E 458 
 .3 
 
 .B44 
 Copy 1 
 
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 jraolished by ANSON" D. F. RANDOLPH, 683 Broadway, corner of Amity 
 
 Street, New-York. 
 
 THE WAR TO END 
 ONLY WHEN THE REBELLION CEASES. 
 
 BY HENRY W. BELLO^V^S, D.B. 
 
 " Shall I not visit for these things? saith the Lord : shall not my soul be avenged 
 on such a nation as this ? A wonderful and horrible thing is committed in the land. 
 The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means. And my peo- 
 ple love to have it so : and vrhat will ye do in the end thereof?'' — Jeremiah 5 : '29, 30, 31. 
 
 The Head of our Nation, by solemn proclamation, summons this 
 whole people together to-day, to confess its sins, and to implore the 
 mercy of God upon our torn and distracted country. It is, indeed, a 
 fitting service! Pray God it may be performed in a sincere and 
 thoughtful spirit! Every nation has abundant cause to confess its 
 sins ; for what people ever yet walked humbly and consistently in the 
 way of God's commandments ? Our own country, blessed with such 
 an origin and such a heritage, has peculiar reasons for acknowledging 
 its tmfaithfulness ; special occasion for humbling itself beneath the 
 chastenings of the Almighty. For we have grievously sinned against 
 light, liberty, and love. With more blessings, material, moral, and 
 spiritual, than ever fell to any nation ; a fresh and unpolluted soil ; an 
 isolation from the old world, Avith its rooted errors and transmitted 
 wrongs ; a government based upon impartial respect for human rights ; 
 a wide-spread system of popular education, and a free press ; perfect 
 toleration in matters of faith, with a universal reverence and support 
 for religious institutions — what excuse is there for our not being a 
 wise, a justice-loving, a temperate, a moral, and a God-fearing people? 
 With tyrants or sensualists for their monarchs ; a proud and pampered 
 aristocracy oppressing the middle or the poorer classes ; without re- 
 presentation in the government ; robbed of schools ; pcimed up in com- 
 

 pulsory clnirclies ; soured by want ; degraded by excessive toil ; mad- 
 dened by injustice ; with doubts or defiance toward a God, wliose 
 priestly representatives so unworthily reveal Him — what wonder if 
 coarse appetites, if violent crimes, if low morals and infidel thouglits 
 mark the populations of many European kingdoms ? It is very little 
 to our credit that we surpass the very best of foreign nations in morals 
 and piety. "VVe might as well boast of the larger products of our fat 
 "Western soil! The question for us is — and God is j^utting it now 
 with fearful distinctness — are Ave in any fair degree equal in our 
 morals and piety, as a people, to our talents, opportunities, and privi- 
 leges ? If Ave are not, we are sure to suflfer by laws as inexorable as 
 those thfit govern the stars in their courses. PriA'ileges of all kinds 
 involve relative responsibilities. Light must illumine or blind ; liberty 
 turn to laAV or license ; knowledge expand or puff up ; wealth refine 
 or soften and betray. Religion, if it does not make saints, makes 
 liypocrites or atheists ! This American people must either be the best 
 or the guiltiest people on God's earth. There is no middle place for 
 it. Its gifts, endowments, historic and physical position, political, 
 economical, educational, and religious circumstances and opportunities 
 are, in character and sum, so vast, peculiar, emphatic, and providential, 
 that they must either prove a mighty pedestal, lifting America to an 
 unparalleled glory, or a stone of wrath, falling upon our heads and 
 grinding us to powder. 
 
 There can be no doubt that for five and twenty years past, to say 
 the least, the American people have been making greater pi-ogress in 
 every thing else rather than in morals and piety. They have advanced 
 immensely in area, agriculture, manufactures, commerce, wealth, and 
 jDOwer ! The triumphs of their ships and their iron-roads, their canals 
 and their intercommunications of all kind; the discovery of the mines 
 of California ; the invention of telegraphy ; the vast growth of the 
 planting interest — these have been kept full pace Avith by their im- 
 proved systems of popular education ; their rapid advances in the arts 
 and sciences ; in the application of machinery to tillage ; in the extra- 
 ordinary improvement in the character, style, and comfort of dAvellings, 
 the architecture of piiblic buildings, and the decoration of cities. 
 Church-building itself, Avithin that period, has made a notable improve- 
 ment. Meanwhile, the popularization of music, of painting and sculp- 
 ture, of photographic art, of landscape gardening, and rural ceme- 
 teries and public parks, has thrown a cultivated and refined air about 
 our civilization, Avhich has been similarly marked in costume and do- 
 mestic elegance. I am inclined to think, too, that decency and deco- 
 
/^? 
 
 rum of manners have advanced ; tliat avc have acquired more self- 
 control by a greater familiarity with the temptations which, in our 
 first taste of them, overthrew so many ; that with a larger general 
 use of wealth, there is — always excepting the newly rich, who adopt 
 a barbaric magnificence and profnsoness — a more moderate and pru- 
 dent use of money ; that with a freer and more general use of stimu- 
 lants, there is less intemperance ; and, in short, that with not more 
 principle or piety, there is more good taste, decency and decovum. 
 Among the most pleasant of these indications is the fact that yoimg 
 men, born to easy circumstances, are no longer, what for a generation 
 or tAvo they were, almost as a rule, the necessary victims of their po- 
 sition. They have learned how to enjoy life, without throwing them- 
 selves away ! There is a fir happier and safer relation between child- 
 ren and parents, more mutual confidence and companionship, and far 
 less peril and less actual ruin from dissipation than ten, and especially 
 tjian five and twenty, years back. In all these resj^ects, there has been 
 progress. 
 
 It seems to me, however, that in respect of absolute morals and 
 piety, Ave have not been making a corresponding progress ; nay, that 
 in very important particulars, Ave have degenerated, and sufiiciently to 
 deserve and to receive the solemn warning and chastening of divine 
 Providence. 
 
 The last Aac and tAventy years haA'e been eminently an era of exter- 
 nality, of material development, of outside shoAV and polish. Morals, 
 religion, art, trade, commerce have accommodated themselves to Avhat 
 
 as expedient, practicable, acceptable, easy, and pleasant. It has 
 been a period of imiA'ersal compromises and concessions. Every body 
 has been trying to make money ; and other things, by general consent, 
 have been accommodated to the money-makers. Religious sects have 
 cut off their corners and become as smooth to each other as stones in 
 the same bi'ook. Political parties have seldom kept their own princi- 
 ples long enough to haA^e any serious and A'aluable result from their 
 conflict. Manners have groAvn easy and insincere ; education general, 
 ornamental, and superficial. There is little study, little substantial 
 reading, little original scientific discoA'ery ; there is almost no eai'nest 
 and original poetry. When, nearly a quarter of a century ago, I came 
 to XcAv-York, there was a small school of serious, earnest, and high- 
 aiming artists here. "We haA'e twenty times their number noAV, and a 
 hundred times the patronage for art, but certainly no more of the 
 school I name, and, I think, not so many. Literary and thoughtful 
 society is equally in a state of decay. Even those nurseries of original 
 
thought and refined taste — the college societies — where, thirty years 
 ago, noble young men plumed their Avings, made their cUMcts as states- 
 men, as debaters, as poets, and historians, have declined, until elegant 
 scholarship, literary ambition, and poetical aspiration have become 
 almost unknoATO. A college-student prides himsell' much more on 
 rowing, gymnastics, and pugilism, than on classical or mathematical 
 learning, least of all on literary tastes, which, if he has them, he keeps 
 then^ to himself. 
 
 While external accomplishments and outward ease and polish have 
 thus taken characteristic possession of colleges and, I fear, of young 
 ladies' schools, a corresponding degree of attention to the outside has 
 weakened religion. We have beautiful churches, but M'here are the 
 saints? We have eloquent and practical sermons, but where the 
 sound, penetrative, and soul-piercing doctrines ; where the earnest and 
 devout lives ; where the unworldly and holy disciples ? I suspect a 
 large part of the toleration of our day rightly named would be called 
 religious indifference; a large part of the alleged improvement iii 
 dogma, theological ignorance and apathy. Religion has degenerated 
 into an ethical system; it devotes itself to trimming the laAvn, instead 
 of ploughing up and planting the field. It is polite, civil, gentle, 
 elegant, smooth, popular ; when it ought to be stern, stout, aggressive, 
 commanding, solemn, and uncompromising. As a consequence, it has 
 no enemies, but also few devoted friends. There is nothing to pro- 
 voke either attack or unbelief in so negative a thing, and accordingly 
 angry skepticism and passionate denial are both passed by. No longer 
 do young men of burning hearts find themselves called to the ministry 
 of such a mediocre piety ; and all the elegance of churches, and all 
 the liberality of parishes, can not attract the best gifts to the service 
 of the altar. Only divine love, only Christ-like faith ever drew a true 
 minister into the profession we still call sacred ! 
 
 And when education, literature, poetry, art, religion, have all been 
 externalized and smoothed away into decency, what must it be with 
 politics, which is the name for the religious, the moral, the public life 
 * of the ISTation ? Of course, either as effect or as cause, it will lose 
 earnestness and dignity, and be deserted of good and great men, either 
 because there are none such, or they will not enter into so low and 
 corrupt a life. Certainly, the devotion to money-making, the super- 
 ficial spread and scattering of our people to which it has led ; tlie 
 sitdden occupancy of the West and the Pacific coast, have diluted the 
 political quality of the Nation. The scattered embers, on fire from a 
 common flame when they lay together, have gone out in their too sud- 
 
///-? 
 
 den dispersion. A good man, going from a good commimity, is not 
 the same man without that community. Men uniformly degenerate 
 without the support of their peers. The public virtue was not strong 
 enough to bear such a territorial stretch. It was not deep enough to 
 spread over so Avide a surface. The representative system, covering the 
 sparse and backward counties in States, and the thinly-settled and dis- 
 tant States in the Federal system, has gradually swamped the elevation, 
 culture, and earnestness of the more moral and religious portions of 
 the State or country, in an average tone of vulgar mediocrity, and this 
 has not merely outbalanced Avhat is best, but gradually corrupted it 
 and converted it to itself The vast size of our country, its scattered 
 population, and the relative small ratio of the highly educated, moral- 
 ized, and religions portion to the rest is, perhaps, enough, mider our 
 representative system, to account for the great degeneracy in our 
 political leaders and our political life, without any other consideration. 
 Our best men have refused to solicit political station, or to accept it. 
 Our legislatures have become frequently the scenes of bribery and cor- 
 ruption. Our city councils sanedrims where grammar, decency, and 
 truth are crucitied. Our Congress too often a mere arena of half- 
 educated partisans, striving for sectional, local, and personal advan- 
 tages. "We have lifted available candidates to Senatorships, and even 
 made Cabinet officers and Presidents of men who could steal the i>ublic 
 property and dally with traitors and rebels. Our corner-groceries and 
 liquor-stalls govern our city elections. 
 
 Xow, the woi'st of low-toned political leaders and low-minded or 
 corrupt political bodies is, that they insensibly corrupt the press, and 
 the literature, and the pulpit of a nation. The very mind and con- 
 science of a people become gradually defiled and seai'ed by the con- 
 tinued exhibition of shameless morals, and low thoughts, and corrupt 
 men and measures in high j^laces. An illiterate and corrupt common 
 council lowers not only the whole domestic and foreign reputation of 
 a city and country, but it weakens the conscience and defiles the mind 
 of every citizen of the whole nation. The same may be said of every 
 weak or Avillful President, Secretary, Governor, or other high represent- 
 ative functionary. Nations are not responsible for weak or corrupt 
 hereditary monarchs, or born ruling classes. But xoe are parties to our 
 own shame, and we sink to the level of those we elect to govern us. 
 I believe that the politics and the politicians of the last quarter of a 
 century have seriously impaired the people's faith in free institutions, 
 have degraded the conception of what constitutes greatness and good- 
 ness, and corrupted very perilously the National tone and life. 
 
6 
 
 Besides the opportunity of material advancement, which has filled 
 our people with a general proclivity to money-making, besides the 
 scattering of our population, which has sxiperficialized the depth of 
 our tone and culture, and broken the lines of moral tradition, there 
 has been one other general cause of demoralization and degeneracy 
 acknowledged by most, but the subtlety and universality of which 
 few of us have duly measured. I mean the institution of Slavery, with 
 all that its existence and maintenance have involved us in. 
 
 The constitutional necessity under which Ave have lived, of accom- 
 modating our political views and action to the protection of an insti- 
 tution which, in 2")roportion to our intelligence, moral development, 
 and spiritual insight, we have felt to be bad and inhuman, wrong and 
 sinful, has sloAvly but surely vitiated and poisoned the mind and con- 
 science of our people. "What the efiect of Slavery has been in tlie 
 South, upon the intellectual and moral life of the people, the present 
 war has more fully revealed. We knew before, that neither art, poetry, 
 nor literature could flourish in its baleful shadow ; that political finesse 
 and a long-headed policy, absolutely required to secure any position 
 for States cursed with such a disabling yet darling peculiarity, Avas the 
 only form of talent sure to groAV there. We did not knoAV Avhat a 
 besotted pride, what desperate recklessness, Avhat brutal violence, 
 what tyranny of a fcAV over the many, marked a slaveholding popu- 
 lation ! We could not have believed that, in the nineteenth century, 
 any population existed in the Avorld over which an enlightened self- 
 interest had so little influence, any in which passion, fury, and pride in 
 a degrading peculiarity, could hurry the Avhole people into a reckless 
 self-destruction. But Ave have lived to see Slavery setting fire to its 
 OAvn prison-house, and contending for the right to destroy itself, as, 
 before noAA^, nations haA'e only contended for liberty, and Ufe, and 
 honor. We have seen the same men that Avere for so many years the 
 terror and the pest of our Congress, through their violence of temper, 
 and readiness to substitute the pistol and the bludgeon for the legiti- 
 mate weapons of debate, overaAving their OAvn communities by their 
 ferocious wills, and leading a blind and ignorant people to national 
 ruin, in vindication of their own personal threats and revengeful pas- 
 sions. I do not belicA^e that out of American Indian records, a more 
 savage immolation of all the rights, possessions, and future of a peo- 
 ple was ever before made by a conspiracy of political leadei-s for their 
 OAvn personal and private gratification. The success of the rebels has 
 been, and continues to be, only a success in the ruin of every thing 
 Southern. They succeed in bringing more and more fuel to their OAvn 
 
/>^f 
 
 pyre ! And the foreign aristocracies look on in adniiration at the chiv- 
 ahy, the courage, the devotion of a people, whicli, witliout any real 
 and noble object, without any of the universal aims or purposes that 
 have justified revolutions, or which history can approve or admire, is 
 yet capable of desolating its territory, burning its cities, sacrificing 
 its population, ruining itself, sooner than abandon willfulness, caprice, 
 and pride, and submit to its own national laws ! The success of the 
 South has not been in the least success in its object, but only success 
 in holding out beyond all expectation and Avith a stubbornness truly 
 Avonderful, against those who possess the absolute j^ower of compel- 
 ling their ultimate submission. Their success, the longer it continues, 
 is only their more complete ruin. The longer they hold out, the more 
 is their territory devastated, their cities bombarded, their slaves scat- 
 tered, and inoculated with insubordination to their masters, their popu- 
 lation starved and destroyed. And the resolution to endure this, the 
 recklessness to look it in the face, as their rulers must, and still continue 
 to delude with false hopes or to inflame the whole population to perish 
 in inflicting the most serious injuries in their power on this Govern- 
 ment and Nation — willing themselves to perish, if only they may have 
 the joy of destroying the government their f ithers and ours together 
 framed, — this is the noble Indian-chief lieroism and patriotism, which 
 England and France admire in the Southern leaders. And it is Slav- 
 ery which has bred and nourished the passions and the suicidal reck- 
 lessness which culminate m this national self-immolation ! You recol- 
 lect the difliculty with which the English government controlled the 
 horrible suttees and suicides of Hindoo widoAvs on the funeral i^yre of 
 their husbands ! This is what our truly paternal Government Avas, 
 for the first year of the Avar, chiefly solicitous to do with the super- 
 stitious madness that had seized the Southern States — to prcA-ent them 
 from self-slaughter, to keep them from making it necessarA' for the 
 Avholc poAver of the Xorth to rise, as upon a set of maniacs careless 
 of their OAvn lives and fortunes, if only they might perish in the gen- 
 eral flame that consumed their Xation. The Government could not 
 believe this madness real ; it thought it feigned. The people of the 
 Xorth, accustomed to the SAvay of reason and the control of self- 
 interest, could not believe that any people could be so insane and pas- 
 sionate, so blinded with A'indictiA'c pride and sectional fury, as to m- 
 voke their OAvn utter ruin, in seeking theirs. And so they temporized 
 and played with the rebellion. And the Government dallied and 
 doubted, and the generals coquetted and postponed battle, and averted 
 decisiA'c conflicts — all in the honest ho^je, and, as I noAV belicTC, iu 
 
8 
 
 the proyidentinlly-guiclecl policy of an expected return on the part of 
 the foe to reason and loyalty. " There must be millions of loyal peo- 
 ple in the South," Ave said. " The sensible jiortion of the j^eople there 
 will rise upon their own politicians soon. The moment the masses 
 see whither this thing is tending, they Avill revolt." 
 
 But in all this we reasoned as about a free people, a people who had 
 been, as we iancied, sharing our own educational and moral blessings. 
 We talked of the Southern masses, as if they had been Northern 
 masses ; and with the Slave-mind as if it had been the American mind. 
 We did not know, we could not know, Avhat Slavery, successful, tri- 
 umphant, rich, the political ruler of this Nation for a half-century, had 
 become ! We had no conception of the fury of its pride, of its ac- 
 cumulated contempt and hatred for us, of its besotted conceit and 
 self-will ! We had forgotten to what tasks it had found itself equal ; 
 Avhat it had achieved in the political arena ; what an appanage North- 
 ern Avealth, education, and influence had become to it ; hoAV it had 
 really acquired the feeling of being the natural lord of this continent, 
 its princes, a superior race, with a divine right to rule ; and how, in 
 this intense and intoxicating madness, it liad finally brought itself to 
 the full determination, and to a not Avholly crazy conviction of its 
 chance of succeeding in the eftbrt to rule this country completely and 
 in the interest of Slavery, or, failing in that, to destroy the country 
 and bury itself in its ruins ! It is now clear that the leaders had this 
 conviction ; and, considering the past, in Avhich politics had been their 
 full life, Avhile it had been only our pastime, held secondary to almost 
 every thing else, to commerce, manufactures, education, pleasure, 
 profit — it is not strange that they should have calculated that our 
 bulky prosperity, our wealth, numbers, and resources constituted a lazy, 
 careless, unorganized strength, without much political principle or 
 patriotic earnestness about it, and that before it could be really 
 aroused and animated Avith a common purpose, it might be routed 
 and overAvhelmed by their drilled and trained organization. 
 
 HoAV near, at the very start, this fearful power, now so clearly rush- 
 ing to its OAvn ruin, Avas to accomplishing our destruction, God only 
 knoAvs, though our Government, I think, has a pretty lively sense of 
 it. Our imminent danger was that the rebellion would succeed at 
 once. After a year, it had no chance Avhatever ; but in the first three 
 months it was an even question ; in the first six a j^robable danger ; 
 at the end of the first nine an anxious concern. Thank God, it has 
 been since then only a question of hoAV thoroughly intent the South 
 was on ruining itself; and that, in my judgment, is the only alterna- 
 tive left it noAV — a more or less complete destruction. 
 
/J e 
 
 9 
 
 But, I return to say, that the evil wliich Slavery had so deeply 
 and fully wrought in that great limb of our National Body, Avhero 
 it had its seat, it had to a most disastrous degree wrought by synii)a- 
 thetic action, on the whole frame of the country. If you remember 
 that for twenty-five years it had occupied at least half of all the 
 legislation of the Federal Government, thictured all its debates, con-, 
 trolled tli« division of parties, and been the chief subject of political 
 drill and discussion ; that State legislatures, and lyceums, and news- 
 papers had rung with the theme ; that the Constitution of the Fnited 
 States protected it, and, to calm its jealousies and fears, made the 
 fugitive Slave-law binding on the political conscience of every good 
 citizen ; that eveiy great public officer swore to sustain it as a part 
 of the Government ; that moderate and cautious men — valuing peace 
 and order, contracts and good faith — felt themselves called npon to 
 discountenance anti-slavery teachings which the generous instincts 
 and moral sympathies of the more elevated and humane thoroughly 
 went along with ; that the immediate commercial and trading inter- 
 ests, and the manufocturing wealth of the North, wei'e complicated 
 beyond any possible disentanglement with the continuance of Slavery 
 and enlisted in its support — while the educational and religions teach- 
 ings were unconsciously, and the higher literature and poetry, the plat- 
 form eloquence, the lyceum oratory of the North, all purposely strug- 
 gling against it ; that the great monetary institutions, the large cap- 
 italists, Wall street, and State street, South street, and Lowell, and 
 Newark, and Paterson, and Pittsburgh — were apologists and uphold- 
 ers of it — with all the conservative instincts and interests of the 
 North — with which inevitably go the colleges, the churches, the 
 clergy — and with them the ethics, and the piety of the land — every 
 thing but exceptional genius, or individual independence, or deep- 
 hearted manly conviction, or simple-hearted womanly instinct — I 
 say, when you consider all this steel-hardened process, you can 
 not help seeing how tremendous, how unconscious, how thorough- 
 ly inwrought, inbred, fastened and fixed the influence which 
 Slavery has had over the Northern mind, and heart, and will, and 
 character. My own conviction is, that not a Northern man Ha-cs, 
 whose character does not bear the mark of the Slave's manacle, either 
 as a convict brand, or a martyr's cross ; either in the distortion which 
 his faculties have experienced in violent contention with it, or in the 
 deformity of unnatural accommodation to it. It has created a class 
 of persons — who may be considered embodied protests — with a 
 monstrous development of conscience of this evil, crowding every 
 
10 
 
 more delicate form of liuman sympathy — while in the mass of the 
 people, it has more or less made moral consistency, political coherency, 
 and even full intellectual sanity, quite impossible. I believe that this 
 terrible disturbing influence has acted on the whole intellectual and 
 moral life of the Nation, as an concealed mass of iron, near the 
 binnacle in a wooden ship, acts on the compass — making its indica- 
 tions false and unreliable, while they are trusted to guide the ves- 
 sel. There could be no natural and wholesome development of the 
 moral life of this Nation, with this lie and wickedness consecrated 
 and shrined in its political heart. The pulpit of the country, brave 
 and free here and there, as courageous and commanding men chanced 
 to occupy it, has been necessarily bound, not by fear or interest 
 chiefly, but by modesty, doubt, and sympathy with the conservative 
 class — the sober and prudent portion of the people. ^Ve have all 
 been brought up at tlio knees of good men justifying our Constitution 
 in its compromises. The saintly and the learned, the polished and 
 the successful, the social lords and ladies of the land, have taught 
 our rising youth, our yoimg clergy, our teachers in schools, puncti- 
 lious reverence for the Constitution and the Laws — reverence for its 
 great defenders — and a corresponding contempt, or hatred, for the 
 radicals who were imperilling the Union and the Constitution, by 
 questioning any of its compromises. It was clearly impossible that 
 our etliics, our piety, our literature, our social system, should not be 
 corrupted with the virus in our lawful Constitution. I feel its hate- 
 ful sap in my own blood. I can not be sure that it does not still 
 corrupt my intellectual currents, disorder my heart, and glaze my 
 vision, I hate it the more for some secret kindness for it still 
 lurking in the tissues, where reverence for my teachers, gratitude to 
 our fathers, and respect for law and order, mesh it in and forbid 
 it wholly to escape. I fear that I shall find it rising up against me 
 in the awful day of accoimt — and that I shall never fully know the 
 injury it has done me, till I see my image in the perfect mirror of 
 the divine judgment ! 
 
 It was this moral stupor, so deep we did not know it, producing 
 a distaste for politics — a growing indifli^rence to, or despair of repub- 
 lican institutions — a willingness to let bad men administer a govern- 
 ment thus hopelessly bound in the cords of a terrible constitutional 
 evil — which made us such an object of misgivings even to good men 
 abroad; — which led the South to conceive of and think feasible our 
 subjugation — which really paralyzed our futh and our eftbrts for the 
 first year of this war, and which was made the instrument under God 
 
11 
 
 of bringing us to the hopeful condition in-which we now are. That 
 condition is this — a state in which it is impossible for the South to 
 draw back, or for the North and West to do any thing but go for- 
 ward ; — a condition certain, I think, to end in the utter disintegra- 
 tion of Southern society, Southern institutions. Southern slavery — 
 an utter destruction of the political, social, and industrial existence of 
 Slavery, securing for the first time in our Nation, a homogeneous peo- 
 ple, policy, and law. 
 
 Nobody can say, that we, the North, sought this, or were even 
 willing to have it come. " The prophets prophesy falsely, and the 
 priests bear rule by their means ; and my people love to have it so." 
 It did not seem jjossible. We were not up to it in our morals, our 
 politics, our finances, our self-confidence. We aimed at the preserva- 
 tion of the Union and tlie Constitution, and the enforcement of the 
 Laws. Those who would gladly have hoped for what has now come 
 did not dare to do so. The people of the North were not supposed 
 by any calm and cai'eful mind to be at all ready to contemplate so 
 radical a dealing with their difiiculty. Most slowly and reluctantly 
 did Congress contemplate a confiscation policy, an Emancipation act 
 — or any course looking to extinction of the Slave power, or seizure 
 of the constitutional rights alleged still to belong to Rebel States. 
 We could none of us believe that the Rebels abjured these rights ; 
 that they did not still contemplate and desire reiinion upon some 
 terms — a little better for them perhaps, but not very much worse for 
 us, than the old ones. And so we went on, calling out our forces in 
 driblets, coining our paper-money by installments, and always ready 
 for expected propositions of peace; — until by degrees, Providence 
 seems to have committed the free powers and instincts of the Ameri- 
 can people, to a decisive and final conflict with the Slave power and 
 its instincts — a conflict in which one must be left forever dead 
 upon the field. 
 
 The first and perha23S most desperate tug in this struggle, was 
 with the enemy here at home. That enemy it was, an old party 
 sympathy with the South, honest as any mei"e party spnpathy 
 can be — and rooted in the debates and cries of numerous politi- 
 cal campaigns crowned with victory, which the Government looked 
 on with the greatest dismay, and to soothe and disarm which, it so 
 long upheld its temporizing policy. The Government was sagacious ; 
 the policy Avas prudent. The signs all indicated it ; and you remem- 
 ber, how the triumj^is of a peace policy resoimded in the elections of 
 New- York, and the great Western States. It seemed for a few weeks 
 
12 
 
 as if the nation were doomed to perish between the two fires of 
 its open enemies and its false friends ; to be crucified between two 
 thieves — Shivery at the South and Party at tlie Nortli ! But thank 
 God, party was instantly shocked at the ghastly image of its own suc- 
 cess ! The honest Democracy saw its real figure reflected in the 
 Southern sky, and started back appalled at the treason, to Avhich it 
 was- just ready to become accessory. The country was saved, when 
 the brave, old, and trusted leaders of the Democracy — some firm from 
 the start, but many turning about Avith still more effect in the mid- 
 current of our threatening ruin, beckoned off the masses ready to 
 throw themselves into the Southern scale, with the saving cry : " Ye 
 know not what ye do." 
 
 The second tug was in the army itself. There, too, the bone and 
 sinew remembered the old party cries, and had a contempt and hatred 
 for the negro Avhich made even the slightest concession that Slavery 
 was the real cause of the war, and its extirpation any object of our 
 arms, a dangerous thing to allow — nay, a truth Avhich it seemed ne" 
 cessary to conceal under any amount of self-deception at the centre. 
 Leaders without radical sympathy with freedom must be kept at the 
 head of our troops. East and West ! The slave must be driven out 
 of the camps with the bayonet, and handed over to his master. He 
 might possibly now and then be permitted to take the spade, but 
 never the musket. So deep-rooted and so disgusting was the hatred 
 of the negro, among the rougher and coarser of oixr population — so 
 greedy the desire of the lower class of foreigners to have a lower deep 
 down Avhich to look — so utterly brutal the jiartisan feeling of hatred 
 which portions of our Xorthern press had encouraged toward the 
 slave, that I confess I despaired at seeing this venomous animosity 
 even begin to disappear in my day and generation. And I am confident 
 there Avas very little hope of it on the part of our rulers. Yet it has 
 begun to soften, nay, it has rapidly dissolved, and it is swiftly melting 
 away — and this, in the best possible way — under actual contact with 
 the slave in the Southern trench, and on the ships and wharves, and 
 battle-fields of the South. Our armies, the rank and file, have met 
 this black brute — so ignorant, stupid, lazy, and useless. They have 
 found him about as intelligent as many of their own comrades, and 
 more muscular and industrious, more useful, and as kind and compan- 
 ionable. They see him toiling for money at the wharves of Acquia 
 Creek, Newbern, and Port Royal, Nashville, Memphis, and Xew- 
 Orleaus, with a constancy, sobriety, patience, and* utility, which inter, 
 rupt and confound all their previous notions. They have found him 
 
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 18 
 
 with a heart, a cousclence, a ■will — in short, a humanity like their own. 
 They see that he is the strength of the rebellion ; that one negro in 
 the field of corn keeps two rebels in the field of battle, and that every 
 stroke of the spade, is a stroke of the sabre and a thrust from the bay- 
 onet in its transposed value. They see that the only loyal men in the 
 South are black men ; the only men from whom credible information is 
 to be had, the only friends the soldiers has, the negroes. They appre- 
 ciate for the first time : 1 . The wrong and inhumanity of Slaveiy — 
 in thus seeing its objects ; 2. The military value of the slave, as a 
 rebel antagonist; 3. His importance as a loyal ally. And they drop 
 their prejudices and fall back on their humane feelings and their mili- 
 tary and personal instincts of self-preservation. The army, therefore, 
 is certainly becoming slowly and surely — nay, rather surely and 
 rapidly, Abolitionist, not merely in its technical, but in its more real 
 and practical sense. The period of suspense on this jDoint is passed — 
 the army has itself settled the qiiestion of Xorthern feeling on this 
 subject. It has adopted the Emancipation policy of the Government; 
 only more so. And it is this army, more intensely anti-slavery, as it 
 gets further South, which, by its multitudinous letters, by its protests 
 against a timid, anti-negro i:)olicy, and by its indignant remonstrances 
 at any half measures at home — has helloed settle the press and the 
 pulpit and the j^eople of the loyal States in a radical anti-slavery 
 policy, as the only military, the only politic, the only moral, the only 
 economic policy to be pursued. 
 
 The only remaining tug in this struggle — and I think we may almost 
 flatter ourselves that is now on the very verge of a successful 
 throw — is not a few smart victories, although we doubtless need one 
 greatly on the Rappahannock, but a deliberate, sober, general willing- 
 ness on the part of our loyal jDCople, to throw the element of time 
 utterly out of their thoughts and calculations, and make the first ar- 
 ticle of th^ir creed this — " War, till we have final and complete suc- 
 cess !" The question for loyal men, is not tcheri, but only hoio the war 
 is to end, and they have no question that the war is to end, only when 
 the Rebellion stops, be it one year, five years, or our natural lives. 
 There is in truth nothing else left, and to this we must come at last. 
 The ship of state is at sea, and the Nation with all its treasure and all 
 its people is in her hold. She is upon the red sea of a bloody civil war. 
 Her port is a victorious peace. This peace she can not make but 
 mijst win. It is not for her to calculate how many days, or months, 
 or years, she Avill struggle with the waves, before she gives up her 
 post and returns to her old mooruigs. There is no return. It is as if 
 
14 
 
 the shore she left -svere sunk. Disgvacecl and baffled, her flag- must 
 turn to a dishonored rag, which pirates themselves would spit upon, 
 did she 'abandon her voyage. No, steady at her helm, and trimming 
 her sails to storm and fog, sounding in the shallows, feeling through 
 the ice, catching every breeze, and tacking against every wind, she 
 has only to press on, making such headway as she can, but never for 
 one instant abandoning her predestined haven, till at last she anchors, 
 shattered and torn, it may be, with any loss of treasure, Avith any 
 hardship to her crew, on short rations or full as it shall prove, but at 
 her lawful and her chosen port, and Avith her own sacred flag at the 
 peak. 
 
 Tlie moment the people have calmly and with a sober sense of 
 the necessity of the case, abandoned any idea but this, we shall have 
 removed the only serious obstacle to a speedy success. While there 
 is any imcertainty of feeling on this point — any hankering for a peace 
 of compromise and concession, we shall have a war protracted by in- 
 decision, debate, division — more expensive, more dangerous, and more 
 bloody — without the least chance of the base peace that is so meanly 
 desired, but also without any chance of the victorious peace that is the 
 sole possible termination of our struggle. Let us be but as one man 
 in our solemn determination to succeed at all hazards and at any cost, 
 and we shall have nnity, energy, economy, decision, in all our councils, 
 and swiftness and certainty in our success. And this feeling I verily 
 believe is already nearly assured. The most gratifying and encourag- 
 ing aspect in our affairs has been the courage, constancy, and cheer- 
 fulness of our people, during a long period of slight apparent success. 
 The Nation has begun to lean upon its own purpose ; to find support 
 in its own heart and conscience ; to be guided by its faith and resolu- 
 tion, and so, to take its daily food, Avhether in the "bitter herbs of delay 
 and failure, or in the manna and quails of progress and success, with 
 equanimity and resolve. Dark and stormy days may be i^i store for 
 us, but they will not be remembered in the mighty joy of our final 
 victory. That triumph is as sure as the harvest that never fails. It 
 is a mere sum in arithmetic. It does not even depend upon victories. 
 Our enemy loses strength by every success, as much as by every de- 
 feat. Eight millions of people may gain a victory every month against 
 twenty millions, and if the twenty millions are merely constant to 
 their purpose, a few years ruins and exterminates the foe in the midst 
 of his successes, by sheer exhaustion of men and resources. Thus the 
 loyal cause is steadily victorious, even Avhen bafiled and lieaten in 
 detail. To wait is to conquer. The longer our forces are in the field, 
 
/^\3 
 
 15 
 
 the more obstinately tliey are resisted, the larger the force we are 
 compL'lled to bring to the war, the more completely we are driven to 
 overrun every acre of the enemy's ai'ea — 'the more thoroughly and 
 completely do we disintegrate his covmtry, saturate his barbarous 
 civilization with ours, carry our customs, our jjeoijle, our temper, and 
 ■ our industry into his territory, and take moral possession of his soil. 
 His stout resistance, successful skirmishes, do but familiarize us the 
 more with him and him with us. I can not even regret that his stub- 
 borness is continued — for if he bent before our blast, we should have 
 passed over liim with less elFect. The war is by its duration, and its 
 thoroughness preparing the South to make a possible part of a free 
 country. You can not plough the yielding sand nor plant it ; but the 
 tough marl may be broken up, spite of all resistance, if only oxen 
 enough arc put to the yoke ! We have oxen enough, and by the 
 gTace of God, we mean to plough the Southern cotton-iields with the 
 heifers of freedom and sow it with Xorthern wheat. War is the only 
 culture our Southern waste admits of. By no other tillage can it be 
 added to the area of cultivated American civilization. And by no 
 discipline, short of that which is sufiered by the North, in its costly 
 sacrifices of blood and treasure, and in its loss of noble youth, could 
 it expiate its own errors and sins, and recover tone and temjier, faith 
 in its primitive ideas, and the earnestness and dignity of its original 
 love of liberty, truth, and humanity. 
 
 In every Avay, then, the war is our medicine ; bleeding us of our 
 moral and political malady, in the free States, while purifving the 
 Southern area by the fire and sword Eebellion continues to invite. 
 
 Let us go on then in solemn earnestness ! in sacred vigor and stern 
 virtue! How long, O Lord ! how long ? and God answers, as long 
 as rebellion and resistance to lawful authority may last. It can not 
 be very long, if we are willing to have it as long as God lists. All 
 the signs indicate rapid sinking m the enemy's resources. His war- 
 riors are all gathered and can not be increased. His food is becoming 
 scarce. His allies are deserting him abroad. His iron and salt and 
 steel are failing him. His locomotives are weari^ig out, and he can 
 not renew them. His few gunboats and ships of war are every day 
 falling into our hands, ft needs no prophet to foretell that another 
 year will bring famine and pestilence into his ranks, and to his hapless 
 homes. His slaves are welcomed to our lines, and are now in thou- 
 sands working in our trenches, and forming into our regiments upon 
 their native soil. Two years have taught us the art of war, and our 
 system is acquiring order and completeness. We are strong in credit 
 
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 and easy in fincances. Our resources liave proved tenfold greater than 
 our fears or hopes. We have not put forth a quarter of our strength. 
 Our armies are the healthiest the world ever saw. Our hospitals the 
 best, our commissariat of unequaled abundance ; our affairs now accom- 
 modated jDerfectly and with consummate ease to ourselves, to an in- 
 definite state of war. Still prosperous, still industrious, still imin- 
 vaded ; when was a people after two years of such costly preparation 
 and such large outlay of men and means, in a condition of such solid 
 vigor ? not a dollar of foreign capital borroAved, not an ounce of food 
 imported. Meanwhile, the enemy is crumbling into ruin. His terri- 
 tory is devastated, so that a hundi-ed years of peace could not in his 
 hands, restore the forests, the gardens, the roads, levees, and planta- 
 tions, lie has recklessly given over to the iron hoof of invasion! I 
 have seen the ruin he has invoked, and he has only to continue to in- 
 vite it a little longer, to make all his cities places for bats and owls, 
 and his fields, a universal wilderness ! 
 
 Oh ! that he would repent and stay the mighty hand of God's 
 wrath that is swiftly sweeping him out of the way of the liberty, the 
 light and the love he has dared to oppose ! 
 
 As for us, it becomes us to pray with all earnestness, that tlae Al- 
 mighty goodness may not break the instruments with which he 
 achieves the retribution due to a slaveholding rebellion, because they 
 did not meanAvhile repent of their own sins and short-comings ! We 
 ought to feel this war, and the meaning of it, and our complicity in 
 it far more deeply and seriously than we do. And it will continue 
 till we feel it to be God's work and our chastisement, as well as that 
 of our enemies. W^e must be thinking in all himiility and shame, of 
 our own blood-guiltiness in our national sins ; especially of our world- 
 liness and materialism ; our devotion to pelf; our shalloAV and sui^erfi- 
 cial piety ; our elevation of base men to place and power ; our Avant 
 of fidelity to man and God, to i^rincijiles, and honor, and truth. If 
 we do not straightAvay begin our repentance, by a stricter attention 
 to our jDolitical duties, giving every A'ote AV^e cast in the fear of Al- 
 mighty God, holding our possessions as stCAvards of the Lord, conse- 
 crating our bodies to temperance and our souls to Christ, we may, 
 after having exterminated our eneixdes, find tsome new vial of divine 
 wrath prepared by Almighty justice for our hai'dness of heart ! 
 May Heavenly Mercy avert such a terrible necessity, by bringing us to 
 instant, thorough, and imiversal repentance and reformation ! 
 
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