such murderous and abominable stuff 
 and, used as a campaign document in the canvass 
 that resulted in the election of Abraham Lincoln 
 to the Presidency, did not fail to fill the South with 
 indignation and alarm. As previously said, the 
 leading Republican members of Congress sub- 
 scribed for the free distribution of a hundred 
 thousand copies; and William H. Seward, the 
 originator and father of the Black Republican 
 party, gave it his special endorsement in which 
 he declared it "a work of great merit." 
 
 The l)ook was preceded and followed by speeches 
 and pamphlets from radical politicians all over 
 the North that were ecjually disgusting and brutal 
 in tone and sentiment. Joshua Giddings, a lead- 
 ing politician and Congressman of Ohio (Ohio, 
 one of the five states that Virginia had presented 
 as a free gift to the Union), said in one of those 
 bitter and murderous harangues: "I look for- 
 ward to a day when I shall see a servile insurrec- 
 tion in the South. When the black man, supplied 
 with bayonets, shall wage a war of extermination 
 against the whites; when the master shall see his 
 dwelling in flames and his hearth polluted; and 
 though I may not mock at their calamity and 
 laugh when their fear cometh, yet I shall hail it as 
 the dawn of a political millenium." 
 
 iThc Impending Crisis in the South, H. R. Helper, pp. 120-139. 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 51 
 
 Erastus Hopkins said : "If peaceful means fail 
 us and we are driven to the last extremity when 
 ballots are useless, then we will make bullets 
 effective." 
 
 For years Northern pulpits and Northern news- 
 papers and pamphlets and books had boiled and 
 seethed and bubbled over with such bloody threats 
 against the people of the South, who had never 
 harmed or given them cause for offense and only 
 asked to be let alone. 
 
 But time was now fully ripe to wreak their 
 causeless vengeance and put their bloody threats 
 into execution. In 1859, less than two years be- 
 fore the election of Lincoln, John Brown, a native 
 of New England and a sojourner in Kansas, came 
 into Virginia with a band of men for the purpose 
 of inciting and leading an insurrection of the 
 negroes to murder the white men and women and 
 children of the South. Brown and his gang of 
 murderers were armed themselves, and supplied 
 with "pikes, "^ made in New England, to distribute 
 to the negroes, who were ignorant of the use of 
 firearms, and plenty of guns and ammunition 
 bought with money secretly contributed in the 
 North, with which they hoped to inaugurate a gen- 
 eral uprising, and a regular holocaust of murder, 
 arson and rapine. 
 
 But the plot was discovered and nipped in the 
 bud by the prompt and timely action of the State 
 and Federal authorities, and Brown and his gang 
 were captured and hung by regular process of law 
 
 IQne of those pikes is now on exiliibition in the Slate Library at 
 Richmond. 
 
52 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 in the Virginia courts. The calm, deliberate and 
 lawful execution of this man by the sovereign and 
 outraged State of Virginia caused a fearful out- 
 break of fury and rage and redoubled threats of 
 retaliatory vengeance at the North. 
 
 Prayer meetings were held in most of the 
 churches in New England and practically through- 
 out the North and West, including "Bleeding 
 Kansas," who has placed a statue of Brown in the 
 Hall of Fame at the Nation's Capitol, where he 
 stands shoulder to shoulder with those peerless 
 gentlemen and patriots, George Washington and 
 Robert E. Lee. 
 
 Those prayer meetings were held to invoke the 
 vengeance of Heaven on those who had caused the 
 just penalty of the law to fall upon one of the most 
 pitiless murderers ever known in the criminal 
 annals of this country, and bells were tolled to 
 glorify his memory. At a public meeting in 
 Massachusetts, attended by United States Sena- 
 tors and other men of prominence in the i)olitical 
 history of the Puritan State, it was unanimously 
 "Resolved, that it is the right and duty of slaves 
 to resist their masters, and the right and duty of 
 the people of the North to incite them to resist- 
 ance and to aid them in it." 
 
 At Rocheford, Illinois, a public meeting called 
 by the leading citizens, unanimously "Resolved, 
 that the City bells be tolled one hour in commem- 
 oration of John Brown." 
 
 Horace Greeley, the famous founder and Editor 
 of the New York Tribune, and one of the head- 
 lights of the abolition party, said: "Let no one 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 53 
 
 doubt that History will accord an honorable niche 
 to John Brown." 
 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose writings, when 
 purged of the taint of New England fanaticism, 
 are read and admired and quoted approvingly in 
 two hemispheres, said that the hanging of Brown, 
 "made the gallows as glorious as the Cross." And 
 afterwards he added to that sacriligious utterance 
 the further information that "Our Captain Brown 
 is happily a representative of the American Re- 
 public. He did not believe in moral suasion, but 
 in putting things through." 
 
 A volume of many thousand pages might be 
 filled with similar extracts from sermons, prayers, 
 speeches and newspapers all over the North, show- 
 ing the spirit of wild fanaticism and venomous 
 hate that had taken possession of the public mind, 
 or at least, the mind of that portion of the public 
 that was swayed by such fanatical teachers as 
 Garrison and Phillips and Emerson and Beecher 
 and Seward and their immediate dupes and fol- 
 lowers. 
 
 It was in the midst of this wild excitement that 
 Lincoln was nominated for the Presidency by the 
 party which had so universally endorsed and abet- 
 ted Old John Brown's murderous raid into Vir- 
 ginia. 
 
 Thoroughly aroused and alarmed, the Southern 
 people demanded a pledge or guarantee that the 
 bloody and diabolical threats which had been so 
 boldly and boastfully made against their institu- 
 tions and property and lives should not be put 
 into effect in case the Black Republican party 
 
54 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 should come into power and get possession of the 
 Government. Instead of pledges and reasonable 
 assurances, they received sneers, abuse, re- 
 proaches, insults and additional threats. 
 
 The fact is, as was clearly indicated then by 
 "the signs of the times" and fully proven since by 
 the developments of historical truth, the abolition 
 leaders were fully determined on war; and all 
 their tricks and cunning were brought into play 
 to goad or exasperate the South to commit what 
 they chose to call an "overt act" to give them an 
 excuse to let loose the dogs of war. 
 
 As already shown, and as all history fully sub- 
 stantiates, the Southern people had always been 
 contented with the Union as it was established by 
 the fathers, and only desired and demanded their 
 just and equal rights under the Constitution. On 
 the other hand the facts are equally patent and 
 indisputable that in the North there had always 
 been a busy and restless party working, by fair 
 means and foul, to undermine and overthrow the 
 Union because they hated the Constitution and 
 were jealous of, and at enmity with the South be- 
 cause of her controlling influence in the formation 
 and administration of the Government, and of the 
 old grudge growing out of the early conflict be- 
 tween the Monarchial principles of Alexander 
 Hamilton and the free Democratic principles of 
 Thomas Jefferson, which latter principles pre- 
 vailed and triumphed to the utter confusion and 
 overthrow of the former. This old enmity and 
 hatred on the part of the North had smouldered 
 and burned with more or less intensitv ever since 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 55 
 
 the formation of the Government and now, re- 
 cruited and strengthened by the fiery and fanati- 
 cal element of New England abolitionism, the com- 
 bined forces felt themselves strong enough to 
 precipitate on the South the long threatened and 
 long dreaded war. 
 
THE PERRY PICTURES. 2526. _ 
 
 BOSTON EDIT ION JEFFtRSOM L) A V I 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Lincoln was elected in the fall of 1860. He car- 
 ried every Northern State except New Jersey, thus 
 receiving a majority of the electoral votes, but he 
 was in a minority of a million and a half of the 
 popular vote. The Southern people were now 
 thoroughly and fully aroused to the threatening 
 and dangerous situation of affairs. The party 
 coming into power had openly and persistently 
 declared unrelenting and exterminating war 
 against them. The Chicago platform was shrewd- 
 ly and cautiously worded, but the spirit and temper 
 of the party that promulgated it had previously 
 been fully revealed and set forth by the violent 
 and revolutionary utterances of its leading men 
 all over the North, as hereinbefore extensively 
 quoted. 
 
 As showing that the same spirit and intentions 
 still prevailed, Joshua R. Giddings, of Ohio, whose 
 speech on a former occasion is noticed on a previ- 
 ous page of this paper, declared on the floor of 
 the Chicago Convention that its nominees could 
 not get the support of the Abolition wing of the 
 party unless the resolutions pledged the party as 
 a whole to carry out the doctrine that "all men 
 are created equal," which, in the abolition creed, 
 had always meant negro emancipation and negro 
 equality. 
 
 Thus, by a cunning and false use of a popular 
 phrase in the Declaration of Independence, the Chi- 
 cago Convention pledged itself to unprovoked and 
 
58 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 unjust war upon the South to overturn and destroy 
 Southern society, as it existed, and make the negro 
 the political and social equal of the white man, 
 "peaceably, perhaps, if they were permitted to do 
 so, but forcibly if they must," And William H. 
 Seward had avowed the same sentiment in a 
 speech in the United States Senate. In the lan- 
 guage telegraphed to his constituents by the Hon. 
 J. L. M. Curry, then a member of Congress from 
 Alabama, "the last argument for peace had been 
 exhausted" and it was to save themselves from 
 such a destructive and ruinous war that the South- 
 ern States determined to withdraw quietly and 
 peaceably from the Union. 
 
 As previously shown, their right to do so had 
 never been questioned or denied. They had all 
 joined the Union without compulsion and by their 
 own voluntary act, and the best and wisest men, 
 both North and South, had always held and de- 
 clared that the States, having only delegated cer- 
 tain powers to the Federal Government, could re- 
 sume those powers whenever their interests and 
 welfare demanded it. 
 
 As long ago as 1811 Josiah Quincy, of Massa- 
 chusetts, an original and bitter Federalist, who 
 was a member of Congress during Jefferson's ad- 
 ministration, and who lived long enough to become 
 a warm friend and supporter of Lincoln and the 
 abolitionists, said in a speech against the bill to 
 admit Louisiana as a State into the Union that, 
 if the bill passed, "it will be the right of all and 
 the (I lit If of some to prepare for separation ; ami- 
 cably if they can, forcibly if they must." A mem- 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 59 
 
 ber called Mr. Quincy to order for making a 
 "treasonable utterance" but the House of Repre- 
 sentatives fully sustained him. 
 
 Judge William Rawle, of Pennsylvania, one of 
 the ablest constitutional lav^yers in the United 
 States, whom Washington appointed United States 
 District Attorney in 1791, and afterwards ten- 
 dered him a seat in his Cabinet, said in his book 
 "Views of the United States Constitution:" "It 
 depends on the State itself whether it will con- 
 tinue a member of the Union. To deny this right 
 would be inconsistent with the principles upon 
 which our political systems were founded. The 
 States, may wholly withdraw from the Union, but 
 while they continue they must retain the character 
 of representative republics." 
 
 President Jefferson expressed the same view 
 in a few words : "States may wholly withdraw 
 their delegated powers." President Madison, in 
 speaking of the States as the parties to a com- 
 pact, said : "The States, themselves, must be the 
 judges in the last resort whether the bargain 
 made has been preserved or broken." 
 
 In 1833 President John Quincy Adams said if 
 secession ever occurred "it would be better for 
 the people of these disunited States to part in 
 peace from each other than to be held together 
 by constraint." 
 
 In 1850 Salmon P. Chase, afterwards Chief 
 Justice of the United States, said in a speech in 
 the United States Senate that "in the case of a 
 State resuming her powers I know of no remedy 
 to prevent it." In 1861 Edward Everett, of 
 
60 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 Massachusetts, said: "To expect to hold fifteen 
 States in the Union by force is preposterous. If 
 our sister States must leave us, in the name of 
 Heaven let them go in peace." Three days before 
 South Carolina seceded, Horace Greeley said in the 
 New York Tribune, which was always acknowl- 
 edged as a leading organ of the Republican party, 
 that "the Declaration of Independence fully justi- 
 fied her in the act." And again in February, 18G1, 
 the same paper said : "If the Cotton States desire 
 to form an independent nation they have a clear 
 moral right to do so." 
 
 And Abraham Lincoln, himself, after his in- 
 auguration as President, speaking through his 
 Secretary of State, William H. Seward, on the 10th 
 of April, 1861, said that he was "not disposed to 
 reject a cardinal dogma of their (the Secession- 
 ists) namely, that the Federal Government cannot 
 reduce the seceding States to obedience by con- 
 quest even if he were disposed to question the 
 proposition; but, in fact, the President willingly 
 accepts it as true."' 
 
 Thus when in the light of all history, extending 
 over a period of seventy years, and largely drawn 
 from the acts and utterances of their own writers, 
 speakers and leaders, the Southern States, fully 
 convinced by a long and bitter experience of the 
 impossibility of living together in a state of peace 
 and harmony under the same Government with 
 their bitter and implacable enemies, determined, 
 purely as an act of self-defence, and self-preserva- 
 tion, to quietly, and, they hoped, peacefully, with- 
 
 'Lfttcrs and Stato Papers of ANraliam Lincoln, X. & II. 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 61 
 
 draw from the Union, which all history shows, 
 and all the world is now convinced, they had a 
 perfect right to do, a wild hue and cry was raised 
 all over the North by the same people and the 
 same party who had always desired and threatened 
 to do the same thing, that the South had made war 
 on the Government for the purpose of "destroying 
 the Union and perpetuating slavery." 
 
 Their act of withdrawal was in no possible sense 
 a declaration of war upon the Federal Govern- 
 ment. They had simply exercised their undeniable 
 and unquestionable right, as expressed in the 
 language of both Washington and Jefferson, "to 
 resume their delegated powers" for the purpose of 
 governing themselves, and conducting their own 
 affairs in their own way without the continual 
 intermeddling of New England fanatics who were 
 never satisfied to "attend to their own business 
 and leave their neighbors to do the same." 
 
 The Federal Government, with Abraham Lin- 
 coln as a convenient and pliant tool at its head, 
 was driven by the whip and spur of those wild 
 and unreasoning fanatics to inaugurate a bloody 
 and cruel and unjust war upon a numerically weak 
 and defenceless people who only asked to be let 
 alone. 
 
 In retiring from the Union the seceding States 
 offered and entreated peaceful negotiations in re- 
 gard to all the public property claimed by the Fed- 
 eral Government within the jurisdiction of the re- 
 tiring States. The forts and public buildings 
 which they seized and offered to pay for could 
 not have been built without the consent and co- 
 
62 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 operation of the States in which they were locat- 
 ed ; they were built for the protection of the har- 
 bors and cities of those States ; they were, there- 
 fore, "partnership property" each of the States 
 being an equal partner in their ownership, and 
 necessarily w^ent with the withdrawing States who 
 were willing, and offered to pay a just proportion 
 of their cost. 
 
 Thus, the seceding States expressed an earnest 
 desire to adjust all matters of dispute or conten- 
 tion by mutual and friendly agreement. They 
 were neither rebels nor traitors. They acted pure- 
 ly upon their Constitutional rights, as were de- 
 clared and acknowledged by the ablest Statesmen 
 and patriots of all parties and all sections in all 
 ages of the Government, and upon what was the 
 unanimous understanding of the States when they 
 adopted the Constitution. Not a single State 
 would ever have become a member of the Union 
 had she imagined that the Federal Government 
 thus instituted w^ould ever attempt to hold them 
 in it by war and bloodshed. 
 
 But our wise and far-seeing Statesman and 
 orator. Patrick Henry, foresaw the danger, and 
 with all the thunders of his mighty eloquence 
 warned his compatriots of the "poison under its 
 wings," and, by his urgent and persistent advice, 
 the State of Virginia, in her act of ratification and 
 acceptance, inserted a clause expressly reserving 
 the right to withdraw from the Union whenever 
 her rights and privileges under the Constitution 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 63 
 
 were or should be violated or endangered without 
 redress/ 
 
 The leaders of the party that forced and pre- 
 cipitated the war on the South, when they raised 
 the diabolical cry of "rebel" and "traitor," knew 
 in their hypocritical hearts that we were not trait- 
 ors. They, or the majority of them had always 
 been disunionists themselves. Many of them had 
 been talking and writing and threatening seces- 
 sion for thirty years, and their fathers and pre- 
 decessors had done the same thing for more than 
 forty years before them. It was not love for the 
 Union that caused them to wage the war. With 
 some it was a settled and fiendish hatred of the 
 South, with others a foolish and fanatical love 
 of the negro, (at a distance), and with others, 
 still — the descendants and successors of the old 
 Federalist element — a traitorous desire to over- 
 throw the free Government of the United States 
 and establish a consolidated or "strong" govern- 
 ment after annihilating the sovereignty of the 
 States. So much for the leaders. 
 
 Of the great mass of soldiers that were drawn 
 into it some were, doubtless, moved by patriotic 
 motives, others of the more ignorant and least in- 
 formed were made to believe that the South had 
 declared war against the North, and others, still, 
 were swept into the vortex without any motive at 
 all. In the language of a Northern historian, who 
 saw and knew whereof he wrote : "A wild and 
 senseless excitement had broken out. Men did 
 not reason, they raved. Those who hesitated and 
 
 iLife of Patrick Henry, Wm. Wirt and Debates of the Virginia 
 Convention. 
 
64 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 asked 'Why' were knocked down, and the BlacK 
 Repul)lic-an leaders instigated their followers to 
 mob and intimidate and overawe every man who 
 dared to think for himself, and reason or argue 
 about the causes and object of the war.'" 
 
 South Carolina seceded in December, 1860. She 
 was followed in quick succession by all the Gulf 
 States, including Plorida and Louisiana, in Janu- 
 ary, 18G1. 
 
 The South had always loved the Union, and did 
 all she possibly could do with honor and self-re- 
 spect to preserve its integrity without an ignoble 
 and pusillanimous surrender of the rights and 
 privileges guaranteed to her under the Constitu- 
 tion. The spirit of sorrow and deep regret and 
 kindly feeling with which she severed her con- 
 nection with the Northern States cannot be more 
 truly and feelingly expressed than was done by 
 those pure patriots and thrice honorable men, Jef- 
 ferson Davis, the executive head, who guided the 
 destinies of the new born nation, and Robert E. 
 Lee, the Commander-in-Chief of her armies in the 
 field. In retiring from the United States Senate 
 to give his allegiance to, and cast his fortunes 
 with his native State of Mississippi, which had 
 already seceded, Mr. Davis said in closing one of 
 the most feeling and eloquent speeches ever heard 
 in that body: "Then, Senators, we recur to the 
 compact that binds us together; we recur to the 
 principles upon which our Government was found- 
 ed ; and when you deny them, and when j'ou deny 
 to us the right to withdraw from a Government 
 which, thus perverted, threatens to be destructive 
 
 iHistory of the Great Civil War, Ilorton, p. 73, 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 65 
 
 of our rights, we but tread in the path of our 
 fathers when we proclaim our independence and 
 take the hazard. This is done, not in hostility to 
 others, not to injure any section of the country, 
 not even for our own pecuniary benefit ; but from 
 the high and solemn motive of defending and pro- 
 tecting the rights we inherited, and which it is 
 our duty to transmit unshorn to our children. I 
 am sure I feel no hostility toward you. Senators 
 from the North. I am sure there is not one of 
 you, whatever sharp discussion there may have 
 been between us, to whom I cannot now say in the 
 presence of my God, I wish you well ; and I feel I 
 but express the desire of the people I represent 
 when I say I hope, and they hope, for peaceable 
 relations with you, though we must part." 
 
 General Lee said after resigning his commission 
 in the United States Army to offer his stainless 
 sword to his own beloved Virginia: "All the 
 South has ever asked or desired is, that the Union 
 founded by our forefathers should be preserved; 
 and that the Government, as it was originally 
 organized, should be administered in purity and 
 truth." 
 
 And as to the monstrous charge, made in the 
 face of all the accumulated testimony of half a 
 century to the contrary, that the South went to 
 war to destroy the Union and perpetuate slavery. 
 General Lee said on another occasion: "If I 
 owned all the millions of slaves in the South I 
 would free them all with a stroke of the pen to 
 avert the war !" 
 
 In proof of his sincerity, if any proof were 
 
66 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 needed, is the well-known fact that he never owned 
 a slave, except a few he inherited from his moth- 
 er's estate and he emancipated all of them long 
 before the war. Stonewall Jackson never owned a 
 slave except two, a man and a woman that he 
 bought at their own request, and he at once gave 
 them the privilege of buying their freedom with 
 the wages received for their services to reimburse 
 him for the price he paid for them. The man 
 accepted the offer and in due time earned his free- 
 dom ; but the woman declined the offer and chose 
 to remain a servant in General Jackson's family. 
 Joseph E. Johnson never owned a slave and, like 
 General Lee, was sincerely opposed to slavery. 
 A. P. Hill never owned a slave, and regarded 
 "slavery as a great evil." J. E. B. Stuart inherit- 
 ed one slave from his father, and, while serving 
 in the United States army in the far West, pur- 
 chased another. Both of these he disposed of long 
 before the war — one because of her cruelty to his 
 child, and the other he sold to a man who engaged 
 to take the negro back to his old home in Ken- 
 tucky. 
 
 Fitzhugh Lee never owned a slave. 
 
 Commodore Matthew F, Maury, our great 
 "Pathfinder of the Sea," never owned but one 
 slave and she, a domestic, voluntarily remained a 
 servant and member of his family until her death 
 long after the war. 
 
 These are all historical facts duly recorded in 
 the papers of the Virginia Historical Society, and 
 in the private correspondence of the accomplished 
 author of "Virginia's Attitude Towards Slavery 
 and Secession," Mr. B. B. Munford. 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 67 
 
 So much for the Southern leaders. As to the 
 rank and file of that glorious army which fought 
 as never men fought, unfed, unclothed and un- 
 paid, and wrote the title of American manhood 
 and valor and patriotism as high on the scroll of 
 fame as was ever reached by any soldiery in the 
 records of the world's history, it is a well au- 
 thenticated fact that perhaps four-fifths, and cer- 
 tainly three-fourths of them never owned a slave. 
 
 Dr. Hunter McGuire, in his admirable work 
 "The Confederate Cause and Conduct of the War," 
 says of the famous "Stonewall Brigade" whose 
 glorious deeds and wonderful achievements in de- 
 fence of Southern rights sent a thrill of wonder 
 and admiration throughout the world : "I knew 
 every man in it, for I belonged to it for a long 
 time, and I know that I am in proper bounds when 
 I assert that there was not one soldier in thirty 
 who owned, or ever expected to own a slave." 
 
 Of the Southern people, described by our aboli- 
 tionist slanderers and traducers as a community 
 of "Slaveholders," "Slavebreeders" and "Slave- 
 dealers," Professor Hart, of Harvard University, 
 in his book "Slavery and Abolition," says that 
 "Out of twelve million five hundred thousand per- 
 sons in the slaveholding communities in 1860, only 
 about one in thirty-three was a slaveholder." 
 
 The historian, Rhodes, in his "History of the 
 United States," records that after three years of 
 bloody war, President Davis said to Lincoln's rep- 
 resentatives in conference : "We are not fighting 
 for slavery. We are fighting for independence. 
 Say to Mr. Lincoln for me that I shall, at any 
 time, be pleased to receive proposals for peace on 
 
68 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 the basis of our independence. It will be useless 
 to approach me with any other." And on a former 
 occasion he had declared : "All we ask is to be let 
 alone — that those who never held power over us 
 shall not now attempt our subjugation by arms." 
 
 Away, then, with the preposterous and malic- 
 ious charge that the South went to war to perpet- 
 uate and extend the institution of slavery ! Still, 
 the cry went forth from the abolition press, and 
 was accepted as truth by the uninformed masses 
 of the European nations that the chief, if not the 
 only business of Virginia gentlemen was the rais- 
 ing of slaves, like cattle, to be sold to the more 
 Southern markets. 
 
 How Virginia loved the Union that she had done 
 more than any other State to create ; how she cluni.'- 
 to it to the last and labored to preserve it until 
 "the last argument was exhausted" is now so well 
 known to the world that it would be superfluous to 
 revert to it, but for the purpose of putting the 
 facts in condensed and convenient form into the 
 hands of our children and children's chiklren to 
 the end that they may imbibe with the rudiments 
 of their education the great truths of the grand 
 and noble struggle their fathers made to "trans- 
 mit unshorn" to them the priceless rights of self- 
 government handed down to us and them by their 
 forefathers of the Revolution. 
 
 The historian, Rhodes, says: "Virginia, whose 
 share in forming the Union had been greater than 
 that of any other one State, was loath to see that 
 great work shattered, and now made a supreme 
 effort to save it."' 
 
 illistory United States. Rhodes, Vol. Ill, p. 290. 
 
CHAPTER VII, 
 
 On the 7th of January, 1861, after South Caro- 
 lina had seceded, and it was evident all the Cotton 
 States, unless prompt measures were taken to 
 effect a compromise, would soon follow her ex- 
 ample, the Legislature of Virginia was called in 
 extra session. In his message to that body Gov- 
 ernor Letcher, after plainly and fully setting forth 
 and explaining the dangerous and perplexing 
 problems confronting the State and the country, 
 said : "The condition of our country at this time 
 excites the most serious fears for the perpetuation 
 of the Union, Surely, no people have been blessed 
 as we have been, and it is melancholy to think that 
 all is now about to be sacrificed on the altar of pas- 
 sion. If the judgments of men were consulted, if 
 the admonitions of their consciences were respect- 
 ed, the Union would yet be saved from over- 
 throw,"^ But while giving expression to his deep 
 devotion to the Union, he did not fail to declare in 
 unmistakable terms his belief in the right of seces- 
 sion. He reviewed fully and dispassionately the 
 persistent action of the abolition element of the 
 North, which, for two generations, had been un- 
 compromising and unceasing in their assaults on 
 the Constitutional rights of the South upon ques- 
 tions relating to slavery and State Government, 
 He discouraged the plan of calling a State Con- 
 vention, and proposed instead that Commissioners 
 be sent to the Legislatures of the several Northern 
 
 ijournal of Virginia House of Delegates, 1861. 
 
70 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 States that had enacted laws repugnant to the 
 rights guaranteed by the Federal Constitution, and 
 to request and urge their repeal, and that similar 
 messengers be, also, dispatched to the Legislatures 
 of the slaveholding States to inquire and ascertain 
 the exact character and requirements of the de- 
 mands and guarantees they deemed necessary to 
 protect their rights and interests under the Con- 
 stitution. Following the spirit, but modifying the 
 plan proposed by the Governor, the General As- 
 sembly adopted resolutions inviting all such States 
 of the Union "as are willing to unite with Vir- 
 ginia in an earnest effort to adjust the present un- 
 happy controversies to appoint commissioners to 
 meet on the Fourth day of February, 1861, in the 
 City of Washington, similar Commissioners ap- 
 pointed by Virginia.'" The same resolutions also 
 provided for the appointment of a Commissioner 
 to the President of the United States, and another 
 Commissioner to South Carolina, and such other 
 States as may have seceded in the meantime, to 
 urge and entreat them to abstain from any further 
 action such as might produce a conflict of arms 
 between the seceding States and the Government 
 of the United States pending the action of the 
 proposed Peace Commissioners. 
 
 The preamble to the resolutions providing for 
 the Peace Conference declared that: "Whereas, 
 it is the deliberate opinion of the General As- 
 sembly of Virginia that, unless the unhappy con- 
 troversy that now divides the States of this Con- 
 federacy shall be satisfactorily adjusted, a perma- 
 
 ijournal of House of Delegates, Extra Session 1861. 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 71 
 
 nent dissolution of the Union is inevitable, and the 
 General Assembly is desirous of employing every 
 reasonable means to avert so dire a calamity."^ 
 
 But, echoing the sentiment expressed in the 
 Governor's message, both Houses of the General 
 Assembly, with practical unanimity, adopted reso- 
 lutions declaring that the Government of a Union 
 formed by the consent of all the States had no 
 right to make war upon any of its members, and 
 with regard to the States which had already seced- 
 ed, or might secede, *'We are unalterably opposed 
 to any attempt on the part of the Federal Gov- 
 ernment to coerce the same into reunion or sub- 
 mission, and that we will resist the same by all 
 means in our power." 
 
 Twenty States responded to Virginia's call and 
 sent representatives to the Peace Conference 
 which met in Washington on February 4, 1861. 
 Rhodes says in the third volume of his History of 
 the United States : "The historical significance of 
 the Peace Convention consists in the evidence it 
 affords of the attachment of the Border Slave 
 States to the Union." The spirit of love and ven- 
 eration for the Government established by our 
 ancestors, and our deep yearning for the restora- 
 tion of peace and amicable relations between the 
 sections were beautifully and feelingly expressed 
 in the utterances and declarations and appeals 
 made by Virginia's representatives. Ex-President 
 John Tyler, who was chosen to preside over the 
 deliberations of the Conference, said in his address 
 on assuming the chair: "The voice of Virginia 
 
 ijournal House of Delegates, Extra Session 1861. 
 
72 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 has invited her co-states to meet her in counsel. 
 In the initiation of this Government that same 
 voice was heard and complied with, and the result- 
 ing seventy-odd years have fully attested the wis- 
 dom of the decision then adopted. Our god-like 
 fathers created ! We have to preserve. They 
 built up through their wisdom and patriotism 
 monuments which have eternized their names. 
 You have before you, gentlemen, a task equally 
 grand, equally sublime, and quite as full of glory 
 and immortality; you have to snatch from ruin 
 a grand and glorious Confederation, to preserve 
 the Government and to renew and invigorate the 
 Constitution.'" Hon. William C. Rives, ex-United 
 States Senator and once Minister to France, said: 
 "Mr. President, something must be done to save 
 the country, to relieve these apprehensions, and to 
 restore a broken confidence. Virginia steps in 
 to arrest the country in its progress to ruin. Sir, 
 I have had some experience in revolutions in an- 
 other hemisphere, in revolutions produced by the 
 same causes that are now operating among us. 
 I have seen the pavements of Paris covered and 
 the gutters running with fraternal blood. God 
 forbid I should see this horrid picture repeated in 
 my own country — and yet it will be. Sir, if we 
 listen to the counsel urged here."- 
 
 Mr. George W. Summers, another of Virginia's 
 representative sons, commenced his speech with 
 an emotion too deep for utterance: "Mr. Presi- 
 dent, my heart is full ! I cannot approach the 
 
 'Journal of Peace Convention, p. 14. 
 -Journal of Peace Convention, p. 135. 
 
THE PERRY PICTURES. 
 BOSTON EDITION. 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1801, BY M. P. 
 
 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 73 
 
 great issues with which we are dealing with be- 
 coming coolness and deliberation ! Sir ! I love this 
 Union. The man does not live who entertains a 
 higher respect for this Government than I do. 
 I know its history — I know how it was established. 
 There is not an incident in its history that is not 
 precious to me. I do not wish to survive its dis- 
 solution."^ 
 
 But all was unavailing. The destructive ele- 
 ment in all the Northern States which sent dele- 
 gates to the Conference had seen to it that none 
 should be sent but those who were pledged to carry 
 out the predetermined plan of the fanatical war 
 party ; or if any patriotic and reasonable men were 
 sent, as some undoubtedly were, they should be in 
 such a minority as to be easily voted down, over- 
 ruled and ignored. And thus all reason, every 
 argument and every pathetic appeal for peace and 
 reconciliation were met by cold disdain, sneering 
 rebuff or positive insult. A single incident will 
 suffice to show the spirit in which all of Virginia's 
 advances and overtures for peace and amity were 
 met. Senator Chandler, of Michigan, familiarly 
 referred to as "Old Zack Chandler," and who dur- 
 ing the years of blood and horror that followed, 
 succeeded by the darker days of Reconstruction, 
 became known to fame, or infamy as "The Great 
 Michigander," wrote to the Governor of his State : 
 "Dear Governor, Bingham and myself telegraphed 
 you on Saturday, at the request of Massachusetts 
 and New York, to send delegates to the Peace or 
 Compromise Congress. They admit now that we 
 
 ijournal of Peace Convention, p. 15. 
 
74 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 were right and they were wrong; that no Republi- 
 can State should have sent delegates; but they are 
 here now and cannot get away. The whole thing 
 was gotten up against my judgment and advice, 
 and will end in thin smoke. Some of the manu- 
 facturing States think that a fight would be awful. 
 Without a little bloodletting this Union will not, 
 in my estimation, be worth a curse.'" 
 
 And that was the spirit that dominated the rul- 
 ing faction of the Northern people, and drove the 
 conservative element before it with a whip of 
 scorpions. The Black Republican party was fully 
 bent and determined on war, and nothing but war 
 and "bloodletting" would satisfy it. 
 
 Thus the deliberations of the Peace Conference 
 came to naught, and the great and vital objects for 
 which the people of Virginia had called their coun- 
 trymen to counsel were met and checkmated, and 
 doomed to go down in history as unachieved and 
 overthrown by a wild and reckless spirit of un- 
 reasoning fanaticism. 
 
 ijournal of Peace Convention, 1861, p. 461; Logic of History, p. 138. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 The General Assembly of Virginia, which pro- 
 posed and brought about the Peace Conference, 
 also adopted a resolution providing for the calling 
 of a State Convention to consider and take suit- 
 able action on the great problems of the hour, and 
 the dangers that menaced and threatened the peace 
 and the very existence of the State and the Union. 
 This body became known in history as "The Seces- 
 sion Convention," a misnomer, as is shown by 
 the fact that it was called as a last resort to find 
 honorable means, if possible, to avoid seces'sion. 
 
 So careful were the movers and promoters of 
 the call to guard against the danger and possibili- 
 ty of an irresponsible body of m^n clothed with 
 untrammeled power carrying the State out of the 
 Union under the promptings of the wild excite- 
 ment and passion that were sweeping over the 
 country and shaking the Government from its 
 foundations, that it was provided in the act that 
 the people of Virginia, in selecting delegates to the 
 Convention, should declare, by a separate vote, 
 whether or not the action of that body should be 
 referred back to the people for ratification or re- 
 jection, thus jealously reserving to the people the 
 right and power to go to the polls and calmly de- 
 cide whether or not the State should withdraw 
 from the Union. 
 
 It was a moment pregnant with the most mo- 
 mentous and farreaching consequences to the State 
 and the country at large. Seven States had al- 
 
76 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 ready seceded, and the remaining seven of the 
 Southern group, with anxious eyes fixed on Vir- 
 ginia, were waiting to see what action would be 
 taken by the old Mother of States and Statesmen, 
 hoping thereby to shape their own for the ultimate 
 good of all. Had Virginia at that moment taken 
 the final step and seceded she would undoubtedly 
 have been followed in quick succession by North 
 Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Missouri, Ken- 
 tucky and Maryland, as was done by the first three 
 named when she did finally withdraw. 
 
 The commanding and determining influence of 
 Virginia in the great questions of the hour was as 
 well recognized and understood in the North as 
 elsewhere. William H. Seward wrote from Wash- 
 ington : "The election in Virginia tomorrow prob- 
 ably determines whether all the Slave States will 
 take the attitude of disunion. Everybody around 
 me thinks that that will make the separation ir- 
 retrievable and involve us in a flagrant Civil 
 War.'" 
 
 Charles Francis Adams has described the in- 
 tense interest centered on the Virginia election 
 thus : 'T well remember that day — gray, overcast, 
 wintry — which succeeded the Virginia election. 
 Then living in Boston, a young man of twenty- 
 five, I shared — as who did not — in the common 
 deep depression and intense anxiety. Virginia 
 speaking against secession had emitted no uncer- 
 tain sound. It was as if a weight had been taken 
 off the mind of every one,"-' 
 
 *Lcc at Appomattox, C. K. Adams, p. 403. 
 -Lee at Appomattox, Clias. F. Adams, p. 402. 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 77 
 
 The election for delegates to the Convention was 
 held on February 4, 1861. Never before had the 
 people of Virginia — the undivided, unpartitioned 
 Old Dominion, before the hand of the destroyer 
 had been laid upon her fair domain with an atroci- 
 ty as black as that laid upon dismembered Poland, 
 — never before had her people been summoned to 
 an election so fraught with such fateful import- 
 ance to the State and the Union. Stirred by the 
 fervor of the campaign and the magnitude of the 
 issues at stake, around the polls that day "the 
 grower of wheat from the banks of the Potomac 
 met the planter of tobacco from the distant Roa- 
 noke, and the tiller of corn who greets the first 
 beams of the morning sun from the golden waves 
 of the broad Atlantic, hailed his brother who 
 catches his last parting ray as reflected from the 
 glassy bosom of the beautiful Ohio." 
 
 A quiet, law-abiding, agricultural people, deep- 
 ly devoted to their State and the Union, and plead- 
 ing only for peace! 
 
 The State was divided into a hundred and fifty- 
 two election districts. The candidates presenting 
 themselves for the suffrages of the people were 
 ranged in three classes — unconditional Secession- 
 ists, unconditional Union Men and Compromise 
 men, that is, men opposed to secession and in 
 favor of the Union provided the Federal authori- 
 ties did not resort to armed coercion to bring back 
 the States already seceded. 
 
 The returns from the polls showed that of the 
 delegates elected to the Convention the men of the 
 second and third classes were in an overwhelming 
 
78 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 majority. On the question of submitting the work 
 of the Convention to the people for ratification or 
 rejection the vote stood 100,536 for submission 
 and 45,161 against it, thus declaring to the world 
 that "on the issues as then made up" Virginia 
 refused to secede. Charles Francis Adams, in his 
 book "Lee at Appomattox," says : "Thus be it 
 always remembered, Virginia did not take her 
 place in the Secession movement because of the 
 election of an antislavery President. She did not 
 raise her hand against the National Government 
 from mere love of any peculiar institution, or a 
 wish to protect or perpetuate it. The ground of 
 her final action was of wholly another nature, and 
 of a nature far more creditable."' 
 
 The Convention met in the Hall of the House 
 of Delegates on February 13, 1861. The vener- 
 able John Janney, a Union man, was chosen to pre- 
 side over its deliberations. His election was se- 
 cured by the harmonious action of the different 
 shades of Union sentiment and feeling which dom- 
 inated the body. On taking the chair the Presi- 
 dent said : "It is now seventy-three years since 
 a Convention of the people of Virginia were as- 
 sembled in this Hall to ratify the Constitution of 
 the United States, one of the chief objects of which 
 was to consolidate — not the Government. — but the 
 Union of the States. Causes which have passed 
 and are daily passing into history which will set 
 its seal upon them, have brought the Constitu- 
 tion and the Union into imminent peril, and Vir- 
 ginia has come to the rescue. It is what the whole 
 
 ^Lce at Appomattox, p. 40J. 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 79 
 
 country expected of her. Gentlemen, there is a 
 flag which, for nearly a century, has been borne in 
 triumph through the battle and the breeze, and 
 now floats over this Capitol, on which there is a 
 star representing this ancient Commonwealth, and 
 my earnest prayer, in which I know every mem- 
 ber of this body will unite, is that it may remain 
 there forever, provided, always, that its lustre is 
 untarnished."^ 
 
 Thus was sounded the keynote of the patriotic 
 spirit with which Virginia approached and at- 
 tempted to solve, for the good of all, the moment- 
 ous problems that confronted her and the country ; 
 and from that day until the 17th of April the op- 
 posing forces of Secession and Union faced each 
 other in ardent and earnest debate. 
 
 It at once became apparent that the strongest, 
 if not the controlling, force in shaping the final 
 action of the Convention would be the policy 
 adopted by the newly elected Federal Administra- 
 tion towards the already seceded States. Vir- 
 ginia, in the recent election, had spoken with no 
 uncertain voice against secession ; but six Gulf 
 States, with South Carolina at their head, had al- 
 ready seceded and organized a Confederacy with 
 its Government established at Montgomery; and 
 Virginia would never consent to, or aid in, the 
 unrighteous and unconstitutional attempt to sub- 
 jugate and coerce these States by force of arms. 
 Thus it became a question, not of slavery, nor of 
 the wisdom of secession, but of the right and 
 power of the Federal Government under the Con- 
 
 ijournal of the Convention, 1861, p. 8. 
 
80 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 stitution to coerce a sovereign State which had 
 merely exercised her undeniable and, until now, 
 unquestioned right to resume the powers by her 
 voluntarily delegated to that Government. 
 
 President Buchanan had submitted to Congress 
 the question of dealing with the seceding States, 
 but Congress had taken no action nor expressed 
 officially any purpose or plan of doing so. 
 
 Thus all eyes were turned upon the incoming 
 President, who, as we have already seen, was 
 elected on a platform inspired by that "Abolition- 
 ism in the North, which, trained in the school of 
 Garrison and Phillips, and affecting to regard the 
 Constitution as 'A league with Hell and a covenant 
 with Death' had, with steady and untiring hate, 
 sought a disruption of the Union as the best and 
 surest means for the accomplishment of the aboli- 
 tion of slavery in the Southern States.'" 
 
 The country stood with bated breath, and the 
 supreme question of the hour was what policy will 
 he adopt, what line of action will he follow with 
 regard to the seceded States : Stephen A. Doug- 
 las, the defeated candidate of the Northern wing 
 of the Democratic party, writing of the Republi- 
 can conspirators, the leaders of the Lincoln party, 
 said in a letter dated February 2, 1861: "They 
 are bold, determined men. They are striving to 
 break up the Union under the pretense of preserv- 
 ing it. They are struggling to overthrow the Con- 
 stitution, while professing undying attachment to 
 it and a willingness to make any sacrifice to main- 
 tain it. They are trying to plunge the country 
 
 iSpcccli of C'VQ. \V. Brent in tlie N'irginia Convention, Mar. 8, 1861, 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 81 
 
 into a cruel war as the surest means of destroying 
 the Union upon the plea of enforcing the laws and 
 protecting public property." 
 
 Such monumental duplicity and hypocrisy could 
 not be better exemplified than in the blatant utter- 
 ances and subsequent actions of the abolition 
 shriekers who had not then been initiated into the 
 underground workings of the real Republican lead- 
 ers and conspirators with William H. Seward at 
 their head. 
 
 After Lincoln was elected and the Gulf States 
 were threatening to follow South Carolina in with- 
 drawing from the Union, Wendell Phillips, the 
 great High Priest of New England disunionism, 
 denouncing Lincoln as "a huckster in politics," 
 and "a slavehound from Illinois" and, condemning 
 the war he proposed to wage against the seceding 
 States, said : "Here are a series of States girding 
 the Gulf which think they should have an inde- 
 pendent government; they have a right to decide 
 that question without appealing to you or to me. 
 Standing with the principles of '76 behind us, who 
 can deny them that right? Abraham Lincoln has 
 no right to a soldier in Fort Sumter." And after 
 those States seceded, he cried frantically in an- 
 other speech : "I have labored for nineteen years 
 to dissolve the Union, and now success has come 
 at last. Let the South go ! Let her go with flags 
 flying and trumpets blowing ! Give her her forts, 
 her arsenals and her sub-treasuries! Speed the 
 parting guest ! All hail disunion ! Beautiful on 
 the mountains are the feet of them who bring the 
 glad tidings of disunion."^ 
 
 ^Speeches, Lectures and Letters, Wendell Phillips, 
 
82 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 And yet, after Lincoln and Seward had "let slip 
 the dogs of war" this same Phillips, and his fol- 
 lowers were loudest and bitterest in hurling at 
 the South the epithets of "Rebel" and "Traitor." 
 
 No man who saw as did the writer, though a 
 boy, the birth of the Republican party ; and no 
 man or woman who has watched its workings and 
 followed its history can doubt for a moment that, 
 from the day of its organization in 1854 to the 
 hour Fort Sumter was fired on. Republicans had 
 striven might and main to dissolve the Union. 
 Not a man in the party, as at first organized, re- 
 spected the Flag. Both the Flag and the Union 
 were scorned and hated by the Republicans of the 
 antebellum regime. The New York Tribune, an 
 acknowledged organ of the Black Republican 
 party, habitually adorned its columns with such 
 irreverent and disgusting doggerel as this : 
 
 "Tear down the flaunting lie, 
 Half-mast the starry flag, j 
 
 Insult no sunny, sky 
 With hate's polluted rag." 
 
 For what purpose, and by what means these 
 original Union haters and Flag insulters were led 
 to turn a complete summersault and launch 
 against the retiring South all the avalanche of 
 long-standing hate and venom they had formerly 
 heaped upon the Union and the Flag will be re- 
 vealed by an examination of their own party reC' 
 prds and correspondence. 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 83 
 
 After leaving his family in Philadelphia and in 
 disguise entering Washington in the night, Abra- 
 ham Lincoln was inaugurated President of the 
 United States on the 4th of March, 1861. His 
 inaugural address, which was eagerly waited for 
 in the hope that it would reveal the policy of the 
 incoming Administration, and thus relieve the 
 strain of uncertainty and suspense under which 
 the country labored, and set at rest the fears of 
 the South awakened by the bitterness and violence 
 of the Presidential campaign, was couched in such 
 ambiguous language and expressed in terms of 
 such studied and artful evasion that the public 
 mind was left in as great a state of uncertainty 
 and perplexitj^ as before. 
 
 On the one hand, in what appeared to be plain 
 and unmistakable language, he gave assurance 
 that the Federal Government would respect the 
 rights of States and individuals in regard to 
 slavery, and that no interest or section would be 
 disturbed in any Constitutional right ; while on the 
 other hand, his utterances and outgivings on the 
 great question of his policy in regard to the coer- 
 cion of the seceded States were so evasive and un- 
 certain as to be plainly susceptible of different 
 and opposite constructions. 
 
 In this atmosphere of uncertainty and suspense 
 the Virginia Convention continued for nearly six 
 weeks to wrestle with the opposing questions of 
 Union and secession. Meanwhile, the Government 
 at Washington had done nothing, and it was a fact 
 fully recognized and understood that the Presi- 
 dent was as a lump of potter's clay in the hands of 
 
84 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 the shrewd and able conspirators by whom he was 
 surrounded. 
 
 The great body of the Northern people, as all 
 the records plainly show, were averse and opposed 
 to making war on the South on the question of 
 slavery. A new issue, then, must be found or in- 
 vented on which the country could be dragged into 
 a bloody and destructive war. Nearly a month 
 had passed and not a step had been taken in that 
 direction. But tremendous and bloody schemes 
 were brooding in the brain of William H. Seward, 
 who, as Secretary of State, was recognized as the 
 moving spirit and brains of the Administration. 
 
 About the first of April, to spur Lincoln into 
 action, Seward wrote a carefully prepared paper 
 entitled "Some Thoughts for the President's Con- 
 sideration." In this paper Seward said : "We 
 are at the end of a month's administration and yet 
 without a policy. This, however, is not culpable, 
 it has been unavoidable. But further delay to 
 adopt and prosecute our policy, for both domestic 
 and foreign affairs, would not only bring scandal 
 on the Administration, but danger on the country. 
 For the policy at home, my system is built on this 
 idea as a ruling one: That we must change the 
 question before the public from one upon slavery, 
 or about slavery, to a question of Union or Dis- 
 union. In other words, from what would be re- 
 garded as a party question to one of Patriotism 
 or Union. The occupation and evacuation of Fort 
 Sumter, although not in fact a slavery or party 
 question, is so regarded. Witness the temper 
 manifested by the Republicans of the Northern 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 85 
 
 States and the Union men of the South. For the 
 rest, I would simultaneously defend and reinforce 
 all the forts in the Gulf and have the Navy recalled 
 from foreign stations to be prepared for a block- 
 ade. Put the island of Key West under Martial 
 Law. I would maintain every fort and Federal 
 possession in the South. This will raise distinctly 
 the question of Union or Disunion."' This letter 
 was intended for Lincoln's eye only, and was never 
 laid before the Cabinet as far as the records show. 
 Lincoln kept the matter to himself, but followed 
 the shrewd and cunning advice given, to drop his 
 party's darling issue of slavery and, in its place, 
 raise the cry of "Save the Union." Both Lincoln 
 and Seward were creatures of the Republican 
 party, put in office by Black Republican votes, and 
 yet, at the very outset of their official career, they 
 spurned their party's most cherished issue, slav- 
 ery, and put in its place the Union and the Flag, 
 both of which their party had always despised 
 and hated and denounced and abused from a thous- 
 and rostrums. 
 
 Soon after the organization of the Virginia 
 Convention a Committee on Federal Relations con- 
 sisting of twenty-one members was appointed, to 
 which should be referred without debate all mem- 
 orial proposals relating to the secession of the 
 State. On the 16th of March the report of that 
 Committee was taken up for consideration by the 
 Convention. The majority report, signed by two- 
 thirds of the members, described and deplored the 
 "present distracted condition of the country" and 
 
 iHistory of the Great Civil War, Facts and Falsehoods, pp. 154-5. 
 
86 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 earnestly prayed that "An adjustment may be 
 reached by which the Union may be preserved in 
 its integrity; and peace, prosperity and fraternal 
 feeling be restored throughout the land," An- 
 other section declared that: "The people of Vir- 
 ginia recognize the American principle that gov- 
 ernment is founded on the consent of the gov- 
 erned, and they will never consent that the Fed- 
 eral power, which is in part their power, shall be 
 exerted for the purpose of subjugating the people 
 of the seceded States to the Federal authority.'" 
 
 The minority report provided for the immediate 
 secession of Virginia. This was defeated by a 
 recorded vote of forty-five "yeas" to eighty-nine 
 "nays." The majority section was adopted by a 
 vote of one hundred and four "yeas" to thirty-one 
 "nays." 
 
 Thus, while Virginia, through her duly elected 
 representatives in Convention assembled, was de- 
 termined to cling to the Union with an undying 
 devotion as long as that could be done with honor 
 to herself and justice to the South, yet she, and 
 the country at large, were left utterly in doubt 
 and perplexity by the inaction of the PYderal Ad- 
 ministration and the ambiguous language and 
 veiled expressions of the President's inaugural 
 address. This general state of uncertainty was 
 expressed by ex-President Buchanan in a letter 
 dated March 16, 1861, in which he said: "Every 
 day affords proof of the absence of any settled 
 policy or harmonious concert of action in the ad- 
 ministration. Seward, Bates and Cameron form 
 
 ijournal of Virginia Convt-ntion, 1861, pp. 31-43. 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 87 
 
 one wing; Chase, Wells, Blair the opposite wing; 
 Smith is on both sides, and Lincoln sometimes on 
 one, sometimes on the other. There has been 
 agreement in nothing.' 
 
 In this aspect of the situation the Virginia Con- 
 vention determined to send Commissioners to 
 Washington for the purpose of ascertaining at first 
 hand what action, if any, President Lincoln in- 
 tended to take in regard to the seceded States and 
 to that end the following resolution was adopted 
 on the 8th of April: "Whereas in the opinion 
 of this Convention the uncertainty which prevails 
 in the public mind as to the policy which the Fed- 
 eral Executive intends to pursue towards the se- 
 ceded States is extremely injurious to the indus- 
 trial and commercial interests of the country, 
 tends to keep up an excitement which is unfavor- 
 able to the adjustment of pending difficulties, and 
 threatens a disturbance of the public peace, there- 
 fore, 
 
 "Resolved, That a committee of three delegates 
 be appointed by this Convention to wait upon the 
 President of the United States, and present to 
 him this Preamble and Resolutions and respect- 
 fully ask him to communicate to this Convention 
 the policy which the Federal Executive intends to 
 pursue in regard to the Confederate States.'" 
 
 The double dealing, duplicity and deceit wilfully 
 and persistently practiced by Lincoln and Seward 
 in their pretended negotiations with this Commit- 
 tee and, also, with the Commissioners sent by the 
 
 iLife of James Buchanan, Vol. II, p. 34. 
 2Journal of Virginia Convention, p. 143. 
 
88 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 Confederate Government to negotiate a peaceable 
 settlement of all matters connected with the Forts 
 and other United States property situated within 
 the seceded States, will go down in history as a 
 blot on the diplomacy of a government claiming 
 to be civilized and enlightened. 
 
 The Committee appointed by the Virginia Con- 
 vention consisted of William B. Preston, A. H. H. 
 Stuart and George W. Randolph. The results of 
 that commission are detailed by Mr. Stuart in the 
 first volume of Southern Historical Society papers. 
 On page 452 he says : "I remember that Lincoln 
 used this homely expression : 'If I recognize the 
 Southern Confederacy what will become of my 
 revenue? I might as well shut up housekeeping at 
 once.' " Still, Mr. Stuart, assures the world that 
 "his declarations were distinctly pacific, and he 
 expressly disclaimed all purpose of war." 
 
 Secretary of State Seward and Attorney Gen- 
 eral Bates, in all their meetings and discussions 
 with the Virginia Committee, were equally out- 
 spoken and apparently sincere in their assurances 
 of peace and the amicable views and intentions of 
 the Administration. At the same moment Lin- 
 coln's proclamation calling for an army of seventy- 
 five thousand men to subjugate and coerce the 
 Southern States had been written, and was al- 
 ready in print; and the same train that brought 
 the Committee back to Richmond elated with the 
 thought of reporting to the Convention the cordial 
 expressions and pacific intentions, as they thought, 
 of the PVdoral Executive, also brought Lincoln's 
 proclamation, calling on the Governor of Virginia 
 
THE PERRY PICTURES. 
 BOSTON EDITION. 
 
 ROBERT E. LEE. 
 
 1807-1870 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1902, BY EUGENE A. PERRY. 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 89 
 
 to furnish her quota of the army intended to over- 
 throw and destroy the last vestige of the Consti- 
 tutional rights of the States. 
 
 Mr. Stuart continues : "This proclamation was 
 carefully withheld from us and we knew nothing 
 of it until Monday morning when it appeared in 
 the Richmond papers. When I saw it at break- 
 fast I thought it was a mischievous hoax, for I 
 could not believe Lincoln guilty of such duplic- 
 ity."' 
 
 And the same course of deception and chicanery 
 was followed by Lincoln and his advisers in their 
 dealings with the Commissioners which, as before 
 noted, were sent to Washington by the Confeder- 
 ate Government, as soon as that Government was 
 organized, to bring about an amicable and "speedy 
 adjustment of all questions growing out of the 
 political separation upon such terms as the re- 
 spective interests, geographical contiguity and 
 future welfare of the two nations may render 
 necessary." 
 
 President Lincoln, while refusing to recognize 
 the Confederacy by treating with those Commis- 
 sioners as the representatives of an independent 
 government, nevertheless, entered into semi-of- 
 ficial negotiations with them upon the questions 
 at issue. During these pretended "negotiations" 
 the Confederate Commissioners were kept in 
 Washington week after week, deceived by verbal 
 promises and misleading hopes of securing in the 
 end a peaceable and satisfactory adjustment and 
 settlement of all the complicated interests and 
 
 iSouthern Historical Society's Papers, p. 452. 
 
90 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 claims arising out of the separation of the sec- 
 tions. The Commissioners were blandly exhorted 
 to be patient and trustful, and were distinctly 
 promised by Lincoln and Seward, through Judge 
 Campbell, of the Supreme Court of the United 
 States, that no attempt would be made to pro- 
 vision or reinforce Fort Sumter, and that the 
 garrison should be withdrawn and the Fort evac- 
 uated as soon as the necessary arrangements could 
 be made; the Commissioners, on their part, agree- 
 ing that, while such arrangements were in pro- 
 gress, the soldiers of the garrison should have 
 access to the markets of Charleston to secure 
 necessary provisions. 
 
 And during all this time Lincoln and Seward 
 were secretly planning, organizing, arming and 
 provisioning one of the most stupendous war Meets 
 ever assembled in American waters to make a 
 sudden descent on Sumter and, thus, inaugurate 
 the most destructive and devastating war of mod- 
 ern times. This deception was kept up almost to 
 the last moment, and as the mock negotiations 
 dragged on from day to day and no move was 
 made towards the promised evacuation of Fort 
 Sumter, uneasiness began to be felt by the Com- 
 missioners and the Government for which they 
 were acting, and Judge Campbell read to Mr. 
 Seward a letter which he had written to President 
 Davis setting forth in detail the agreement en- 
 tered into by Lincoln and the Southern Commis- 
 sioners. Seward, pointing to the letter in Judge 
 Caniplx'U's hand, said: "Before that letter reaches 
 its destination Fort Sumter will be evacuated." 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 91 
 
 At that very moment his gigantic preparations 
 to reinforce Sumter were nearing completion ! 
 
 Still, the days dragged on and grew into weeks 
 and the Fort was not evacuated. Finally, Judge 
 Campbell, urged by the Commissioners who were 
 losing all faith in such promises, and all patience 
 with such dilatory performances, wrote Seward 
 a letter of inquiry and remonstrance. The wiley 
 and unscrupulous Secretary telegraphed his an- 
 swer in a single laconic sentence : "Faith as to 
 Sumter fully kept — wait and see." 
 
 Six days after that astounding assurance was 
 sent the great "Relief Squadron, with eleven ships 
 carrying two hundred and eighty-five guns and 
 two thousand four hundred men, was sent out 
 from New York and Norfolk with orders from 
 the authorities at Washington to reinforce Fort 
 Sumter, peacefully, if permitted, but forcibly if 
 they resist.'" 
 
 It is amply proven by unquestioned public 
 records and published "Speeches, Letters and 
 State Papers,"- that five of the seven members of 
 Lincoln's Cabinet were opposed to the expedition 
 to reinforce Fort Sumter, and advised against it. 
 Even William H. Seward, the closest, ablest and 
 most unscrupulous of his advisers, declared in a 
 letter addressed to the President that, by the at- 
 tempt, "We will have inaugurated a civil war by 
 our own act without adequate object, after which 
 reunion will be hopeless, at least, under this Ad- 
 ministration, or in any other way than by a pop- 
 
 iThe War Between the States, Alex Stephens. 
 -Life of Lincoln, Nicolay & Hay, Vol. II. 
 
92 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 ular disavowal, both of the war and of the Admin- 
 istration which unnecessarily commenced it," 
 Thus did this wiley conspirator conceal, not only 
 from his colleagues in the Cabinet, but, as it 
 seems, from the President himself, his real ob- 
 ject in fitting out the great expedition, which 
 object will appear later. 
 
 But Lincoln had fully determined on war and 
 nothing could swerve or dissuade him from his 
 purpose. After it was learned that the great 
 Relief Squadron had actually sailed from New 
 York and Norfolk, and was under way for Char- 
 leston, General Beauregard, in order to prevent 
 Fort Sumter being reinforced and provisioned, 
 opened fire upon it on the morning of the 12th of 
 April, 1861. The fire was returned by the fort 
 and the cannonade was kept up through the day. 
 At night the firing from the fort ceased, but was 
 continued by General Beauregard through the 
 night. On the following morning the fort re- 
 sumed its cannonade, but soon it appeared that 
 the Vv'orks and buildings were on fire, caused by 
 the hot shot and shell thrown into it by the Con- 
 federates. Major Anderson, in command, ran up 
 a signal of distress, and General Beauregard im- 
 mediately sent a boat offering to assist in putting 
 out the fire, but before it reached the fort Major 
 Anderson displayed a (lag of truce. 
 
 And that is the whole story of the famous bom- 
 bardment of Fort Sumter. Not a single man was 
 killed on either side during the engagement. 
 Afh'r Uu> surrendi'r of the fort, (Jeneral Beaure- 
 gard permitted Major Anderson to salute the 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 93 
 
 United States Hag with fifty guns and, in doing 
 this, two of his guns burst and killed four men. 
 It is an astonishing fact — so regarded at the time 
 — that the Relief Squadron was in full view of 
 the harbor long before the action terminated, and 
 could easily have prevented the capitulation, yet 
 not a gun was fired, or a movement made to sup- 
 port or relieve Major Anderson and his small gar- 
 rison. The real object of the expedition had been 
 accomplished. The South had been driven and 
 forced, in self defence, to "fire on the flag" and 
 that act was instantly seized upon by the aboli- 
 tion party, and adopted as the grand slogan with 
 which to "fire the Northern heart." 
 
 We have seen how, in a letter intended only for 
 the President's eye, Seward had advised and im- 
 pressed on Lincoln the necessity that "We must 
 change the question before the public from one 
 about slavery to a question of Union," and the 
 Flag. It was the only issue on which they could 
 stir the masses of the North and West to rush 
 headlong into a destructive and unprovoked war 
 upon the South. And we now see how successfully 
 and perfectly that arch conspirator had worked 
 out his diabolical scheme to force the South to 
 strike a blow in defence of her rights at Char- 
 leston. 
 
 The news of the attack on Sumter was received 
 with demonstrations of delight by the whole Abol- 
 ition element of New England, and instantly went 
 up the cry of "The Union" and "The Flag." Then 
 began the work of "Working up the Northern 
 mind" and "Firing the Northern heart." By con- 
 
94 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 cert of action the cry was shrieked and shouted 
 everywhere throughout the North "The Fhig has 
 been insulted," and "The Union is destroyed" and 
 the very people who, for years beyond the memory 
 of many then living, had labored to destroy the 
 Union as "a mistake," "a crime" and "a league 
 with Hell," and denounced the flag as "a flaunting 
 lie" and "a polluted rag," were loudest in thunder- 
 ing the new-found slogan: "Save the Union and 
 Protect the Flag." 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 The action of Virginia was prompt and decisive. 
 "The time had come when she must either level 
 her guns on her Southern sisters or make her 
 breast their shield." In reply to the demand for 
 Virginia's quota of the seventy-five thousand men 
 called for in the President's proclamation, Gov- 
 ernor Letcher said : "I have only to say that the 
 militia of Virginia will not be furnished to the 
 powers at Washington for any such use or pur- 
 pose, as they have in view. Your object is to sub- 
 jugate the Southern States, and the requisition 
 made upon me for such an object — in my judg- 
 ment not within the purview of the Constitution 
 or the Act of 1795 — will not be complied with. You 
 have chosen to inaugurate Civil War ; and having 
 done so we will meet you in a spirit as determined 
 as the Administration has exhibited towards the 
 South.'" Similar answers were returned by the 
 Governors of North Carolina, Tennessee, Ken- 
 tucky, Arkansas and Missouri, all of which States, 
 as before said, were watching and waiting for, 
 and were largely influenced by, the action of Vir- 
 ginia. Governor Ellis, of North Carolina, though 
 opposed to secession as Letcher of Virginia orig- 
 inally was, telegraphed to Washington : "I can be 
 no party to this wicked violation of the laws of 
 this country, and especially to this war which is 
 being waged upon a free and independent peo- 
 ple." 
 
 iGreeley's American Conflict, Vol. Ill, p. 86. 
 
96 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 Governor McGoffin, of Kentucky, wrote Lincoln 
 that Kentucky would "furnish no troops for the 
 wicked purpose of making war upon the States." 
 
 Governor Jackson of Missouri replied: "Your 
 requisition, in my judjjment, is illegal, unconsti- 
 tutional and revolutionary, and its objects in- 
 human and diabolical." 
 
 On April 17th the Virginia Convention, by a 
 vote of eighty-eight "ayes" to fifty-five "noes," 
 adopted an Ordinance of Secession, to be sub- 
 mitted to the people for ratification or rejection at 
 a special election to be held on the 23rd of May. 
 At that election the Ordinance of Secession was 
 confirmed by a popular vote of 128,884 for, against 
 o2,134 opposed. 
 
 In the closing hours of the Convention "strong 
 men spoke for or against secession with sorrow- 
 ful hearts and voices trembling with emotion."' 
 The late Mr. B. M. Munford in his admirable book, 
 "Virginia's Attitude Toward Slavery and Seces- 
 sion," says, "The action of the Convention was 
 the logical and inevitable result of the President's 
 proclamation. There had never been any doubt 
 as to Virginia's position. With all her loyalty to 
 the Union, she had repeatedly declared in the most 
 authoritative manner her opposition to the coer- 
 cion of the Cotton States and her determination 
 to resist such a policy."- 
 
 The English historian, Henderson, says: "So 
 far Virginia had given no overt sign of sympathy 
 with the Revolution. But she was now called upon 
 
 1 Rhodes History Ignited Slates, Vol. Ill, p. 386. 
 
 -Virginia's Attitude Toward Slavery and Secession, pp. 282. 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 97 
 
 to furnish her quota of regiments for the Federal 
 Army. To have acceded to the demand would 
 have been to abjure the most cherished principles 
 of her political existence. Neutrality was im- 
 possible. She was bound to furnish her tale of 
 troops and thus belie her principles, or secede at 
 once and reject, with a clean conscience, the Pres- 
 ident's mandate. If the morality of secession may 
 be questioned, if South Carolina acted with undue 
 haste and without sufficient provocation, it can 
 hardly be denied that the action of Virginia was 
 not only fully justified, but beyond suspicion."^ 
 
 In the Convention which framed the Constitu- 
 tion of the United States a motion was made to 
 give the Federal Government power to use mili- 
 tary force against a non-complying State, but it 
 was unanimously voted down and rejected and no 
 such power was ever given the Federal Govern- 
 ment by the Constitution. Lincoln, himself a law- 
 yer, well knew that fact, and he sought an excuse 
 for his unconstitutional action by raising an army 
 to subjugate the South in the old "Act of 1795," 
 referred to by Governor Letcher in his refusal to 
 obey the mandate of the President's call for troops. 
 That act was passed by Congress to enable the 
 Federal Government to assist the State of Penn- 
 sylvania in putting down what is known as the 
 "Whiskey Rebellion" which was an insurrection 
 against the authority of the State of Pennsyl- 
 vania. 
 
 President Buchanan defined the import and au- 
 thority of that old act as follows : "Under the act 
 
 ^Henderson's "Stonewall Jackson," 
 
98 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 of 1795, the President is precluded from acting 
 even upon his own personal and absolute knowl- 
 edge of the existence of such an insurrection. Be- 
 fore he can call forth the militia for its suppres- 
 sion he must be first applied to for this purpose 
 by the appropriate State Authorities in the man- 
 ner prescribed by the Constitution.'" 
 
 The raising of any army for such a purpose on 
 such a flimsy pretext was not only illegal and un- 
 constitutional but, in the eyes of all enlightened 
 nations, supremely ridiculous. 
 
 But in the gleeful language of one of his grovel- 
 ing and obsequious admirers, "Abraham Lincoln 
 kicked the Constitution into the cellar of the Cap- 
 itol and there it remained innocuous until the war 
 ended." 
 
 Compare the high-handed and unauthorized 
 crime of Abraham Lincoln in raising an army 
 of seventy-five thousand men to resist and 
 suppress the lawful acts of the Legislatures 
 and Conventions of the people of sovereign 
 and independent States with his previous opinions 
 and public utterances. According to the Congres- 
 sional Globe, first session Thirtieth Congress, p. 
 94, Lincoln said on the floor of the House of 
 Representatives : "Any people, anywhere, being 
 inclined and having the power, have the right to 
 rise up and shake off the existing government, and 
 to form one that suits them better. This is a most 
 valuable and most sacred right, a right which we 
 hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is 
 this right confined to cases in which the people 
 
 iLifc of Buchanan. 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 99 
 
 of an existing government may choose to exercise 
 it. Any portion of such people may revolutionize, 
 putting down a minority intermingling or near 
 them who oppose their movements."- "The South's 
 secession fulfilled every requirement laid down by 
 Lincoln. The South had the right and she ex- 
 ercised it with dignity and decency. She did not 
 rise up and shake off the Union Government in a 
 turbulent manner, she quietly withdrew,"^ and 
 only asked to be let alone. 
 
 As we have already seen, the whole course of 
 the Lincoln Administration for the first two 
 months of its existence was intended to hoodwink 
 and deceive the South and the conservative people 
 of the North as to its real intentions; and it was 
 only after Lincoln and Seward were ready to 
 strike the first blow that they raised the cry 
 against the South of "Rebel and Traitor." 
 
 The monstrous, oft repeated and as oft refuted 
 charge that the South made war upon the United 
 States Government with intent and purpose to 
 destroy the Union and perpetuate slavery is too 
 stale and, withal, too foolish and absurd to merit 
 serious reply or consideration, save for the pur- 
 pose of keeping constantly before the eyes and 
 minds of our children and children's children 
 throughout succeeding generations the everlasting 
 truths and undeniable facts of the real causes and 
 outrages that forced their fathers and grand- 
 fathers, reluctantly and sorrowfully, in pure and 
 patriotic defence of the God-given and inalienable 
 
 ipacts and Falsehoods, p. 149. 
 
 ^Congressional Globe, Tnirtieth Congress, p. 94. 
 
100 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 rights bequeathed to them by their Revolutionary 
 ancestors, to submit their cause to the arbitra- 
 ment of the sword. War on the South was morally 
 begun by the Abolitionists of New England forty 
 years before the first gun was fired ; it was fully 
 organized by the formation of the Black Republi- 
 can Party in 1854 ; the first gun was fired by John 
 Brown, the creature of that party, at Harper's 
 Ferry in 1859; it was formally opened and de- 
 clared by the sailing of the great war fleet against 
 Charleston in 1861 ; and the first gun at Sumter 
 was only the first gun of self-defense. 
 
 "South Carolina had ceded the land on which 
 Fort Sumter had been built to the General Gov- 
 ernment for the protection of the harbor of Char- 
 leston, and now that the fort was to be used, not 
 for its original purpose but for the destruction 
 of her beautiful city, the State, having lawfully 
 and rightfully seceded from the Union, had the 
 clear right to demand it back; and the Confed- 
 erate authorities acted with rare patience and for- 
 bearance when they waited so long in the vain 
 hope of getting peaceable possession of their own. 
 But when they received information that a power- 
 ful armament was about to enter the harbor to 
 reinforce P\)rt Sumter and make it impregnable 
 to their assaults they, in opening fire upon the 
 fort, "acted as strictly in self-defence as the man 
 who uses whatever force may be necessary to dis- 
 arm an assassin about to strike him instead of 
 waiting to receive the fatal blow.'" 
 
 JMcniorial N'oliimc of JcfTorsuii Davis, p. 308. 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 Let us thus keep the undeniable facts and the 
 undying truths of history constantly and always 
 before our children and before the world, breath- 
 ing the devout and perpetual prayer, 
 
 "Lord God of Hosts, defend us yet, 
 Lest we forget, lest we forget." 
 
 And with those everlasting truths kept constantly 
 before their eyes and instilled from infancy into 
 their minds and hearts, let them be taught fear- 
 lessly and proudly to proclaim, always and every- 
 where, that their fathers need no defense and 
 offer no apology for the course they pursued in 
 the War between the States, steadfast in the 
 eternal right and justice of their cause and as- 
 sured that — 
 
 No purer sword led braver band. 
 Nor braver bled for a brighter land. 
 Nor brighter land had a cause so grand 
 Nor cause a chief like Lee. 
 
 This sentiment was fittingly and aptly expressed 
 by an incident at the Academy of Music in Rich- 
 mond in which the late Hon. A. M. Keiley was the 
 leading figure. Mayor Keiley, as he was famil- 
 iarly and.aflfectionately known in Richmond, had 
 been appointed by President Cleveland a Judge of 
 the International Court and, in the discharge of 
 
102 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 his duties, was resident in Alexandria, Egypt, but 
 was now on a visit to his old home in his native 
 city. In presenting Judge Keiley to an audience 
 of his friends and admirers who had packed the 
 Academy to extend him a fitting welcome, the 
 Chairman, among other compliments, spoke of 
 him as "a Confederate soldier who gallantly 
 fought for what he believed to be right." In com- 
 mencing his address the distinguished speaker 
 said: "I thank my friend for the many kind 
 things he has said about me, but I must reject and 
 deny one of his intended complimentary asser- 
 tions. I did not fight for what I belie red to be 
 right; I fought for what I knew was right;" and 
 the thundering applause which drown^/d his fur- 
 ther utterance showed how thoroughly in sym- 
 pathy with the sentiment his audience was. 
 
 So let it be proclaimed and maintained in the 
 face of all opposition and dispute that we went 
 to war and fought, as never people did, for a 
 cause we kneiv and still know was right and just, 
 and laid down our arms only when "forced to 
 yield to overwhelming numbers and resources." 
 
 The sacred and urgent duty that rests upon us 
 to record and treasure up and transmit to our 
 children and, through them to the remotest gen- 
 erations of our posterity, the whole Truth, un- 
 biased and unperverted in its entirety, of the 
 noble fight their fathers made for liberty and Con- 
 stitutional rights was earnestly set forth by 
 Lieutenant Governor J. Taylor Ellyson in a speech 
 before the United Confederate Veterans during 
 the funeral obsequies of President Jefferson Davis 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 103 
 
 at New Orleans in 1889. Mr. Ellyson said: 
 "There is no danger that we who fought under 
 the Stars and Bars, shall ever forget the memories 
 of four stormy years or prove false to the gener- 
 ous motives that then animated our lives; but 
 there is danger, and real danger, that our children 
 may be taught that the cause for which we fought 
 was treason and we but traitors. From such a 
 fate may a kind Providence spare us ! Then let us 
 see that histories are written which shall contain 
 the true story of Southern patriotism and valor, 
 and which teach our children that the soldiers of 
 the Southern Confederacy were not rebels, but 
 were Americans who loved Constitutional liberty 
 as something dearer than life itself. Let us be 
 certain that our children know that the War be- 
 tween the States was not a contest for the preser- 
 vation of slavery, as some would have them be- 
 lieve, but that it was a great struggle for the 
 maintenance of Constitutional rights, and that the 
 men who fought — 
 
 Were warriors tried and true, 
 
 Who bore the Flag of a nation's trust; 
 
 And fell in a cause though lost, still just, 
 
 And died for me and you."^ 
 Nor was the cause for which we fought entirely 
 "lost," 
 
 "Truth crushed to earth will rise again." 
 Though we failed to establish permanently an in- 
 dependent government, yet, the eternal truth and 
 right and justice of our cause still lives; and that 
 it is steadily gaining ground in the minds and 
 
 iMemorial Volume of Jefferson Davis, p. 584. 
 
104 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 convictions of calm, dispassionate thinkers every- 
 where is shown by the fact, among many other 
 instances, that one of the most distinguished and 
 forceful writers of Massachusetts said in a recent 
 publication, treating of the Confederacy and its 
 people: "Such character and achievement were 
 not all in vain ; though the Confederacy fell as an 
 actual, physical Power, it lives eternally in its 
 just cause — the cause of Constitutional liberty." 
 And that the devotion and fortitude of our 
 people, the enlightened and liberty-loving prin- 
 ciples upon which our Government was founded 
 and its administration conceived and executed, the 
 high plane of civilized and humane warfare on 
 which our campaigns were conducted and the un- 
 surpassed courage and valor with which our bat- 
 tles were fought are fully known and recognized 
 in foreign lands is beautifully exemplified in the 
 following touching incident. Professor Philip 
 Stanley Worsley, of Oxford University, England, 
 sent a copy of his translation of Homer's Hiad to 
 General Robert E. Lee, who was then President 
 of Washington College. On the fly leaf the author 
 addressed General Lee as *'The most stainless of 
 living commanders and except in fortune, the 
 greatest," and adds an original poem in which 
 he says: 
 
 "Thy Troy is fallen, thy dear land 
 Is marred beneath the spoiler's heel — 
 
 >K * * * « * 
 
 Ah, realm of tombs! Kut let her bear 
 This blazon to the last of times: 
 No nation rose so white and fair, 
 Nor fell so pure of crimes." 
 
THE PERRY PICTURES. 129. 
 BOSTON EDITION. 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1898. BY M. P. rice. 
 
 U LYSSES S. GRANT 
 
Bibliography 
 
 Books, Pamphlets, Papers and Manuscripts 
 consulted and quoted in the preparation of the 
 foregoing pages : 
 
 The Olive Branch, Matthew Gary. 
 
 The Pelham Papers, Hartford Courant, 1795. 
 
 Boston Gazette, 1813. 
 
 American Commonwealths, Scudder. 
 
 Epochs in American History, Prof. Hart. 
 
 History of the Hartford Convention, Dwight. 
 
 Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Ford. 
 
 Select Documents, McDonald. 
 
 Journal of Virginia House of Burgesses. 
 
 History of the United States, Bancroft. 
 
 Critical Period of American History, Fisk. 
 
 History of the great Civil War, Horton. 
 
 William Lloyd Garrison, His Children. 
 
 Wendell Phillips, Speeches, Lectures and Let- 
 ters. 
 
 Congressional Globe. 
 
 The Men Who Saved the Union, Donn Piatt. 
 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Speeches, Lectures and 
 Correspondence. 
 
 Joshua Giddings, Speeches and Letters. 
 
 Henry Ward Beecher, Sermons, Lectures and 
 Correspondence. 
 
 Horace Greeley, New York Tribune. 
 
106 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 J. L. M. Curry, Speeches in United States Con- 
 gress. 
 
 John Quincy Adams, Speeches and Letters. 
 
 Edward Everett, Speeches and Letters. 
 
 Abraham Lincoln, Messages, Speeches and Dip- 
 lomatic Correspondence. 
 
 Lincoln — Douglas Debates. 
 
 Life and Public Service of Salmon P. Chase, 
 Schukers. 
 
 Letters and State Papers of Abraham Lincoln, 
 Nicolay and Hay. 
 
 Abraham Lincoln, a History, Nicolay and Hay. 
 Slavery and Abolition, Prof. Hart. 
 History of the United States, Rhodes. 
 
 Journal of the Virginia House of Delegates, 
 Extra Session, 1861. 
 
 Proceedings of the Peace Convention, 1861, 
 Crittenden. 
 
 Lee at Appomattox, Charles Francis Adams. 
 
 Journal of the Virginia Convention, 1861. 
 
 Life of James Buchanan, Curtis. 
 
 Southern Historical Society Papers. 
 
 The War Between the States, A. H. Stephens. 
 
 The Great American Conllict, Greeley. 
 
 Virginia's Attitude Towards Slavery and Seces- 
 sion, Munford. 
 
 Stonewall Jackson, Henderson. 
 
 Facts and Falsehoods, Edmonds. 
 
 Memorial Volume of Jefferson Davis, Jones. 
 
THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 107 
 
 Richmond, Dispatch. 
 
 Annals of Congress. 
 
 History of Slavery in Virginia, Ballagh. 
 
 Defence of Virginia, Dabney. 
 
 Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, 
 Jefferson Davis. 
 
 The Impending Crisis in the South, H. R. 
 Helper. 
 
 Life of Patrick Henry, Wirt. 
 
 School History of the United States, Jones. 
 
 Writings of W^ashington, John Marshall. 
 
 Life of William H. Seward, Lothrop. 
 
 The Confederate Cause and Conduct of the War, 
 McGuire and Christian. 
 
 Wendell Phillips, the Agitator, Martyn. 
 
 Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Rich- 
 ardson. 
 
 Life and Times of James Madison, Rives. 
 
 The Impending Crisis Dissected, Wolfe. 
 
 The Real Lincoln, Chas. L. C. Miner. 
 
 The Logic of History, Carpenter. 
 
 Disunion and Reunion, Woodrow Wilson. 
 
 Life of Wm. H. Seward, Frederick Bancroft. 
 
 Life of Abraham Lincoln, W. H. Herndon, 1886 
 (Suppressed). 
 
 The True Story of A Great Life, Herndon & 
 Weiks, 1880. 
 
 Nullification and Secession, E. P. Powell. 
 
108 CAUSES THAT LED TO 
 
 The Lemars (Iowa) Sentinel. 
 Recollections of Lincoln, Ward Hill Lamon. 
 Life of Abraham Lincoln, Holland. 
 Sherman's Memoirs, W. T. Sherman. 
 Ohio in The War, Whitelaw Reid. 
 Black's Essays, Jeremiah S. Black. 
 Life of Abraham Lincoln, Ida Tarbell. 
 Beacon Lights of History, Lord. 
 
 Abraham Lincoln, Noah Brooks in Heroes of 
 the Nation. 
 
 History of Slavery, Blake. 
 
 Democracy in the South Before the War, Dyer. 
 
 History of the People of the United States, 
 McMasters. 
 
 Defense of The South, Richardson. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 A Pagre 
 
 Abolition Society 37 
 
 Abolitionism 80 
 
 Abolitionism, its origin 34 
 
 Abolitionists change front 93 
 
 Abolitionism spreads 37 
 
 Abolitionism, methods of 39 
 
 Abolition paper 37 
 
 Abolitionist's Propaganda 50 
 
 Act of 1795 invoited 97 
 
 Adams' Administration 18. 19 
 
 Adams, Chas. Francis quoted 76,77 
 
 Adams, John 17 
 
 Adams, Candidate of Federalists 17 
 
 Adams, Minister to England 17 
 
 Adams, John Qulncy 27 
 
 Adams, John Quincy quoted 59 
 
 Alien and Sedition Laws 18, 21 
 
 Ames, Fisher 28 
 
 Anderson, Major 92 
 
 B 
 
 Bancroft quoted 33 
 
 Banks. Gov. quoted 4 7 
 
 Beauregai'd, General 92 
 
 Beecher, Henry Ward 4 5 
 
 Blaclt Republican Party 45, 47, 49 
 
 Bleeding Kansas 52 
 
 Bloodletting prescribed 74 
 
 Books unfair 10 
 
 Boston Gazette threatens Madison 28 
 
 Boston petitions Adams 19 
 
 Brown, John 45, 100 
 
 Brown, John, Capture, trial and execution 51 
 
 Brown, John, Raid 51 
 
 Buchanan, President 80, 97 
 
 Buchanan, President, quoted 86 
 
 Burgesses of Virginia 33 
 
 Byrd, Col. William, quoted 11 
 
 C 
 
 Calhoun, John C 40 
 
 Cameron, Senator, quoted 48 
 
 Campbell. Judge, quoted 90 
 
 Cary, Matthew, quoted 21,22 
 
 Causes traced 11 
 
 Cavaliers 12 
 
 Chase, Bishop 30 
 
 Chase, Salmon P., quoted 59 
 
 Chicag-o Platform 57 
 
 Commissioners from New England 32 
 
 Commissioners from Virginia 70 
 
 Committee from Virginia ."] ...'. gg 
 
 Committee on Federal Relations 85 
 
 Confederate Commissioners 89 
 
 Confederate Government seeks peace 88 
 
 Conspiracy with British Government 26 
 
 Convention of 1854 45 
 
 Constitutional Convention '. 15 
 
 Constitution burned by Garrison 39 
 
 Constitution denounced 40 
 
 Cotton States 60, 69 
 
 Curry, J. L. M ' gg 
 
Danifl, John W., quoted '. 32 
 
 DauKhttrs of the Confederacy 9 
 
 Davis, .It'ffer.sf)n 64 
 
 l)avis. .Iffferson quoted 41,64 
 
 l)fC'hiratlon of Independence denounced 28 
 
 iJechiratlon of Independence Invoked 57 
 
 Declaration of Independence referred to 60 
 
 Demo.iatic Tarty 13, 17, 25, 33. 43 
 
 l>i.suniori, oriffin of 41 
 
 l>i.sunion i>arty 33 
 
 Divine UiKht 19 
 
 Doufflas, .Stephen A., quoted 80 
 
 Dwlght. Hev. Dr., quoted 28 
 
 E 
 
 Efforts to save Union 73 
 
 Kllis. Governor N. C, fiuoted 95 
 
 Kllyson, Governor J. Taylor 102 
 
 Knierson, Italph Waldo, (juoted 53 
 
 T 
 
 Kederal Constitution 22 
 
 federalist partv 16, 17, 19 
 
 Federalists in War of 1812 27 
 
 Klaf? fired on 93 
 
 KhiB insulted 82 
 
 I-'ort Sumter 81, 90. 92 100 
 
 Fi-emont, John C, nominated 45 
 
 O 
 
 Garison, AVilliam Dloyd 39 
 
 Genius of Universal Emancipation 37 
 
 Grant, General 17 
 
 Greely, Horace 52, 60 
 
 H 
 
 Hall of Fame 52 
 
 llaiiiihon, Alex 13, 16 
 
 llaiiiihun. a Monarchist 14 
 
 llaiiiiltonian Partv 15 
 
 Hart. I'rof., of Harvard 67 
 
 llattfiird Courant 29 
 
 llaitlKrd Convention 29, 30, 31,32 
 
 Helper l{ool< 49 
 
 Hinil.rson, historian, quoted 96 
 
 Henry, Hritish conspirator 32 
 
 Hill. A. r 66 
 
 Histories, partisan 9 
 
 Hopkins, Erastus, quoted 51 
 
 J 
 
 Jackson, Governor, Mississippi 96 
 
 Janriey, John 78 
 
 .lefferson. Thomas 13, 19. 25, 33 
 
 Jerfcrsfn), Thomas, denounced 20 
 
 JetTersonian party \ 20 
 
 .li'fferson's platform 20 
 
 Jefferson quoted 21. 31, 59, 66 
 
 X 
 
 Kansas 45 
 
 Keillcy, I Inn. A. M l6l-'» 
 
 K.-y West ■.■.■... S5 
 
 KinjT of i;nKland i»etitit)ned 34 
 
 !• 
 
 DanptlMn. .Iiihii, (nmted 21 
 
 Ijoe, l-'ltzliuKh 66 
 
 Lee, UolM-rt K '.".'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.".'.ei, "l04 
 
 Lee, Robert E., quoted 65 78 
 
Page 
 
 Letcher, Governor of Virginia 69 
 
 Lincoln's Administration 87 
 
 Lincoln's advisers 86-7 
 
 Lincoln's Cabinet 91 
 
 Lincoln elected 57 
 
 Lincoln's inaugural address 86 
 
 Lincoln inaugurated 83 
 
 Lincoln's Message 83 
 
 Lincoln nominated 49, 53 
 
 Lincoln quoted 60, 98 
 
 Louisiana admitted 58 
 
 Lyon, Matthew, imprisoned 18 
 
 JUL 
 
 Madison 19. 26, 28, 25. 33 
 
 Martin, Luther, quoted 14 
 
 Mason 25 
 
 Massachusets Resolutions 29 
 
 Maury, Commodore 66 
 
 IMissouri Compromise 37 
 
 Monarchial Government 13, 17, 20 
 
 Monroe 25 
 
 Munford, B. D 6, 96 
 
 McGoffin, Governor of Kentucky 96 
 
 McGuire, Dr. Hunter 67 
 
 XT 
 
 Negro Equality 38 
 
 New England, hotbed of secession 33 
 
 New England's insincerity 35 
 
 New England and Kansas 46 
 
 New England, perpetuates slave trade 34 
 
 New England, seeks to overthrow Union 26. 27 
 
 New England settled 11 
 
 New Engl&nd .States Convention .' 30 
 
 New lOngland threatens to secede 32 
 
 New York Tribune 60, 82 
 
 Northern Historian quoted 63 
 
 Northern Confederacy 22, 26 
 
 Northern Leaders, reference to 53 
 
 Northern propaganda 51 
 
 O 
 
 Olive Branch, The 21 
 
 Overt Act 54 
 
 Partnership property 62 
 
 Patriotism invoked 84 
 
 Peace Conference 71 
 
 Peace Conference, Failure of '74 
 
 Pelhani Papers 22. 29 
 
 Phillip.s, Wendell 40 
 
 F'hillips. Wendell, denounces Lincoln 81 
 
 Political war on South 23 
 
 Preston, William B 88 
 
 Public property 61 
 
 Puritans 12 
 
 Q 
 
 Quincy, Josiah 29, 58 
 
 R 
 
 Randolph, Geo. W 88 
 
 Rawls, Judge William, quoted 59 
 
 Rebel 63 
 
 Reconstruction 10, 45 
 
 Relief Squadron 91 
 
Faffe 
 
 Republic denounced 28 
 
 Republican Tarty ' 16. <7 
 
 Rhodes, historian, quoted 68. 71 
 
 8 
 
 Seceding States seek adjustment 62 
 
 Secession Convention 83 
 
 Secession, right of unquestioned 29 
 
 Seward. W. H 58. 84 
 
 Seward, duplicity of 81 
 
 Seward described 43 
 
 Seward plays false 88 
 
 Seward, policy of 84 
 
 Seward (juoted 76 
 
 Slavery abandoned 84 
 
 Slavery made issue 33 
 
 Slaveholders denounced 37 
 
 Slaves, care of 39 
 
 Slavf trade In Constitutional Convention 35 
 
 South Carolina Seceded 64 
 
 Southern Leaders 37 
 
 Southern Statesmen for Union 46 
 
 South fouRht for principle 99 
 
 South loved L'nion 64 
 
 Soutli misrepresented 38 
 
 South opposed slavery 33 
 
 Spotswood. Alexander, quoted 12 
 
 States withdraw 61 
 
 Stuart. .1. K. H 66 
 
 Stonewall Jackson 66 
 
 Strong, Caleb, (Joveinor of Massachusetts 27-S 
 
 Stuart, A. H. H 88 
 
 Summers, Geo. W., quoted 72 
 
 Sumter, General, assaulted 18 
 
 T 
 
 Traitor 63 
 
 Tyler, John 71 
 
 n 
 
 Uncle Toms Cabin 39 
 
 Union denounced 28, 39 
 
 Union distasteful to North 54 
 
 V 
 
 Virginia abused 28 
 
 Virginia Convention 86 
 
 Virginia Klectlon 77 
 
 Viiglnia General Assembly 75 
 
 Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions 19 
 
 \'irginia luvi- of Uni<m 68 
 
 Virginia refuses Lincoln's Call 28 
 
 Virginia IJesolutions 70 
 
 \'irgjnia secedes 95 
 
 Virginia settled 12 
 
 Virginia settlers described 13 
 
 Virginia State Convention 76 
 
 W 
 
 War of 1K12 27 
 
 Washington 33 
 
 W.ishitigton. irillut'nce of 16 
 
 Washington writes Hamilton 15 
 
 WiuK Party 43 
 
 Whiskey Rebellion 97 
 
 Withdrawal from Union threatened 11