Chapter XXXVI

Who will say that Nature and Liberty were the genii who directed the labors of the leaders of the Rebellion?

Soil, climate, hereditary traditions, and customs of society, give to a people the fierceness and gentleness of character, as well as the perfection of mind and body. This fatal Stockade, with the silent mound of earth which contains its harvest of death, is a fair and just exponent of the bigoted and selfish policy that struck down the Flag of the Republic; of that cruel and unearthly spirit which has despised all the "attachments with which God has formed the chain of human sympathies," and which, without a tear of remorse, has strewn the Atlantic Ocean with a broad pathway of human bones!