Chapter I (7)

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

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

(124) _Life of Seward_, vol. i., p. 672.

(125) A. Lincoln, _Complete Works_, vol. i., pp. 215, 240, 251.

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

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

(128) _Life of Parker_ (Weiss), vol. ii., p. 172-4 (406).

(129) _Civil War in America_ (Draper), vol. i, 565-6.

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

(131) Zachariah Chandler, 1860.