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THE 
 
 HEROIC PEEIODS 
 
 A NATION'S HISTORY. 
 
 AJsT APPEAL TO THE SOLDIERS OF THE 
 A^IEPJCAN ARMIES. 
 
 TAYLER LEWIS. 
 
 UNION COLLEGE. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 BAKER & GODWIN, PRINTERS, 
 
 PRINTING-HOUSE SQUARE. 
 
 1866. 
 
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 ^\^ 
 
 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 A NATION is born, a league is aiade. The oue is a natuial 
 aud historical product, the other an outward and artificial 
 construction. The one has an inward organic power making 
 its organization what it is, the other is made by its organiza- 
 tion as a purely outward adjustment. In other words, a na- 
 tion lias a true life, vivifying every part, and felt in every part ; 
 a league is a mere balance of power, an equilibrium of me- 
 chanical forces. Hence a nations-has. a true political person- 
 ality ; it has a conscience, an acconntlibility-; a league is the 
 creature of diplomacy ; it (^an 'have, at the' highest, no other 
 principle for its inward or outward action than a time-serving 
 expediency ; there can enter in its history no high question of 
 right, for anything of the kind would be a disturbing instead 
 of a conserving element. A nation claims a true allegiance ; 
 a league has no higher obligation than a temporary contract, 
 Avhich each party may put an end to, with no other consider- 
 ation than its own safety in so doing. A nation is an histor- 
 ical power ordained of God, and representing God upon earth ; 
 a league is a purely human thing, a contrivance of politicians, 
 often the lowest contrivance of the lowest politicians. Such 
 political alliances have often appeared in history. There were 
 the ever-dissolving Grecian confederacies ; there was the short- 
 lived Achaean league, the best of them all ; there were the 
 Italian leagues of the middle ages ; there have been European 
 congresses and alliances of more modern times ; going back 
 into the remote past, we find the remarkable " confederacy," 
 
mention :-d by the Psalmist, of " Edom and the Ishmaelites, 
 of Moab and the Hargarencs ; " last of all there lias been tlie 
 Soutbein Confederacy, beginning to crumble as soon as formed* 
 having the elements of weakness and wickedness in its very 
 inception, and falling to pieces through its own innate deprav^- 
 ity, its own inbred dissensions, even when a fierce outward, 
 conflict was giving it an unnatural vigor and an artificial enthu- 
 siasm. It might have destroyed the nation whose life it 
 assailed ; it never could have sustained itself. Its brief 
 wretched existence shows us the fearful danger we have ^^1 
 escaped, the fatal wreck that might have come over the whole 
 nation, from the example even of its temporary success. 
 
 Political combinations of this kind have ever exhibited the 
 same base features. Products of an evil diplomacy were they 
 all. Their history is nothing but a history of faction and in- 
 trigue. They have ever presented the worst aspects of human 
 nature, destroying social integrity, and weakening the sense of 
 obligation id the individual man, by merging it in a soulless 
 mechanism having neither life, nor honor, nor conscience, nor 
 accountability. They have never had anything great and glo- 
 . rious about them, except as they have approached, or been trans- 
 formed into, the national idea, or have had a transient honor 
 from flashes of glory that have occasionally appeared in some 
 of their component parts. In thenaselves, they have ever 
 been the deformities of human history. For such leagues 
 there are no elements of the sublime, because there are no 
 necessary historical ideas connected with them ; no elevating 
 reminiscences of the past ; no proud hopes of the future ; no 
 inspiring eras ; no symbolic words and days to call out a lofty 
 enthusiasm; no great questions of right; in a word, no heroic 
 periods, such as are ever associated with the ideas of a true 
 political personality, and of a precious national life. All is 
 sordid, low, selfish. Such political mechanisms, if they de- 
 serve the name, may be said to have, in truth, no history in 
 themselves, or as wholes. It is simply a record of the selfish, 
 sectional struggles of the parts with each other and wnth the 
 
embracing combination. This must be so, since there is no 
 national feeling — in^other words, no feeling of a common life, 
 to prevent it. The annals of such a soulless corporation can 
 give us nothing more than the unceasing strivings of sections 
 ever disturbing in the very effort to maintain this mechanical 
 balance of power, or ever seeking to separate themselves from 
 the merely artificial whole with which they are connected by 
 no living bond. 
 
 It is only a nation that can have anything truly heroic in 
 its history, and the converse of this holds equally true ; every 
 real nation created by God, even the smallest and most 
 obscure of them, have had, somewhere in the course of their 
 political existence, their heroic periods. It is the historical 
 sign of nationality. It has been their birth struggle, or some 
 other eventful time or times to which they are ever looking back, 
 as that which gives them a title to stand in the family of na- 
 tions. It is that which gave them oneness and totality, or se- 
 cured it against destruction, and to which they, therefore, 
 refer as identical with their national life and national contin- 
 uance. Even Portugal thus looks back to the days of Vasco 
 da Gama ; Holland remembers, and yet lives in, the remem- 
 brance of her glorious struggle for nationality ; aud so, too, 
 the national existence of Sweden yet derives strength from 
 the great period of her emerging from anarchy in the days of 
 Gustavus Vasa. It is the remembrance of Tell and his heroic 
 time that makes Switzerland a true nation, preventing the league 
 character, which enters too much into her structure, from 
 wholly marring her noble history. In the greater nations 
 this has shown°itself still more strikingly. All that is politic- 
 ally high and glorious has ever connected itself with these 
 thoughts of a national hfe, as a true personality having at 
 some periods of its course such facts of a glorious past, and 
 making that past the ground of its hope in the future. 
 
 A heroic age may be briefly defined as one predominantly 
 unselfish, or as a time when the self-consciousness, both 
 individual and national, is all taken up in some strong absorb- 
 1* 
 
6 
 
 ing emotion— when a strange elevation of feeling and corres- 
 ponding dignity of action are seen in men, and they seem to 
 be carried on by impulses that appear extravagant to the more 
 calculating temperaments of succeeding times. This heroic 
 spirit is not grace, nor religion, but that which stands next to ' 
 them among the moving powers of humanity. It is, in other 
 words, the highest thing purely human. Strong feeling, like 
 the pure reason, is unselfish, and the heroism of which we 
 speak may be characterized as the self-forgetfulness aroused by 
 a great ri(/kt, or a great idea, and grounded on the fact that 
 the ideal in man is ever higher and purer than his ordinary 
 actual. The denial of this is a mere play upon words. It is 
 enough to justify the name that such intense passion, so called 
 out, is something far above the low, sordid, consciously calcu- 
 lating selfishness of our common life. Such heroic periods in 
 a nation's history seemed designed by Providence, not for 
 themselves only, or the great etiects of which they are the 
 immediate causes, but for their influence upon the whole after- 
 current of the national existence. The strong remembrance 
 becomes a part of the national life ; it enters afterward into 
 the common and constant thinking; it gives a peculiar direc- 
 tion to the national feeling; it imparts a higher character to 
 its subsequent action ; it makes the whole historical being 
 very different from what it would have been had there been no 
 such epic commencement, no such heroic time ,or times. It fur- 
 nishes a treasury of glorious reminiscences wherewith to rein- 
 vigorate the national virtue when impaired, as it is so like to 
 be, by the factious, and selfish, and unheroic temper produced 
 by subsequent days of merely economical or utilitarian pros- 
 perity. 
 
 And thus ^oe stand in the family of nations. Young as 
 we are we too have had our heroic periods, the second, in 
 respect to glory, every way worthy of being named together 
 with the first. The earlier struggle has passed into history, 
 and its character is secured. The critical after-period was 
 marked by no compromises, no letting down of the heroic 
 
idea out of a false charity to traitors, no belittling of the 
 great struggle, no marring of its honor by any attempts to 
 give eqnal honor to its domestic foes, no obscuring the great 
 truth for the political accommodation of tories who had fought 
 against it, no yielding the great right by admitting to Its 
 equal guardianship men who had zealously opposed its asser- 
 tion, no sinking into ignominy the whole contest, on both sides, 
 by lessening that great right to a mere question of "stand- 
 points," as though it had in itself no intrinsic, unchangeable 
 truth as seen from every stand-point. The men of that day 
 never admitted that they went through a long and fierce war 
 to settle what might have at any time been viewed as an open 
 question, or which had not been regarded as irrevocably de- 
 cided from the beginning. They fought not to settle what 
 was in itself doubtful, and which, therefore, never could be so 
 settled, but to assert and maintain what was certain, vital 
 never to be yielded. Such was the temper of the men who 
 essayed the "reconstruction " of our nation after the war in 
 which it had its birth. No such proceedings followed our 
 first glorious epoch as now threaten to tarnish the lustre of the 
 second and to deprive it of all its due historic eftect. 
 
 It is all idle for the false conservative to say that there is 
 no danger of this. History does, indeed, in time, assert itself, 
 and the value of the heroic is not wholly lost, but it may be 
 obscured for generations. There never was for England a 
 nobler period than that of the wars of the Puritans ao-ainst 
 the Stuarts. Its honor is now again emerging from the cloud 
 but we know that unprincipled reaction and a base reconstruc- 
 tion, under the name of restoration, put the brand of ino-lorious 
 centuries upon the most heroic cause and the roost heroic 
 names in English history. We must see to it that our Hamp- 
 dens, our Pyms, and our Vanes, our civil and military heroes, 
 our glorious asserters of the fundamental idea of the Ameri- 
 can Picpublic be not suffered to fall under the same long re- 
 proach. Above all must we see to it that the Monks and the 
 
Clarendons do not get the upper hand — that they be not the 
 men to represent us aod our history in generations to come. 
 
 There is no need to dwell further on our first great histor- 
 ical time. Another similar epoch, still more terrible, is yet to 
 have its place and character assigned to it. It is not too much 
 to say that we are now assigning it. This present political 
 canvass is to determine whether the conflict through which we 
 have just passed is to take its place of honor beside our first 
 struggle, and to go down to history in company with it, or 
 whether it is to be stripped, for a time at least, of all its 
 grander features, and reckoned among the inglorious wars of 
 faction, differing in no respect from a vulgar prize-fight except 
 in the ocean of bloodshed which it has occasioned. 
 
 A war of faction, a bloody mob-fight g -'owing out of a 
 presidential election, a base contest between " two sets of ex- 
 tremists," each equally wrong, equally deserving the reproba- 
 tion of the country — an ignominious strife, " swinging round 
 from South to North ; " such is the representation given by 
 Andrew Johnson, when he himself revives again these words 
 of faction, the North and the South — talking of extremists 
 w^hen, in all the proceedings that for long years were prepar- 
 ing this war, he himself was one of the extremes of Southern 
 extremists, voting with them through Kan«a«, through Le- 
 compton, his name standing on record wnth Davis, Mason, 
 Slidell, Tombs, and Wigfall, as constantly and as regularly as 
 the letters of the alphabet. He now sees things " swinging 
 round," and puts on a par with the extremists to whom he had 
 so long allied himself (even to the very verge of the traitorous 
 plunge) men who never violated a law of the land, and who 
 have been ever foremost in defense of our national honor. 
 
 So, Seward calls it " a civil war," as other advocates of the 
 rebellion have compared it to the American revolution. Be- 
 tween this and the unspeakable crime of the Southern leaders 
 there is no parallel whatever. Besides being for a most 
 righteous cause, our first war with Britain was a contest 
 
9 
 
 Detween a mother country atid a far-distant misgoverned col- 
 ony. It differed in no essential aspect from a war b'etween 
 two distant nations. It was a separation coming in tlie natu- 
 ral course of things, as belonging to the very intent and idea 
 of colonization. As compared with the Southern war for 
 slavery, it presents all the difference between the necessary 
 pains of parturition and the most foul matricidal murder. In 
 like manner, Seward's deceptive term, a " civil war," is equally 
 out of place. It is designed to lower the whole struggle, even 
 as the other comparison was meant unduly to elevate the 
 South. But it is an utter misnomer. It was no civil war. 
 This term is rightly applied to contentions where two opposing 
 forces in a state are striving in an irregular and violent man- 
 ner for the mastery, neither seeking to destroy the nation, but 
 each, on the contrary, protesting their superior devotion to the 
 preservation of the national life. Such wars have been fre- 
 quent in the world, disastrous and bloody, though not wholly 
 destitute, on both sides, of some features of the heroic. Sach 
 were in England the wars of the Roses ; such were the 
 struggles between King and Parliament. They were not like 
 this indescribable rebellion against republicanism. So France, 
 too, can find redeeming elements of glory in her fierce revolu- 
 tions. For in none of these contests was either French or 
 English nationality ever assailed. Neither party thour>-ht of 
 harming it. AH would have united in a struggle for its pres- 
 ervation, one and indivisible. The CromweUian and the cav- 
 alier, the aristocrat and the sans culottes, held alike sacred 
 that precious historical idea on which we have insisted as the 
 radical distinction between a nation and a base, factious 
 league. But in our own case how utterly the reverse was the 
 spectacle presented ! It was the very life of the nation that 
 was assailed ; it was an effort by the foulest means to blot it 
 out of history. This was the unspeakable crime attempted by 
 the plotting "extremists" with whom Andrew Johnson had 
 been so long connected. For this there were sought the 
 basest foreign alliances. This vile league had its still viler 
 
10 
 
 leagues abroad. Recreant to tlie name and the idea of repub- 
 licanism, they had their emissaries praying aid from Euro- 
 pean monarchies, not in defense of, but for the destruction of, 
 the freest and most beneficent government on earth. Men 
 who once sat in the Senate of the United States, men with 
 whose ayes and noes Andrew Johnson's voice had long 
 sounded in unbroken unison, lurking at foreign courts where 
 the very name of their country was hateful and her noble in- 
 stitutions of freedom were more dreaded than anything 
 else on earth ! This was the utterly un-American proceeding 
 of the Southern Confederacy ; this was the unspeakable crime 
 of Mason and Slidell, whom Andrew Johnson would compare 
 with Wilson, and Andrews, and Sumner, and Fenton, and 
 Stevens, and Cuvtin, "at the other end of the line." What 
 crimes have " these men " committed that they should be so 
 stigmatized ? What have they done except to defend, most 
 ably and manfully, opinions which, whether we call them 
 practical or not, every man knows to be in soul-accordance 
 with the Declaration of Independence, in most conservative 
 harmony with that great historical document which underlies 
 all our republican ideas, and gives us our distinctive character 
 among the nations of the earth. For long years had Andrew 
 Johnson's colleagues freely maintained opinions subversive of 
 all these ideas, though holding, all the time, the highest oBices 
 in the government. But " these men," whose only excess, if it 
 be excess, is in their love of freedom— " these men" the 
 President calls the Northern traitors. At every railway sta- 
 tion the same violent language is repeated. He means by this 
 the unbroken loyal pai-ty, including Congress and the govern- 
 ors of all the loyal States. He means by it just what copper- 
 head editors have meant by the same language throughout 
 the war. But strangest sight of all is what may be called the 
 afterpiece in this dramatic performance. At every repetition, 
 forth steps one who was for so many yea's an honored leader 
 in this party, one who gained the name of its chief " radical " 
 from those who now assail it. He has no confession to make. 
 
11 
 
 but hardly is the intemperate harangue concluded when he 
 appears upon the railway stage and blandly says: This is all 
 just so, my fellow-citizens ; — what our great and good Presi- 
 dent tells you is nothing but the honest truth. Could there 
 well be conceived a m^re melancholy spectacle ? And yet we 
 would not forget the great services that this man has rendered 
 to the cause of right and freedom. We will rather tax our 
 iancy to invent palliations for his present course, than to 
 believe that in the past days of his high and deserved renown 
 he was either self-ignorant or insincere. It was not merely aid 
 that these Southern "extremists" sought; they endeavored to 
 degrade, in every possible way, the republic which Washing- 
 ton and Franklin had helped to found. They continually cast 
 the foulest reproach upon our history and our name. Men 
 now seeking admission to Congress, men lately sitting in the 
 Johnson-Philadelphia Convention, were foremost in the plan- 
 ning and the execution of these base anti-national embassies. 
 A civil war might have been waged and yet each party pre- 
 serve an American and a republican position. A civil war, 
 had it been truly such, might have had a ground for conciliation ; 
 this utterly traitorous and un-American proceeding excludes 
 every idea of harmonious action with the guilty participants. 
 The men who did this, the men who planned and supported it, 
 may have an amnesty consigning them to contempt, though 
 leaving to them life and property ; they may have mercy with 
 io-nominy, but forgiveness nsver. We mean national and polit- 
 ical forgiveness. They can never more be permitted to sit in 
 an American senate ; they can never more be trusted with the 
 national honor. This sinks as they rise ; the cause for which 
 250,000 men have died loses its historical glory just in propor- 
 tion as these men are suffered to emerge from their infamy. 
 
 " Our late civil war," says Secretary Seward. By such 
 language as this he would seem to regard it, not as a struggle 
 for a nation's life, but a party fight, to be cured by a little di- 
 plomacy. The " higher law " was forgotten in his pleasant chat 
 with Governor Perry about " Northern and Southern stand- 
 
12 
 
 points," It all became a matter of perspective. The "irre- 
 pressible conflict " resolved itself into a difference of latitude, 
 a mere difference of style, according as a speech happened to 
 be made in Ch-irlestun or New York. A fight between two 
 parlies ! Most true, indeed, but who were the parties ? Every- 
 thing depends upon the right naming of the issue. It was 
 not North and South. It was not two factions in a nation, 
 each equally zealous, or professing to be, for nationality. It 
 was the Nation versus Rebels. It was the nation on the one 
 side, the whole nation, in its total political idea, a republican 
 nation, with its national life, struggling with men North and 
 South who were seeking to destroy that life, to bury the 
 national idea, and resorting to the most unscrupulous as well 
 as the most bloody means to effect their purpose. 
 
 It is here that the distinction we have made becomes of 
 vital importance, and that is the reason why we have so 
 strongly insisted upon it. It at once clears up the issue and 
 exposes the deceptive statement. Had we been a mere league, 
 there might have been some more plausible ground for char- 
 acterizing it as such a factious " civil war." It was, on the 
 other hand, the nation warring with a most mischievous idea 
 that long had been poisoning its vitality, and which could only 
 save its life by casting it out. It was not sectssion merely — a 
 thing which may be asserted or renounced according to the 
 expediencies of the times — but that from which secession inev- 
 itably comes. It was, we say again, a nation contending for 
 its life. What must we think of a man making high claims 
 to the reputation of a statesman who could overlook or ignore 
 this vital point. It was not North versus South, nor even 
 States against States ; that view is the product of the disor- 
 ganizing league idea. Even in these rebellious States the 
 nation existed all along — as much in Georgia as in New York. 
 It never ceased for a moment to be present in every part dur- 
 ing the hottest period of the war, the same as before and after 
 it. In all these seceding portions there had been, for eighty 
 years, the high national jurisdiction, supeiior to, yet in con- 
 
13 
 
 currence with, the local, and that, too, not as a government 
 over States (as that of States over individuals), or coming in 
 contact with the individual only by means of State interven- 
 tion, but reaching down through the States, exercising direct 
 jurisdiction, having direct power over, and claiming direct 
 allegiance from, every man, black or white, included in their 
 lower geographical organizations. This national jurisdiction 
 was never lost, never relaxed. It was at no time a mere wait- 
 ing claim, or in any manner put in abeyance, but insisted 
 upon, and enforced every moment by the most vigorous action, 
 until fully and triumphantly reasserted. Mr. Lincoln's oath, 
 " registered in heaven,*' never lost for a moment the solemnity 
 and the power of its sublime attestation. As became inevit- 
 able in such a conflict, the opposing local governm^^nts per- 
 ished — perished by the very position in which they had placed 
 themselves— perished by their own suicidal acts. Unless we 
 hold that death may be a part of life, or that disorganization 
 may be the law of an organic structure, or that a thing may 
 be at, the same time in violent resistance and yet in harmonious 
 relation to the whole of which it forms a constituent portion, 
 the conclusion must follow : The State governments, taking 
 this position, perished ; but the nation never lost, never loosed 
 its hold. This is not metaphysics but common sense. What- 
 ever ideal States may have remained hidden away, and out of 
 all sight of the actual, as some have dreamed, the assumed 
 State governments of which McGrath, and Vance, and Letcher 
 claimed to be heads, were not States that the nation could ac- 
 knowledge ; for a State is an organization, a lawful organiza- 
 tion, and not a mere geographical space, or a collection of 
 people. They ceased to be^States — States in the Union, and 
 we can know no other. The lower perished, but the " higher 
 law" lived on; the national jurisdiction survived amid all the 
 tumult, and when the struggle ended this was the only polit- 
 ical vitality left unharmed in these rebellious portions. As 
 such it was the fountain, the only fountain, of any future 
 vitality, of any future political organization for these disorgan- 
 
u 
 
 ized commuhities The nation ttill remained unbioken, "un- 
 impaired ;" and it was the nation, through its legislative body 
 constitutioually representing it in such action, that could alone 
 re-tore the lower and the lost jurisdiction. From it new life 
 must tiow to those broken, and wasted, and withered members 
 of the body p.^liiic. Here resided the vis medicatrix from 
 which alone could come the healing power. For four) ears 
 there had been no governors in those States, no k-gi^latures, 
 no judicial officers whom the nation could acknowledge 
 There was not one among them who had taken the national 
 oath essential to the validity of their action. -: It was not a par- 
 tial severance, a partial disorder, that might be cured by par- 
 tial order yet remaining. The tie of allegiance was broken 
 everywhere and in all. There was no political or official 
 soundness of any kind, whatever remains of loyalty might be 
 found, here and there, in individuals. All was anarchy. 
 There was no beginning de novo from themselves. No part, no 
 class, had any more right to make any such commencement 
 than another. There was no convening powT^r, and hence, there 
 could be no lawfully acknowdedged conventions. There was, 
 in short, no law there except this higher law, which had never 
 peiished. Theie was nothing to determine franchise, or when 
 or how such franchise should be exercised. The rebel gov- 
 ernor, the rebel legislatur.', the rebel genera's, had no more 
 power here than the rebel suldier in the ranks, certainly not 
 more than the peisecuted unionist, or the loyal colored man. 
 A military authority might, in the meantime, keep the peace ; 
 but the nation, through its once concurrent and never lost 
 jurisdiction, the nation as legislatively represented, could alone 
 reoiganize. Every other view lands us in contradiction and 
 ab;urdity, or would compel us to admit the lawfulness of con- 
 tinued revolution as an escape from the difficulty. Ignoring 
 the only remaining fountain of law and right, we must leave 
 the whole question of future political life to the mere chances 
 of anarchy, with the expectation of something in some way 
 turnino- up that might afterward be made regular by the na- 
 
15 
 
 (ioiial acknowledgment. But tl.en it would not be the same 
 old State, hut a new onp, arising in an anarchical and revolu- 
 tionary manner; for ihere could he no continuance of the old 
 life hut through some life remaining, and that, as we have 
 shown, was the unbroken national jurisdiction, once concurrent, 
 hut now exclusive, because it is all that remains to make a 
 beginning, however that which is thus begun might be left 
 (after full restoration) to the old power of changing its con- 
 stitution as it pleased, and with no other restriction than a 
 truly republican form, in harmony w'ith the Constitution of the 
 nation. This alone could bridge the chasm of anarchy and 
 revolution ; for law, as distinguished from these, is a living 
 thing, a continuous energy, and not a mere arrangement oi 
 dead expediencies. Hence such a course is no less a necessity 
 for the dismembered parts, than it is the high rirjht of the na- 
 tion; for lawful organizations can only proceed regularly from 
 organizations previously existing, regarded as initiating and 
 regulating the inceptive mod-s of those that follow. Espe- 
 , daily does this living power of law find its highest exeraplifi- 
 , cation in republican governments, whose beauty and perfection 
 ■is that the greatest flexibility and diversity may be secured 
 without thosB chasms and convulsions that are sometimes ren- 
 dered necessary under other forms. The poiver of restoring, 
 reconstrncting, initiating into jwlitical life the broken mem- 
 bers; resides in the unbroken national whole. That settled one 
 [question only yet remains: who represent the nation in this, 
 I'the executive or the law-making power, that is, Congress, to- 
 igether with the President, so far as by his veto he rightfully 
 I performs a legislative act. That question we will not here 
 ! argue. Had it not been for late events, it seems difiicult to 
 (imagine how any doubt could possibly have arisen in respect 
 Ijto the one and only answer to be given by any rational mind. 
 ;!A11 this might be argued from the very idea of nationality in 
 fits bearing on the case before us. But it has not been left to 
 'abstract reasoning. The express provision that Congress, as 
 thus legislatively representing the nation, shall guarantee to 
 
16 
 
 each State a republican form of government, puts the matter 
 at rest. It is difficult to imagine a case to which it is more 
 perfectly applicable than that of a State that has broken its- 
 relations to the Union, and lost its true position by rebellion. 
 In oidinaiy times it would seem like a provision for whose ap- 
 plication no emergency could arise. The great men who 
 framed the Constitution are not known to have anticipated 
 any such tenible convulsion as that through which we have 
 passed ; and their having so perfectly provided for it, there- 
 fore, may well warrant the reverent belief that in this most 
 essential article they were wisely and providentially guided by 
 "One who loved our nation." 
 
 In reviewing this argument we are carried back to that 
 most vital distinction, before insisted upon, between a nation 
 and a league. It at once resolves the wretched sophism of in 
 and out by which our most illogical President, and his no less 
 illogical Secretary, have so complicated the great measure and 
 the great question of the day. A certain class of reasoners 
 are ever fond of what the technical logicians call the dilemma. 
 It is so easy apparently. They can turn it in almost any way 
 to suit any application, and in doing this they seem to be un- 
 conscious how easily it may be turned directly against thom. 
 A State, say these astute logicians, is either in the Union or 
 it is out, or if it is not in, then it is out. If it is out, then 
 secession has been successful. We fought four years, and lost ' 
 so many lives in denial of the doctrine that a State could go 
 out, and now "the radicals" say they actually wre out, and 
 that, therefore, legislation is necessary to bring them in again,. 
 etc., etc. There are many men who really regard this as an 
 argument ; and how conclusive they think it is shown by the 
 great use that was made of it by Democrats and so-called Con- 
 servatives in Congress. It is hard to deal patiently with such 
 a wretched quibble. The clear mind of Lincoln saw through, 
 it intuitively. His distinction between a perfect position in, 
 and a disordered relation to, the Union is only a presentation,., 
 in other terms, of the two ideas on which we have been dwel- 
 
17 
 
 ling. The bare statement solves at once the boasted dilenaraa. 
 These rebellious States were out of the Union, but they were 
 never out of the Natimi; they were not permitted to be, they 
 never shall be permitted to be oiU of the N'ation. They were 
 out of the union, which, important as it is, is not the nation, 
 but the /orm of the nation, the organization of the nation, or 
 rather the form of its organization. This is what Mr. Lincoln 
 meant by saying they were out of relation, out of their practi- 
 cal order in the nation. But they were never out of the Na- 
 tion it-elf, as something lying back of the union, older than 
 the union, and that made the union, when it said, " We, the 
 people, do ordain and establish." They were never out of 
 that God-formed political entity, that great historical power 
 the substantial being, the very substance itself, lying under and 
 back of all /or?/is, and whence all conventional, political forms 
 derive their power and their only lawful being. They broke 
 the Constitution, and have, therefore, no right to name it in 
 their defense ; but they never broke the Nation that made the 
 Constitution. To return to Mr. Seward's statement of the 
 issue, it was this nation, one and indivisible, that was the grand 
 party of the first part in the great contest through which we 
 have passed. The other party may have any name, or name«, 
 that any may choose to give it. We may call them mobs or 
 states, as we please, or we m ly say it was a warring with an 
 antinational idea, upheld by mobs and States, and which the 
 national life required to be cast out at all hazards. It was not 
 a fight between two sets of extremists, " swinging round," as 
 Andrew Johnson says; that is simply a degradation of the 
 whole matter. It was not a war between North and South, 
 it was not a v/ar between two factions in a nation, it was not 
 a civil war. All these paltry ideas belittle the contest, and 
 dishonor the mighty hosts of the dead. It was a nation, we 
 say again, struggling for its life. It was the nation against 
 rebels at the Sjuth and malignant copperheuds at the North, 
 combine! with all in Europe who desired our ruin, who were 
 
18 
 
 oppo-ed to the glorious doctrine of human brotherhood, and 
 who hated the very name of republicanism. 
 
 There is a third method of belittleing the great cause. It 
 takes the form of chivalry. It talks of honorable foes. It 
 affects to doubt whether treason has really been committed ; 
 and if it has been, treason, it says, is no dishonorable crime; 
 as though there were no difference between a war of aristo- 
 cratic factions in a monarchy and this long-plotted, assassin- 
 like assault upon a nation's life — between rebellion against the 
 " divine right of kings" and such a diabolical attempt to de- 
 stroy the divine right to live of the noblest republican govern- 
 ment on earth, and that, too, by open complicity with its most 
 deadly foreign foes. In promoting this phase of reaction, Mr. 
 Montgomery Blair is the chief agent. He would almost give 
 the palm of heroism to the rebellion. They were at least 
 equally heroic, equally patriotic in their way, and now that 
 the prize-fight is over, equally entitled to come in and share 
 in the future legislation of the country. Some who lived in 
 the more immediate vicinity of this rebellious pestilence still 
 hold precious the national idea. It was with them stronger 
 than the sectional feeling, which the league doctrine, and 
 Blair's interpretation of it, would make the predominant and 
 the higher principle. Those brave men who perilled all in 
 the cause of loyalty and nationality were "recreants," for- 
 sooth, to the chivalrous, though, perhaps, mistaken spirit of 
 the greater numbers around them. The speaker would seem 
 to have forgotten that Andrew Johnson once claimed to be 
 one of this very class ; but no language could have more 
 clearly shown how far this Johnsonian movement, in its 
 " swinging round," has receded frem the spirit which actuated 
 the nation when Sherman marched through South Carolina. 
 
 According to Blair, there was really no high and immuta- 
 ble principle involved. It was a mere matter of " stand-points." 
 The rebels, from their position, had some claim to the alle- 
 giance of those around them. Notwithstanding the contempt 
 they were endeavoring to bring upon everything American 
 
19 
 
 and republican, they were slill, for the South, the chivalrous 
 party, the patriotic party, and those suffering adherents to the 
 national idea were " recreants." The other side were fighting 
 for their honor, the honor of their women — how perfectly has 
 he learned the false rebel cant — they were " repelling as- 
 sailants !" How dare this " recreant," whom Lincoln once 
 trusted — how dare he thus defame the martyr's memory, the 
 honor of the loyal living, and of the heroic dead ! With him 
 it is a mere shifting of position in the examination of a picture. 
 They, from their " stand-point," viewed it so and so, and they 
 were "honorable men," We, from our stand-point, viewed it 
 somewhat differently, and we, too, are honorable men ; we are 
 all honorable men. In this wretched attempt to save the sec- 
 tional honor, and to revive, for new party purposes, the sectional 
 spirit, how irretrievably sinks the national honor, and with it the 
 honor of the countless dead ! As one side of the scale here rises, 
 the other inevitably falls. Think of it, soldiers, for your glory 
 is deeply involved in that of the cause for which you fought. 
 They must go down in history together. Think of it, for the 
 honor of your dead comrades, when the solemn question comes 
 up, " Who slew all these ?" We are more concerned in these 
 awful words than were they to whom the avenging Jehu an- 
 ciently addressed them. This vast slaughter ? We are now 
 deciding the question whether it was indeed a great right, a 
 great idea, involving a nation's life, that demanded such a 
 sacrifice, or whether it was what the Blair and Seward repre- 
 sentation would make it to be, the foulest as well as the most 
 inexcusable national crime that history has ever recorded. This 
 is the question, soldiers, and your votes are to determine to 
 which of the political tendencies now drawing in such diamet- 
 rically opposite directions, the nation's honor, and your honor, 
 may mo^t safely be confided. To see this clearly is to deter- 
 mine at once how you shall vote. 
 
 Nothing can be more evident than that in all such lan- 
 guage as held by Blair and Seward there is a virtual denial of 
 there having been ever any great question of right and truth 
 
20 
 
 involved in the co.itast. They may not wish sj to present it, 
 but the necessities of the new J jhnson movement drive them 
 inevitably toward it. There was then no " higher law," there 
 was no " irrepressible conflict of ideas," demanding svich a bur- 
 then of national debt, and such a holocaust of heroic lives. 
 No ideas have been changed by it. We are again as we were. 
 To meet the new party emergency secession even must be 
 mildly treated. It must be represented as having been, once 
 at least, an op^rn question, with the inevitable conclusion that 
 if so, it is an open question still, whenever there is again the 
 strength and the opportunity for its assertion ; for force can 
 never settle right ; and war should only be for the maintenance 
 of an undoubted right, not to settle what was ever fairly open 
 to dispute. Besides, the future Orrs, and Hamptons, and 
 Mom'oes, vnny not feel concluded by declarations made in a 
 Philadelphia convention. An open question once whether we 
 were a nation or not ! Eighty years of national existence had 
 not proved it ; if so, it is open yet, we say, and so is the Ameri- 
 can doctrine of political equality, and the religious doctrine of 
 the One Humanity. Men could hold oiEces and take the most 
 solemn oaths for more than half a century, and yet honestly 
 and honorably hold that such acts created no allegiance, that 
 such oaths made no solemn and binding obligation. They 
 ask to swear again, or even think it ung.inerous to require 
 such a test of their present and future loyalty ! They put 
 themselves upon their right. Though the war, like a vulgar 
 pugilistic conflict, has decided for the moment which is the 
 stronger, yet in the beginning there was little or no difference 
 of principle. It was a factious dispute, leading to a most bloody 
 issue ; but we were all about equally right, equally wrong, 
 equally honorable, each equally entitled to come aud with " un- 
 i:npaired rights '' share in the future government. In the name 
 of the dead, wc protest against a doctrine so utterly demoraliz- 
 ing, bo;h politic illy and morally, as this. Blessed are the 
 merciful, but truth and right before all things. Holy is char- 
 ity, but we debase the name ; we hold up instead of it a vile. 
 
21 
 
 lying thing, worse in the sight of God than an honest viadic- 
 tiveness, when we forget that charity rejoiceth in the truth. 
 An open question ! or one that might fairly seem such ! 
 What right had we from the Eternal Justice to settle, in this 
 awfully bloody way an open question, or even one so doubtful 
 that it might be rationally disputed ? How had we been 
 lying to the world for eighty years, if the question of our 
 American nationality had been open, or even controvertible ! 
 If there was not, on the side of the nation, a clear right, a 
 great right, a most holy and indispensable right — a right 
 which could not be waived at any hazard — then our war Avas 
 a great national crime, and every man concerned in it, from 
 the highest to the lowest, from the commander-in-chief to the 
 poorest soldier in the ranks, ought to humble himself and con- 
 fess the sin of his participation. Above all, how must it come 
 home to the conscience of one who now takes this estimate of 
 it, Avho now calls it a mere civil war, yet who may be charged, 
 if this view be a correct one, with having done more to bring 
 on a strife so bloody, yet so causeless, than any single indi- 
 vidual at the North ! With heart-felt sorrow do we say this 
 of an old friend and classmate. We appeal from William 
 H. Seward of 1866 to William H. Seward of 1856— from his 
 talk with Governor Perry of South Carolina to his speeches in 
 the days of Kansas and Le Compton — from his low position 
 now to his lofty position then. He was not mistaken. There 
 was such a "higher law," however he may have fallen from it. 
 There was that "irrepressible conflict" of ideas which he 
 would now merge in the lower notion of a factious strife, as a 
 prelude to a factious " civil war." Those to whom he held 
 this lofty language stand now where they did then, their ranks 
 unbroken, their enthusiasm for the right undiminished. He 
 has abandoned that great party which be described then, and 
 it is no less true now, as representing, more than any that bad 
 ever existed in this country, the conscience and the intellect of 
 the land. If intelligence, education, morality and religion are 
 radicalism, they were radical then, even as a false-named con- 
 
22 
 
 |>-rvati<m calls the:n radical now. They have not cban^red, 
 l>"t he stands to-day with their opponents. He is associrted 
 now w]th rebels and copperheads, not honored by them, never 
 to be trusted, never to be supported by them for any exalted 
 station. They can never forgive his "higher law," even 
 though he himself may se?m to have renounced it. 
 
 How long .hall we be fooled by platforms and resolutions 
 made to order, instead of looking at movements, and ten- 
 dencies, and affinities, whose direction cannot be mistaken, 
 and which are the only things that leave their mark in 
 nstory! The instincts that bring false men and false par- 
 ties together are more unerring than our keenest reasoning, 
 ihey show an invisible logic of events driving to their con- 
 clusions with more certainty than could ever be derived from 
 any abstract argumentation. Who, for example, can mistake 
 tlie nature of the movement that rallies every Northern Cop- 
 perhead and Southern Rebel, pardoned or unpardoned, round 
 Andrew Johnson, and so demands, as an assurance and a ne- 
 cessity of Its success, this lowering of the great idea for which 
 the nation fought, this letting down of the heroic .pirit to 
 meet Its factious needs. It must sink, if they would rise. Its 
 grand treasure of lofty reminiscences must be wasted if they 
 would come into power. It is this lowering tendency that ap- 
 pals us more than any technical measures of reconstruction 
 It IS a sufficient argument that those measures must be wroncr 
 that most require it. We go against that tendency, without 
 asking any question about "the policy" connected with it 
 We go with that party which is most directly in the way of 
 such a movement, without thinking of its perfection or imper- 
 fection as a party, or any charges of radicalism that may be 
 brought against any members of it. This one fact would we 
 keep ever before the mind : The character of our great war 
 n changing, and, unless the downward tendency is arrested, 
 will continue to change, until the movement lands us in our 
 own demoralizing contempt, and makes true the scot!s of our 
 enemies throughout the world. 
 
23 
 
 O the dead an J gene ! the uij riads of the slain ! how 
 keen the pang, how utterly unendurable the thought, that ye 
 should have died in such a war as these representations would 
 make it to be — having ?o litttle of principle, so little of the 
 heroic, either in result or in idea. Ye veiily thought that 
 ye were contending for a great right, when Lo, it turns out to 
 be a mere strife of factions " swinging round." You7' ene- 
 mies, and the entmies of republicanism, were nearly as hon- 
 orable as yourselves ; they had nearly, if not quite, as good 
 grounds of right as yourselves! They were compelled to lay 
 down their arms ; they fight no longer, they have thrown up 
 the sponge, as the vulgar boxer says, and now we must treat 
 each other, and indulge in a mutual gabble, in the Blair style, 
 about each other's pluck and bravery. 
 
 Ti*e great oath of Demosthenes comes again into remem- 
 brance, Oi ^« Toiig iv MaqaOfbvi* — No, by those who fell 
 at Gettysburg, at Fort Fisher, and Mobile, it shall not be. 
 This is declamation, it may be said. These are the catch- 
 words of cauipaign orators, there is no argument in them. Be 
 it so, and yet they are most rational tests of truth. They are 
 signs of those mcst important things that we have mentioned, 
 the movements and tendencies of the hour that to the plain 
 common-sense of men have so mttch more significance than 
 any amount of hair-splitting about platforms and policies. 
 Mark well, soldiers, on which side in this present political can- 
 vass these yet honored names are mo.-t heaitily and sponta- 
 
 * " No, by those who fell nt Marathon, I swear !— by those who formed, the battle 
 line at Plataea,— by those who conquered in the sea fight at Salatnis and Artemi- 
 eium." We repeat this sublime passage from a former appeal, for we know of noth- 
 ing in antiquity more applicable to the present time. Let this heroic apostrophe 
 ring in every soldiers ear as he tteps up to the ballot-bos. The mere sound of it 
 should do more to give his vote a right direction than twenty columns of such argu- 
 ment as is contained in the Philadelphia-Johcson Address. Marathon, Plataea, Sala- 
 mis, were fought for Pan-heUenia, for ALL GREECE. Shall our late battle-fields 
 resemble them, or shall they go down in history like the inglorious spots, all over 
 Greece, when faction warred wi'h faction, under the power of no higher principle 
 than a petty "States rights'' doctrine that for centuries made this fair portion of the 
 world a political hel),— a warning instead of an example to the ages. 
 
24 
 
 neously used, and where the least mention of them calls out 
 the most enthusiastic applause. Go into one meeting and you 
 will hear them resounding everywhere. They are the staple 
 of every speaker ; there is no cautious handling, no evasive 
 shrinking, no ill-disguised fear lest they should call up hate- 
 ful or disagreeable remembrances in the audience. Watch 
 the movements of another gathering ; how different the style 
 of oratory ! The burthen there, is all of taxes and high prices. 
 What sparing mention of these glorious battle-fields, if they 
 are mentioned at all! How poor the plaudits, how lacking in 
 heart the cheers, even should cheers accompany their forced 
 and heartless utterance. It cannot be otherwise. The themes 
 into which, on the one side, there is thrown the whole soul of 
 the speaker, are felt to be utterly out of harmony on the other, 
 and we well know the facts of other years that hav^ made 
 them so. As well might the Babylonians have attempted to 
 sing the songs of Sion, as a Democratic or a Johnson audience 
 exhibit any real enthusiasm at the mention of these heroes 
 and the bloody fields where they conquered. Ye remember 
 Abraham Lincoln, soldiers. Mark where that noble martyr 
 name is mentioned with the briefest notice, or is passed over 
 in ominous silence, or only alluded to with reproach. In such 
 meetings you will hear nothing said of monuments to his 
 memory. How little, too, of Grant or Sherman, even though 
 some would fain persuade you that those great captains are so 
 insensible to their own military honor as to have sympathy 
 with a movement that must inevitably reduce it in time to the 
 level of the traitors Lee and Beauregard. Farragut is called 
 a Democrat, We know nftt what his former party alliances 
 may have been. But mark well, soldiers, and let Farragut 
 himself mark well, where his true glory is most frequently 
 rehearsed; where the story of his great deeds calls out the 
 most rapturous enthusiasm, and to which side in this move- 
 ment his fame may.be most safely intrusted as indissolubly 
 connected with the unimpaired honor of the cause in which 
 he so nobly fought. There is, we say, a vast significance in 
 
25 
 
 this, and our military and naval heroc-s must be strangely 
 blind if they fail to perceive it. The pirate Semraes, after 
 robbing our commerce to the amount of fifty millions, not only 
 goes unpunished but is elected to a judicial office, and may at 
 any time, if the Philadelphia doctrine of " unimpaired rights" 
 is true, be elected to and take his seat in Congress. The in- 
 evitable tendency of the new movement, headed by Johnson, 
 is to put this infamous rebel and robber in the same or a sim- 
 ilar grade of honor with Farragut, to make them both pictures 
 in some such wretched tableau as was lately got up in Phila- 
 delphia of South Carolina and Massachusetts, with this differ- 
 ence, that whilst the one case presented a pitiable farce, this 
 would be indeed a most sad and humbling reality. Such a 
 thing could not take place, or tend to take place, without a 
 corresponding denial of there being anything great in the 
 cause for which either fought ; and when this is done the 
 heroism of the admiral stands no higher than that of. the 
 pirate ; our country becomes a mere ring of faction, and both 
 stand on the low level of the vulo-ar prize -fio-hter. 
 
 But what shall be done with the South, say some. Are 
 Ave to remain forever two people, though we call ourselves 
 one nation? It may be retorted that the strife of twenty pre- 
 vious years, bad as they were, did not do as much to make us 
 two people as Andrew Johnson's " policy " has accomplished 
 in the past twelve months. But we deny tliat there was any 
 insuperable difficulty. There were ample materials for nation- 
 ality in the South had there been statesmanship to discover 
 and employ them. The old South, meaning by that the small 
 oligarchy of powerful slaveholders who held to secession, and. 
 the league idea, and the mischievous local State rights in dis- 
 tinction from the true and vital State rights which it was the 
 chief object of the national constitution to secure, or the right 
 of each State and its people to the full benefits of citizenship 
 and unimpaired republican institutions in every other State, — 
 this old South, we say, that was ever plotting rebellion could never 
 restored be — ought never to be restored. The attempt should 
 
26 
 
 never Lave been made. This old oligarchical South was anti- 
 national to the core, and could never have been made otherwise. 
 The boldest ringleaders should have met the merited doom of 
 tre:ison, the remainder of this class, who had been all active 
 participants in the rebellion, should have been content with 
 their lives, and an utter exclusion from all political trust. 
 They themselves expected no less. Now, true statesmanship 
 would have seen at once that there must be other elements 
 brought into the political construction of the Southern States, 
 even had the absence of other material rendered necessary 
 their importation. It would have seen it to be madness to at- 
 tempt to bring back this old South, just as it wa^ with no 
 opinion changed, and with every feeling embittered by a sense 
 of their defeat. There was, we repeat it, ample material for 
 this new element, if the old slave-holding power, the ever-re- 
 bellious power, had been once thoroughly put down, and, with 
 that fact once known as fixed and irrevocable, other things had 
 been allowed unhindered to assume their natural position, and 
 had been favored in so doing. Their antirepublican deceivers 
 disarmed and shut out from all hope of future political power, 
 the miserable dupes, the poor whites, as they are called, might 
 have been hopefully educated into true republicanism. In aid 
 of this, there were the men who had ever b?en loyal, and the free 
 colored population who, on every principle we hold politically 
 sacred, were entitled to citizenship with all the impartial ac- 
 companiments that follow it in the case of other men. It 
 would not have so much mattered what particular modes of 
 reconstruction the President and Congress might have mo- 
 mentarily, or experimentally, adopted, if all had been in this 
 spirit, and with this purpose so made necessary by the great 
 p'^.ril through which the nation hfvd passed. Aside from any 
 question of right on the part of the colored people, our owni 
 safety demanded such new infusion of political elements, or 
 the introduction of something that should substantially change 
 the Southern representation. An ordinary knowledge, too, 
 cf human nature is sufficient to convince any one who makes 
 
27 
 
 the least claim to statesmanship, that had such a course been 
 taken, and zealously pursueJ, with the whole constitutional 
 power of the executive directed to it, the growth of a true na- 
 tional feeling, instead of being slo.v and difficult, would have 
 been as rapid as that of the reverse spirit has been under a dif- 
 ferent treatment. It is idle to plead the want of constitutional 
 power. In the first placr>, rebels had no right to name the 
 constitution, and, secondly, in the acknowledged power of am- 
 nesty and pardon, lay the power of any condition the execu- 
 tive and legislative wisdom of the nation might see fit to at- 
 tach to them. The greater power included the less, and in 
 this simple statement lies the whole argument that has been 
 so mischievously complicated. Bnt now the great hindrance 
 has been put back again. Instead of aiding the real suff'ering 
 classes, one of which (the poor whites), though guilty, is en- 
 titled to our hearty commiseration, every effort has been di- 
 rected to restore to power, " unimpaired" power (to use the 
 Philadelphia word), the very heart of the rebellion, leaving 
 these poor whites in the same ignorant dependence, and the 
 white loyalists, together with the loyal colored population, to 
 every indignity and every cruelty that baffled rage may heap 
 upon them. " The suff'ering South," was one of the dominant 
 notes sounded in the address of the late Johnson Convention. 
 As there used, it was that most monstrous of all lies, a truth 
 misstated and out of place. " The suffering South ! " For whose 
 benefit was this phrase used ? It was not in behalf of the 
 murdered negioes, or the persecuted loyalists, or the miserable 
 ignorant whites, but to procure political sympathy for the men 
 who had been the authors of all the suffering North and 
 South. " The South ! " keeping up still that mischievous mis- 
 nomer, which, for so many years, has put a wretched oligarchy 
 of less than three hundred thousand slaveholders as a balance 
 in the scales against a nation containing thirty millions of souls 
 North and South! "The suff'ering South!" There was 
 weeping over the picture, it was said. The tears of Orr, of 
 Dick Taylor, of Alexander H. Stephens, mingled with those of 
 
28 
 
 Doolittle, Hendricks, Voorhes, and tlie extra-member, Val- 
 landighara, for the sufferings of the South. The weeping la- 
 mentations have been taken up by Wise, in Virginia ; by For- 
 rest, the butcher of Foit Pillow, in Memphis, and by Monroe, 
 in New Orleans. It presents a tableau casting far into the 
 shade that of South Carolina and Massachusetts, as so pathet- 
 ically represented by General Couch. If the one calls out 
 our contempt, the other excites our deepest indignation for its 
 vile hypocrisy, both on the part of its Southern actors and it> 
 melodramatic managers from the North. 
 
 We have used the term belittleiug as the best that could 
 be employed to denote the change that is coming over the 
 character of our great war, and which the necessities of this 
 new reactionary movement demands. It takes the guise of 
 charity* and talks foolishly of "fatted calve?." We say, fool- 
 ishly, for no less irrational than unscriptural is such an appli- 
 cation to unrepentant prodigals who demand their portion of 
 goods with more arrogance than when they contemptuously 
 left their father's house. The appeal we make is more espe- 
 cially addressed to our military men. We mean not the mere 
 artificial soldier whose uution of loyalty never rises above the 
 Dalgetty standard — who might as likely have been fighting 
 on the side of the rebellion had it not been for varying cir- 
 cumstances. We had many such men in our army before 
 the war. It was the result of a peculiar training arising out 
 of peculiar circumstances. Even the military oath, ever held 
 so sacred, and which, of all things, it might be supposed, 
 would have made the national predominant over the state or 
 sectional feeling, did not prevent the greater part of them from 
 joining the rebellion. Of those that remained on the national 
 side, some, though they fought well, were just the persons to 
 fall in with these unheroic views of our great struggle, because 
 the side on which they fight does not aft'ect their narrow tech- 
 nical military honor. It was an emblematic loyalty, and they 
 find no difficulty, now that the heat of the strife is over, in 
 prattling chivalry again, and talking of "honorable foos " 
 
29 
 
 standing higher in their esteem, perhaps, than the poor south- 
 ern loyalist, to whom they give no credit for an enthusiastic 
 nationalism which they themselves, it may be, had but little 
 felt. It was only an emblematic loyalty, we say, and they find 
 no difficulty iu recognizing a principle equally high with tlieir 
 own, under other emblems than those consecrated to national- 
 ity. They would not sing the "bonnie blue flag,'' but they 
 can hold as chivalrous friends those who do so. It was no 
 feeling of the true heroic, born of unquenchable loyalty to 
 nationalism, that led such men as these, and the coui se of some 
 of them is now showing it. But they are a small portion 
 even of the regular army, the majority of whom were actuated 
 by a very difierent spirit, especially as evinced by our two 
 great commanders. Our noble army of Volunteers ! the ap- 
 peal is to you to resist this belittleing process now commenced 
 at AVashington, and attempted to be consummated at Phila- 
 delphia. Your honor — we cannot repeat it too often — your 
 honor is at stake. Arouse ye, soldiers of Grant and Sherman, 
 ye men of Fort Donaldson,Vicksburg, and Lookout Mountain. 
 Carry your minds forward to the period when ye shall be old 
 men. Think of your own children asking you about these 
 battle-fields as your fathers inquired of their fathers about 
 Bunker Hill and Saratoga. Do you wish the scenes of peril 
 where you faced death for what you truly felt to be a great 
 cause, and a great question of right, to go down to history 
 with the same lofty remembrance, the same untarnished char- 
 acter of heroism ? Then bear in mind that events now passing 
 are to decide, that the present political struggle is to decide, 
 that your votes are to decide, the momentous question in 
 in which you and your children have so deep an interest. Are 
 you at any loss in regard to your ballot, then lay aside all the 
 politician's quibbles about in and out of the Union, and sim- 
 ply look to movements and tendencies. See in what direction 
 they are hastening. Ask of your own common-sense — with 
 which party, as they are now marshalling, does this great 
 question of the national honor, and of your honor, and of tlie 
 
30 
 
 battle-fields in which you have fought and in which your com- 
 rades died, lie most to heart, — to whose keeping their glory 
 may be safely intrusted ? Who make these appeals to you ? 
 There is vast significance, we say again, in that. And on 
 which side is there the most cautious reserve if not the most 
 ominous silence, in respect to all I hat inspired your souls in 
 the hours of danger and of death ? Do you find the ideas 
 and the feelings that then possessed you represented in the 
 Philadelphia-Johnson Convention ? Can you support a move- 
 ment that calls out the rapturous assent of such unrepentant 
 rebels as Hampton of South Carolina, of Forrest of Fort Pil- 
 low, and Monroe of New Orleans? Can you vote just as 
 they would have you ? After all your hard-fought battles, 
 after all your heroic sacrifices, can you be even indifferent to a 
 tendency which, by giving a low character to our national 
 war, can only end by putting Grant on a level with Lee, and 
 Sherman with Hood, and making the dead of Andersonville 
 of no higher account than the drowned pirates of the Ala- 
 bama ? What would the world have thought; where would 
 have been our remembrances of our fatheis if they had 
 proceeded in this manner after our first heroic struggle ? 
 Suppose that Tories had been immediately received into Con- 
 gress, or had even been allowed in some places a greater rep- 
 resentation ! Their course was resistance to the establishment 
 of a Republican government when old ideas so strongly led 
 the other way ; the unspeakable atrocity of the Southern 
 conspiracy consisted in its being an attempt to destroy a re- 
 publican nation after eighty years vigorous life, and the most 
 beneficent rule that earth had ever witnessed. It was a crime 
 which has no parallel in the history of man. Shall these men 
 ever again sit in an American Congress? Shall they make 
 laws, or assist in making laws for you and your children ? 
 This is the great issue of the present canvass. See to it that 
 no foolish cry of " radicalism, " no sophims about " policies " 
 and reconstruction, prevent you from looking it steadily in the 
 face. On you, soldiers, above all other men, devolves the duty 
 
31 
 
 of so guarding the remembrance of the past five years, that no 
 subsequent events may be allowed to cast the least shadow 
 upon their sublime heroism. 
 
 A heroic period, it may be repeated, is one characterized 
 by a predominant unselfishness. The higher attributes of hu- 
 manity come out, the lower for a season disappear. There 
 may be a counterfeit of this ; but the test of its genuineness is 
 the presence and the impulse of a great'idea, of a great right, 
 rousing us out of our ordinary indiff'erence. Such was the 
 time through wliich we have passed. There was romance in 
 it, but romance is not always unreality. The heroic feeling- 
 could be seen in the slightest as well as in the greatest events. 
 It poured itself out in national hymns and songs. It had its 
 poetry, some of it poor poetry, indeed, and having all grades 
 of excellence, from the lyre of Whittier to the extemporized 
 ballad of the camp, but all precious as showing the one strong 
 inspiration. It appeared in a hundred ways that at other times 
 we should have regarded as mythical exaggerations. There 
 came again in reality stories that we had heard of only as ro- 
 mantic fictions, or highly colored facts of the older times — 
 mothers oflering their children, as had been done in ancient 
 Sparta, and during our first war with Britain, — the wife bid- 
 ding the husband go forth to the conflict, the maiden, her 
 lover; young children with difliculty restrained at home, and 
 cases not unfrequent of the merest boys falling on the battle- 
 field. Every one must remember how our newspapers abounded 
 in such accounts — one class of newspapers we mean ; for in all 
 this, those that now support " the policy" were as silent as the 
 grave. Exaggeration there may have been in many cases, and 
 yet as a whole falling short of the reality, — assuming the uncon- 
 scious coloring of the mythical, and yet inadequate as a picture 
 of the truly grand and heroic in the spirit of the times. 
 
 This heroic period of ours elevated us by showing us to 
 ourselves in a light we hardly could have imagined before ; 
 and now that the scum again is rising, and the vile in politics 
 is coming forth, we are in a condition to measure it by the 
 
32 
 
 contrast. Who would have thought ten years ago that such 
 armies could have heen raised in such a way, and of such 
 material ? But then the inspiring, the unselfish idea, had not 
 come, and there was liltle or nothing in our history for half a 
 century past to aid the imagination in conceiving it. We 
 could not then understand the power of a great and heroic im- 
 pulse as arising out of a great question touching our national 
 life. AVe would have deemed it impossible that our old men, 
 our young men, our women, our children, should be possessed 
 by such a spirit, so putting down, and putting out of sight, 
 the ordinary low selfishness of common times. Oh, our 
 heroic boys ! Who could have thought it ? Never can the 
 writer forget one touching scene in his morning lecture-ioom. 
 It was in the third year of the war. Many before had gone 
 from the institution ; the oldest son of one member of the 
 faculty had given his Hfe early in the conflict ; one of its most 
 accomplished Professors had left the college to form a regi- 
 ment, at whose head he afterward fell in the bloody field of 
 Chancellorville. But there came another call ; and on the 
 morning referred to, out of a class-divison of thirty there were 
 eight places silent at the calling of the roll. Their occupants 
 had given their names to a regiment destined for Port Ilud- 
 son. They endured the severest hardship of the camp and the 
 battle-field as manfully and as cheerfully as they had ever 
 sported on the college green. Some of them never came back. 
 Among these was the prize scholar', the beloved of his class, 
 the only son of his mother. He sleeps by Port Hudson, his 
 grave trampled upon by insolent rebels, but often visited, per- 
 haps, and strewed with flowers and tears by the loyal son of 
 Africa. Oh, those noble boys, worthy of all the renown they 
 had ever read of on the classic page ! It comes over me some- 
 times in a feeling of unbelieving wonder. Were these heroes 
 of the fiercest battle-fields indeed the same young lads whose 
 familiar faces had so often been before me in the lecture-room 
 — those playful boys, so fond of mingling sport with study 
 and whom I had so often chided for their mirth-lovino' irreo-u- 
 
33 
 
 larities ? As I think of those young dead faces lyiiig in the 
 trench, or among the blackened ruins of the mine, there 
 comes up a feeling of repentance that, like a croaking senior, I 
 should have ever talked to them of the degeneracy of the age 
 Those noble boys ! How soon did the times bring them up 
 not merely to manhood — that false manhood to which we are 
 too apt to hurry in the low selfishness of ordinary life — but to 
 the fullest stature of the most heroic humanity ! From the 
 older graduates of the college more than three hundred went 
 forth, filling all grades, from the general to the private, whilst 
 from larger institutions they mustered in still greater num- 
 bers. 
 
 And so it was all over the land. But why give these sta- 
 tistics ? What bearing have they on the present political 
 argument ? Much every way. Taken in connection with 
 other facts of a similar kind, they show how much higher a 
 thing than any fictitious romance was the spirit and the 
 solemn verity of the time we call heroic. They show how 
 reaiarkably the four year?, from 1861 to 1865, stand out 
 above all other years in our histoiy, since the period that 
 made us a nation. They excuse us from a formal definition of 
 heroism. "We have the thing itself, the fact, before us. They 
 evince how great must have been that question, how lofty that 
 idea, which lifted up the nation to such a hight. But most 
 of all does it show how deeply disastrous, not only to the 
 future political prosperity of our beloved laud, but to that 
 higher thing, its spiritual health, is the undervaluing tendency 
 already remarked upon, although it may ever so much take to 
 itself the form of charity, whilst it so utterly ignores that up- 
 holding of the right and true which alone can give our com- 
 mi-eration of the vanquished any real or substantial value. 
 But take whatever guise it will, it has always the same unmis- 
 takable tendency. Johnson's "swinging round," and Seward's 
 talk of " civil war " and " fatted calves," and Blair's " chiv- 
 alry," have no other aim nor meaning. The notions that un- 
 derlie all such affected phraseology, much more the falsehood 
 
34 
 
 that there is in their putting forth, are directly dimming that 
 high sense of right in which the true heroic has its aliment, 
 and on the guarding of which the political and the national 
 well-being so much depends. It is not the North alone that 
 suffers by it. These things have done, and are now doing, 
 more to hurt the South than all the suffering caused by Sher- 
 man's army, or any subjugation of which the most malignant 
 copperhead ever dreamed. 
 
 Incalculable is the political evil of transforming, in any 
 way, the character of this glorious period into the reverse 
 picture of a strife between contending political parties, the 
 merit or demerit of which is nearly on a par, whose battle- 
 fields and monumental places are to be regarded as equally 
 honored, and, therefore, by an inevitable necessity in our 
 thinking, equally inglorious — such as the whole conflict must 
 become, on both sides, if these representations be correct — 
 making us the scoff of the world, and a dishonor among the 
 nations. The bare statement would seem to b? the only argu- 
 ment required. Insteal of a traitorous rebellion subdued, 
 with all the legitimate foUowings of such an act, a mere mis- 
 understanding, or a factious " civil war," settled by an under- 
 standing, if not a formal paper treaty, — no terms imposed, no 
 rights imjmired ! We cannot conceive of anything more dis- 
 organizing or destructive that could be incorpo'ated iuto our 
 history ; and yet the men who favor this would dare to call 
 themselves Conservatives ! 
 
 If the view of Seward be correct, then this may be our 
 first civil war, but it will by no means be our last. If there 
 be nothing to lift it out of this low category, and put it where 
 it shall have no future imitation — making it a grand excep- 
 tional event, with those high mark^ of dift'erence to which we 
 have alluded — then may we expect it to be often repeatel. 
 The example once set of such an attempt, with such an im- 
 punity, it will come over and over again, as often as favoring 
 circumstancQs occur. An assassination, a change of execu- 
 tive, a heavy burthen of debt on the one side, or a capacity 
 
35 
 
 (arising out of a wild state of society) to fight ■without money 
 or credit on the other, may bring such favoring circumstances 
 sooner than we expect. The thought of a c^reat right once 
 gone and the Blair conception taking its place, the true heroic 
 impulse waning and the false chivalry come again, the bright 
 national idea becominsf dim and the mischievous league fal- 
 lacy — such a favorite ever with the smallest of politicians — 
 taking anew possession of the mind, — we may expect our 
 history, in spite of oaths and written constitutions, to be but a 
 repetition of that of the factious States of Greece, and of the 
 Italians of the middle ages. 
 
 There is nothing to prevent such a result except the his- 
 torical hallownng of this time, and setting the brand of ever- 
 lasting infamy, if not the mark of death and confiscation, on 
 this one desperate attempt at the national life, so excelling in 
 the enormity of its wickedness everything called revolution, 
 civil war, or rebellion in any land less free, less happy than 
 our own. There must be a difference made between our war 
 and all these. Set its glory now so high that it shall be 
 lowered never. Let it be so photographed in the soul of the 
 nation that its bright features shall be never dimmed or lost. 
 Let it be embalmed in the fragrant odors of memory, beyond 
 all reach of harm or decay. This is the present work, de 
 raanding no less of struggle, no less of heroism than the war 
 itself. It is this which makes the canvass of 1866 of such 
 incalculable importance. Such is the question, soldiers, to be 
 decided by your ballots, as before by your bullets. Resolve 
 that it shall be decided right, and no further argument need 
 to be addressed to you as to the side on which those ballots 
 shall be cast. 
 
 Such a decision we owe to the political virtue of the liv- 
 ing. ' We owe it to the 250,000 dead, the value of vvhose 
 lives cannot be estimated ; for we may safely say that they 
 were among our noblest lives. It was the noblest who were 
 most likely to fall. The brave living who shared their peril 
 will be the last to regard this testimony to their fallen 
 
36 
 
 comrades as any disparagement to themselves. 'Twas sung of 
 old by Sopliocles — 
 
 Iiovi]pbv oi'Jfi^', aAXa rovg Xpf/arovc asl. 
 War takes the noblest ever. 
 
 In the drama of " Philoctetes," the vs^ounded chieftain on the 
 desert isle is asking news from Troy. Where is Achilles ? 
 Dead. And where's Patroclus? Dead. And Ajax, then, and 
 Nestor's noble son A^ntilochus ? All dead and gone. 
 
 Phi, And vi^liere's that man of double tongue, 
 
 Subtle and plausible ? 
 Neo. TJlvsses lives ! 
 
 Phi. Tlieresites, too ? tliat busy demagogue ? 
 Neo. Tliey are living still, I hear. 
 Phi. Aye, aye; 
 
 1 do not doubt it. Evil never dies. 
 
 The fraudful and the vile live on ; the brave, 
 
 They dwell in Hades. 
 
 It has a heathen air, but there is a likeness yet in the old 
 poet's limning. Its vivid outlines are still suggestive of men 
 and things near by us. '" Subtle and plausible," ylihaar^ xe 
 Stirbg Ttal aocfdg — there is no mistaking the modern counter- 
 parts. Ajax and Pati'oclus dead ; Ulysses and Thersites still 
 living. The martyr Lincoln slain, the noble WadsworLh 
 lying in his bloody grave ; Lyons among the dead, — M'Pher- 
 son, Sedgwick, Pieynolds, Pteno, Mansfield, Kearney, witli a 
 host more that would fill pages should we name tlicm, — these 
 all gone ; the plotting politicians at Philadelj^hia sitting in 
 conclave with surviving traitors from the South, the venomous 
 Copperheads, the men of emblematic loyaltj", all left behind, 
 to make new compromises, to break the nation's solemn 
 pledge — in a word, to soothe rebellion, and, in so doing, de- 
 preciate that high right, that solemn cause of national life for 
 which these c'lorious heroes fell. 
 
Such depreciation must be llie inevitable result of any far- 
 ther progress in this oblique and downward direction. Al- 
 ready has President Johnson put it out of his power to " make 
 treason odious," as far as he is concerned. Already has he 
 put it out of his power to punish it at all, even in its highest 
 representative. The traitors, indeed, are too numerous to 
 make the highest punishment of all, by the ordinary process 
 of law, either possible or desirable ; but events have taken 
 place that, without change, put it out of the question in re- 
 spect to every one. The mere pardon, with life and prop- 
 erty, given to one distinguished rebel, would not, of itself, be 
 in the way of the punishment of another ; but to pardon such 
 a one, with the express purpose of making him governor of a 
 State, or the mayor of a principal city, and that, too, within a 
 few months after the laying down of their rebellious arms, 
 makes all punishment of others impossible, unless all such pro- 
 ceedings are wholly cancelled and reversed. Humphrey in 
 the gubernatorial chair of Mississippi, Monroe chief magistrate 
 of New Orleans, Stephens in the Senate, Orr and Wise in 
 Congress, and Davis on the gallows I Guilty as he is, guilty 
 as they all are, we could not bear the inconsistency. Some 
 rebels may be punished whilst some are pardoned ; but we 
 cannot admit some to seats in Congress and make au example 
 of any. Such an act of admission is a complete cancelling of 
 the crime of all. It is equivalent to a solemn decision, that 
 there is, in fact, no crime in assailing our national life. It is 
 only a difference of opinion, a viewing things from another 
 standpoint, and, therefore, perfectly compatible wiih moral 
 and political integrity. 
 
 A striking illustration of this is furnished by a single 
 notorious case. There was present as one of the delegates to 
 the Philadelphia Convention, General Dick Taylor, as he is 
 called. He, as well as Orr, of South Carolina, was very fond 
 of the phrase, "fellow-citizens." We know not whether he 
 has received an official pardon, but it would not have been re- 
 garded there as of much consequence, either io excluding or 
 
38 
 
 in admitting this destructive lebe! to that most conservative 
 body. He was allowed to cotne among them and talk of fel- 
 low-citizens. Now, this confederate Gen. Taylor, had put to 
 death, at one time, by the most cruel and ignominons mode 
 of hanging, eight "fellow-citizens" of the United States, for 
 no other cause than maintaining that natijnal allegiance 
 ■which was the direct consequence and duty of their national 
 citizenship. Their alleged crime was nothing else than their 
 loyalty to that government to which he as well as thev owed 
 service, and to which he, as a military man, was specially 
 bound by the most solemn superadded and voluntarily as- 
 sumed oaths. They had enlisted in the Union army, and 
 were thus mercilessly put to death as traitors to a traitorous 
 confederacy, as rebels to a rebellion. Here is a new phase of 
 this atrocious business. Treason itself may be pardoned, re- 
 bellion, if it adds no other features, may be amnestied, but a 
 nation that would not avenge its loyal "citizens" thus slain — 
 not slain in battle, but ignominousiy huiig for their loyalty — 
 deserves the world's reproach; it forfeits its national chaiac- 
 ter as a power ordained of God to punish Avrong, and vindi- 
 cate the right. It deserves not that men should be loyal to 
 it; it disowns the allegiance which it pretends to claim, yet 
 cannot, or will not, jirotect. What hold on Southern loyalty 
 should we have in any future rebellion from the same quarter. 
 No. amnesty should have included the perpetrator of this 
 atrocious deed ; no special pardon should have extended to his 
 treason that mercy which he denied to the luvalty of those 
 1>iave men. He who hung men for their fidelity to their true 
 allegiance should have felt what was due to a real traitor. 
 Now this man was a delegate to the Philadelphia Convention; 
 his lebel hand, thus foully stained with loyal blood, was 
 grasped by Dix and Custer. He was allowed to say, " fel- 
 li)W-cit/sejis ; " this murderous destructive was cheered in this 
 conservative gathering, when he talked of " radicals " and 
 "fanatics." He was therewith full credentials, and his re- 
 ception was an unmistakable sign that his associates in that 
 
39 
 
 bo(]y deemeti him worthy of instant ad'nisslon into the na- 
 tional legislature, if a majority of rebels like himself had given 
 him their votes for that high place of trust. This mysterious 
 doctrine of " uniinpaired State rights," which forms the staple 
 of the Philalelphia reasoning, would make such a man a fit 
 law-maker for the nation whose life he had so assailed, and 
 whose loyal citizens he had thus murdered on the express 
 ground of their loyahy. This was the real " hauling down 
 the national flag," for doing which Gen. Dlx would have " in- 
 stantly" had shot the ignorant Southern soldier who only 
 obeyed the commands of his brutal masters. It saves us an- 
 other definition. It presents at once the difference between a 
 roal and what we have called an emblematic loyalty. 
 
 This deed of Taylor's was far from bnng the only ca=;e of 
 the kind. A confederate general in North Carolina hung in 
 one day twenty Union men, and on the same ground of 
 fidelity to the government under which th^y were born, and 
 to which they owed the highest all-^giance. It was n^t al- 
 lowed with them to be an " open question." In Texas, too, in 
 East Tenne^see, in West Virginia, such tragedies occurred al- 
 most daily. The number and names of those who thus suf- 
 fered will, probably, never be fully known, but certiinly there 
 is no matter that more deserves the most searching congres- 
 sional investigation. And thus does it become one of the 
 great issues of the present political canvass. The kol dam-im, 
 the " voice of bloods," if we may use the fearfully intensive 
 Scriptural expression, is crying from the wilds of Texas, and 
 from the mountains of Tennesse?. It calls for vengeance, not 
 revenge, which some are ever confounding with it, but solemn, 
 righteous, judicial investigation with corresponding retribu- 
 tion. Loud is that cry, but God alone will hear it — no na- 
 tional inquiry, no official investigation will be aroused by it, 
 if the government is once wholly surrendered into the hands 
 of the present executive, and his zealous supporters North and 
 South. It Will all be left to the " unimpaired rights " of rebel- 
 lious states. Soldiers of our noble volnntper armies I These 
 
40 
 
 loyal men died in their efforts to come to your aid. Can yon 
 ever forget them and their yet hving suffering compatriots ? 
 Your action at the polls must decide that solemn question. 
 
 Such cases as these show into what a complication we are 
 brought by the President's most illogical reasonings. If "his 
 policy" is to be continued, he has put it out of his power, and 
 out of the nation's power, to hold to accountability either 
 States or individuals. As far as personal consistency is con- 
 cerned, he might have held a high theory of State dig- 
 nity, and yet have vindicated the national justice and the 
 national honor. If they could not rebel as States, if they 
 were ever ideally loyal as States, however strange that mio-hl 
 seem in point of fact, then he might have demanded their 
 action against rebellious individuals, and, on failure or refusal, 
 have treated them as mobs and insurrections, or as States 
 under the power of mobs and insurrections, having their forms 
 of government usurped by them, and so constitutionally held 
 them by martial rule (and, in that case, martial protection) 
 until the riotous individuals had all been ejected from their 
 usurped places, the ringleaders judicially treated, and a true 
 loyalty brought out from its idealism into actual and rightful 
 possession of the State power. This would have been the pro- 
 ceeding of a statesman and a patriot, though having a high, 
 and even an excessive, theory of State rights. In this way, 
 too, if patriotism and nationality had been among his control- 
 ing principles of action, he might have preserved the national 
 honor and the national integrity, as well as his own consis- 
 tency, to say nothing of fidelity to the great loyal party to 
 whom he was indebted for all his power, whether for good or 
 evil. But there are other considerations, and those, too, con- 
 sistent with the best aspects of a true States' rights doctrine. 
 If they were real States, such as this theory demands, then 
 they could rebel as States. If they could rebel as States, then 
 they could be punished as States. If they were high cor- 
 porate persons, owing allegiance as such, then, on the breaking 
 of that allegiance, they could incur forfeitures in the same 
 
41 
 
 capacity. This seitns to be demanded by the very idea of 
 State dignity. Let us present the only t'lree possible views of 
 State relation. If, in the first place, they were merely municipal 
 districts, greater in j urisdiction, but thy same in kind as cities 
 and counties, then the question is easily disposed of. It" mobs 
 and insurrections break out in such districts, those mobs may 
 be quelled, their leaders punished, and the district reorganised 
 as expediency and the national will may demand. If, secondly, 
 they are actual sovereignties, bound by an outward league to 
 other sovereignties, then, on their breaking that league, they 
 may be either let go, or they may be coerced to its observance. 
 This would follow even on the extreme Calhoun doctrine ; but 
 even th-n this ultra theory of leagued sovereignties, false as it 
 is, would not warrant the absurd Philadelphia platform. On 
 coercion for breaking their contract, or treaty with other sov- 
 ereignties, they are not brought back to its observance with 
 " unimpaired rights," but with such new terms and new con- 
 ditions as the laws of war and of nations allow to be imposed. 
 They may be required to pay the expenses of the war ; there 
 may be demanded of them the banishment of individuals ; they 
 may be even declared annexed or conquered. But if, thirdly^ 
 what we call States ai"e somewhere between these two extreme 
 views, then are they, at the highest, political personalities, not 
 simply bound by a league to, but owing, ia common with 
 others, a true allegiance to, a higher political personality, 
 which is not a mere aggregate of the^e lower corporations, but 
 a true historical being, of which they are the organization, or 
 the form, but not the organizing power ; — that organizing 
 power residing in a "people" or nationality lying back of all, 
 and making a sovereignty not simply over States, and claiming 
 allegiance merely from States as such, but over all individuals 
 in those States, and claiming allegiance from every man of 
 them in the exercise of all those powers to which such whole 
 people or nationality has constitutionally limited itself, and 
 which it may constitutionally diminish or enlarge. Still, by 
 
 such organization as afortsaid, the underlying States may be 
 4* 
 
42 
 
 regarded as political personalities, thus distinguished from 
 mere municipal districts on the one hand, or leagued sovereign- 
 ties on the other. This is our State system, or form of na- 
 tional organization. If, however, they are thus restricted 
 political personalities, then they, too, as such political corpora- 
 tions, owe a true allegiance to the higher national personality 
 as well as the individual personalities of whom they are com- 
 posed. All allegiance implies accountability, with liability to 
 penalty and forfeiture for its breach. Otherwise we run into 
 the utter political absurdity that the parts of a nation, whether 
 individual or corporate persons, may be guilty of any disorder, 
 endangering the life of the whole, and, on the forcible quelling 
 of such disorder, relajse immediately into their former state, 
 with no rights impaired, repelling every remedial method 
 made necessary by such disorder, and treating as a wrong the 
 demand of any security against future danger, except their own. 
 assertion, however made, that, for the present, they resist no 
 more. In such a case the seeming coercion is, in fact, non- 
 coercion ; it is not carried out ; nothing is effected by it ; it 
 had better never have been begun ; if accompanied by a great 
 sacrifice of life, it is a folly and a crime. 
 
 It all amounts, then, to this : If they are corporate per- 
 sons they have corporate liabilities. As said before, the very 
 dignity of the State idea, if it have any dignity, demands this. 
 If so, then they may commit treason, which is, in its essence, a 
 violation of allegiance. If they could commit treason, then 
 they could incur, and did incur, the forfeitures and conse- 
 quences of treason, although their corporate being rendered 
 them incapable of suffering some of its specific penalties as 
 they may be inflicted on individuals. Civil death is one of 
 these consequences of treason, whether as committed by indi- 
 viduals or corporations. It is, in fact, both a penalty and a 
 consequence. Such civil death results directly from the idea 
 of breach of allegiance, as separation from a common national 
 life. This can happen to States. If they cannot be hung by 
 the neck like individual traitors, their polilical life may be ius- 
 
43 
 
 pended, aud is of itself suspended, by the very act of treason — 
 that is, the withdrawal of allegiance. If, then, this political 
 life comes into them again, it must be from the action of the 
 great national body in which, as a whole, the life still remains 
 unimpaired in the fountain and principle of its vitality, and 
 which, as before proved, is pre-eminently represented in the 
 great national Legislature. 
 
 We hope the reader will pardon this dry argumentation. 
 The great principle for which we contend could not well be 
 set forth in briefer or less abstract terms. But waiving all 
 this, and supposing that the President, for any reason, could 
 not see his way in this direction, then he had a clear course 
 in the other. Taking his own theory, so inconsistent with his 
 other notions of State power and State dignity, so inconsistent, 
 too, with actual facts, namely, that no action of a State could 
 affect its relation to the Union — that it was never out, how- 
 ever solemnly it had declared itself to be out — that it had never, 
 as a State, made war upon the nation, however explicitly and 
 in all its corporate action, legislative, judicial, and conven- 
 tional, it had declared and carried on such war — suppose we 
 admit that as States they ever continued, regularly and har- 
 moniously, in all their rights and relations to the Union, and 
 that all that took place Avere the acts of mobs and insurrec- 
 tions under which those ever loyal States were suffering, even 
 as Massachusetts, to w'hich the President so illogically com- 
 pared them, suffered from Shay's rebellion — suppose, I say, we 
 admit all this, strange as it seems, and allow that everything 
 done was done by individuals with only individual liabilities, 
 although these individuals comj^rised all the governors, all the 
 judges, all the legislators, all persons holding positions in the 
 organic machinery of these strange nondescript bodies — what 
 then ? Why, surely, as " treason 7nust be made odious," these 
 individuals, or at least the worst among ^them, should have 
 been held liable for treasun. They should have been reached 
 in some way, and if this could not have been done through 
 the State organizations, or through the judiciary therein 
 
44 
 
 (whether called Siale or National), oa account of sympatLy 
 with theru, then they should have been treated as mobs still, 
 and other and loyal organizations put in their places. 
 
 The whole of the President's difficulty is solved by the 
 plain distinction, before made, between the Nation and the 
 Union as the form of its organiz.ition. It is also disposed of 
 by the unanswerable argument drawn from the fact that each 
 one of the rebellious States had broken its own constitution, if 
 it be a sound principle that the national constitution is a part, 
 and an essential part, of the constitution of each State. But 
 waiving all this, we say again, why not proceed against them 
 as individuals — why not, in some way, " make treason odi- 
 ous ? " Now here presents itself again the strange complica- 
 tion that comes directly from these illogical ideas. It is the 
 monstrous shifting of responsibility till it lodges no where, and 
 no body can be touched. Were these States all this time, 
 full, lawful States, or lawless mobs ? They must not be States 
 for one purpose and r.iohs for another — mobs when the at- 
 tempt is m:^de to hold the State to its forfeitures and its lia- 
 bilities, and then States again when the individual actors in 
 these mobs and insurrections want to iuterpos.; State author- 
 ity and State allegiance as their shield. It was supposed that 
 though it might be false there was really some dignity in this 
 doctrine of State rights, sd that a man might hold it and yet 
 liave some claim to leason and respectabihty. Il was thought 
 there was some chivalry about it, but as thus used, what a_ 
 miserable skulking thing it is ! Look at the pitiable position 
 of Alexander H. S'^ephens. Do you hold, sir, that the State of 
 Georgia was out of the Union ? By no means, is the reply. 
 The State could not be legally out of the Union, and, there- 
 fore, it was not out of the Union. What a sudden conversion 
 this, of these once nation-reviling conspirators, to the new 
 Johnsonian doctrine ! But who made the war then ? As the 
 State could not be legally out of the Union, and must there- 
 fore, be supposed to have maintained unimpaired its loyal re- 
 lations to the Union, the irregularities referred to can only be 
 
45 
 
 regarded as the unauthorized acts of mobs or individuals. 
 Very well, sir, but now another question. "Were you, as an 
 individual, guilty of treason? Not at all. The State of 
 Georgia held to the right of secession ; its inhabitants, in- 
 cluding myself, still hold to it, although we do not mean to 
 assert it just now, and what T did was by virtue of my al- 
 legiance to a sovereign State. It was therefore not treason 
 against the United States. Who can understand it ? The 
 representation, so far as it can be put into words at all, would 
 seem to be something like this. Back of all the mobs and 
 turbulence stands the ideal State as fair as ever, Actualhj, 
 its governor is the head of a most violent insurrection against 
 the national authority ; ideally he is head of a political body 
 the harmony of whose relations to the great republic has 
 never been impaired, and which holds its place the same, at 
 all times, without terms or conditions. But are you and 
 others then, guilty of treason ? In answer to this question, 
 there instantly vanishes the mob w'hich had so strangely rep- 
 resented this abstract corporation. The State itself now 
 emerges from its idealism, and under it the mob and all the 
 actors in the mob, from Vice-President Stephens down, im- 
 mediately take shelter. Shall a great nation be juggled in 
 this way ? Shall a quarter of a million of our noblest men 
 have died and no other result come from it than such a 
 thimble-rigging farce as this ! The cruelties of Andersonville 
 shock lis more, but the pain they occasion is less than the 
 feeling that hence arises, of our utter national humiliation. 
 
 This complication is coming widely into view, and bids 
 fair, unless soon untied, to make infinite confusion in future 
 judicial proceedings. Take again the case of Dick Taylor 
 aforesaid, or that of the North Carolina general, who hung 
 twenty loyal Union men. Suppose these persons indicted for 
 murder, to say nothing of the crime of treason. The blood they 
 have thus shed cries to heaven, and orphan children are ask- 
 ing justice against the slayers of their innocent parents. 
 There is the form of an arraignment, when lo ! there is pro- 
 
46 
 
 duced ou the trial, the orders of a coufederate governor, or 
 the warrant of a confederate general, and all this sanctioned 
 by confederate sovereign States, whose acts, during all the 
 time of the rebellion, must be held to be as legitimate as be- 
 fore and after; for they were never out of the Union, and 
 their rights in it were never in the least impaired. Add to 
 thi-i the doctrine of Judge RufBn, lately ratified by a popular 
 vote in North Carolina, that no acts, or conventions, or pro- 
 ceedings of any kind, that were forced upon them by military 
 or any outside authority have any validity, and we have a 
 state of political confusion unexampled in the annals of the 
 world. If they were simply mobs and insurrections, then 
 Gen. Lee, and every man in his army, were each liable to in- 
 dictment of murder for every Union soldier slain, of arson for 
 every building burned, of robbery for every article of property 
 taken or destroyed. But who expects them ever to be found 
 guilty on any such indictments, or to be punished in any way, 
 if the President's policy is carried out, and this mysterious 
 doctrine of State rights is allowed to shifo from the actual to 
 the ideal, or from the ideal to the actual, in any way that may 
 be required to shield crime on the one hand, or to get rebels 
 into Congress on the other ? The pleas of which we speak 
 have been already offered and received in Southern courts. 
 Many more such will be offered, and the result will be that 
 by means of this wretched juggle, no man however guilty will 
 be punished ; no man as well as no State will find any rights 
 impaired, or any wrongs imputed whatever crimes he may 
 have committed. 
 
 Now, aside from the political inconsistency, such a state of 
 things as tbis is most demoralizing. It is a shocking, and a 
 consequent benumbing, of the national conscience. The health- 
 ful preservation of the great ideas of right and wrong, of the 
 eternal distinction between truth and falsehood, of the sanctity 
 of the national oath, of the feeling that such a great right and 
 truth were involved in our national struggle, is a higher thing, 
 a more precious thing, than any amount of sentimental con- 
 
47 
 
 ciliation, whatever guise of charity it may assume. The moral 
 sense is hurt, and, in tim^, becomes diseased, by the sight of 
 guilt, especially great guilt, going about unpunished. This is, 
 in fact, the ultimate ground of punishment in human law £is 
 representative of the divine. It is deeper than all the policies 
 and expediencies that are usually urged as the only penal 
 sanction. Call penal justice utilitarian if you will, but then 
 the production and preservation of a healthy social conscience 
 is the highest earthly utility. Guilt unpunished is ever de- 
 moralizing. It is still more demoralizing when some punish- 
 ments are inflicted, but with that gross inequality which 
 shocks instead of admonishing. When, for example, a miser- 
 able Clamp Ferguson writhes upon the gallows as a guerrilla, 
 whilst his clerical instructor in rebellion is admitted into 
 Christian pulpits, and his military commanders, whom he 
 thought he was zealously serving in his irregular mode of war, 
 are lionized at Philadelphia conventions; or when the poor', 
 stolid, brutal-tempered Wirtz is executed for crimes almost 
 forced upon him by his position, whilst men who placed him 
 there, and kept him there, are regarded as eligible to Congress 
 and the right of rebellious States to send them there is'' pro- 
 nounced unbroken and " unimpaired." 
 
 It is a plea often used in palliation of Southern treason, 
 that they were " educated'' in the doctrine of State sovereignty! 
 and that they should, therefore, be judged from this their^own 
 " stand-point." The answer to it is, that the men for whom 
 such plea is specially made were not so much the educated 
 in this idea as they were themselves the educators. It might 
 have some force as oflered for that debased class commonly 
 called the " poor whites;" but it is a mean hypocrisy when 
 u^ed in behalf of such men as Stephens, Wise, and Orr. For 
 long years had they directed all their efforts to instill this po- 
 litical poison into the Southern mind. Secession, and the 
 extreme State rights doctrine out of which it arose, is not a 
 natural American growth either North or South. Born cf 
 Southern sectionalism, even as that was born of the exo'.ic 
 
48 
 
 slavery, it took long years, and the favoring fact of a pecu- 
 liarly ignorant population, to make it grow. The national 
 idea, on the other hand, was the true American plant. It 
 showed itself as an organizing power, even before our history 
 liad shaped the nation into its more regular growth and form. 
 It was born of our Anglo-Saxon nationality. We see its pro- 
 gress, drawing the wide-sparse districts closer together, in the 
 French and Indian wars, in the early American Congresses, 
 and in other acts that preceded the revolution. These were 
 emphatically American Congresses, for they showed the ger- 
 minal nation, even before the umbilical cord was severed that 
 bound us to our historic mother. For the preservation of this, 
 as much as for separation from Great Britain, was the battle 
 fought. It was never meant to lose that binding idea, the 
 want of which would have rendered the struggle, in other re- 
 spects, a mischief instead of a blessing. The parts were ac- 
 knowledged, but that only rendered all the more precious that 
 from which these rights of the parts have all their meaning. 
 It was those most precious " State rights " which the dema- 
 gogue does not understand, or undervalues for the mere petty 
 local power, to which alone he gives the name. It was that 
 higher right of every colony, of every State, and of the people 
 of every State, in every other State, — that right of unimpaired 
 citizenship throughout the wide Anglo-Saxon American terri- 
 tory. It was this, too, or its more perfect security, for which 
 the Constitution of 1VS7 was formed. The great thing wanted 
 was the more perfect equalization everywhere of the valuable 
 and acknowledged rights of every part in every part, and in 
 the whole, so that there might be no local legislation on mat- 
 ters in which all had an interest, or that would make a man 
 less a man, less a citizen, with less of the rights of a citizen, in 
 one portion than in another. These higher State rights de- 
 manded'a general guardianship against the narrow, local, sec- 
 tionalizing State rights doctrine which, while jealous for the 
 corporate, is most likely to be regardless of the individual lib- 
 erty. We see this plainly now — how much more favorable to 
 
I 
 
 49 
 
 the individual freedom is the larger jurisdiction, aud liow it has 
 to strufjgle to preserve it against the local power.'* It' couserv- 
 atisra is the standing firm, by the fundamental and distinguish- 
 ing idea of a government, then he among us is the true con- 
 servative who is the most national, and, at the same time, 
 
 * This may be made clear by a brief analysis. In our beautiful 
 yet complicated structure of government there arise five species of 
 rights. 1st, the rights of the nation ; 2d, the rights of the States in 
 the nation; 3d, the rights of the States in each other; -ith, the rights 
 of the States in their local jurisdictions; 5th, last of all, yet the most 
 precious of all, or that for which all the rest exist, the right of the in- 
 dividual in the State, in the nation, and in both to be unhindered in 
 the attainment of any place, franchise, or benefit which the powers 
 that God has given him may enable him to attain, and on the same 
 terms, be they high or low, and on the same conditions on which they 
 are allowed to be attained by any other individual in the State, or in 
 the nation ; in other words, perfect political equality. 
 
 It is certainly a remarkable fact, that whilst in the republican striv- 
 ings in Europe the tendency is strongly toward such ackuowledgtneQt 
 of the rights of the individual, as the ultimate political aim, here, on 
 the other hand, there are held doctrines, and those, too, called demo- 
 cratic, which tend directlj' the other way, making the preservation of 
 certain corporate rights a liiglxer thing (a more democratic thing they 
 would say) than the very end for which those corporations have any 
 value. Attorney-General Speed, in his paper of resignation, admir- 
 ably presented this idea of the higher value of the individual right; 
 and it is to be hoped that a thought so old, and yet so new, may be- 
 come a leading principle in our politics, not to be put out by any 
 efforts of a false democracy. 
 
 The common, noisy, undefined, and incapable-of-being-defined 
 States rights doctrine stands equally opposed to the rights of the na- 
 tion and the rights of the individual. This comes from an instinctive 
 conviction on the part of its advocates that the broad shield of the 
 one is the great security of the other, as against local tyranny or local 
 prejudice ; and that in a republican land, what they call centraliza- 
 tion is the very reverse of what goes under the same name in a despot- 
 ism ; that it is, in fact, the difi'using power, the equalizing power 
 sending out liberty and securing liberty to every part. Hence their, 
 evil jealousy and their fa^se logic; hence, too, their utterly undemo- 
 cratic position. 
 
 6 
 
60 
 
 most strenuous foi individual rights. Never was there a 
 greater anomaly presented in the history of political philosophy 
 than the manner in which, through the abused name of cen- 
 tralization — totally misapplied from its French or European 
 use — the lower has tended to displace the higher, and the petty 
 claims of locality, or of indefinable corporate abstractions, have 
 been urged to the damage of the rights of the States ia 
 each other. Among these is the interest of each State in the 
 institutions of every other, and the corresponding right to de- 
 mand that those institutions be equal and republican. It was 
 for this, and to secure the rights of individuals, both in the 
 States respectively and in the whole, that the present Consti- 
 tution was solemnly ordained by, and iu the name of the 
 
 PEOPLE OF THE UnITED StATES. 
 
 This is the true Conservatism.. It \i the reverse doctrine 
 that is destructive of our fundamental national idea. The 
 " endangered liberties of the States" — this cry of the dema- 
 gogue has come to mean little els 3 than the liberty of tramp- 
 ling upon liberty, or the liberties of oligarchical States to 
 infringe upon the liberties of individuals, and, in so doing, to 
 make war upon the most precious liberties of other States, as 
 well as upon the most sacred rir/kts of the nation. But, whatever 
 be the nature of this doctrine of State sovereignty, these men 
 for whom it is now plead as a palliation were themselves its 
 teachers. They were the educators. They controlled Legis- 
 latures and Conventions by it. The ignorant rebellious com- 
 munities which they had thus educated obeyed them, instead 
 of their obeying their States. The plea, we say, might do for 
 the deluded masses whom they pressed into their armies; but 
 how utterly false and base it is when made by such men as 
 Stephens, "Wise, and Lee, or when they suffer their friends at 
 Philadelphia to make it for them. 
 
 Mobs to go out, and States to come back. 
 
 States to go out, and mobs to come back — 
 Take it either way you please, according as the application or 
 the purpose demands. We have alrearly remarked upon some 
 
I 
 
 51 
 
 of these. In the case of Mr. Alex. 11. Stephens, this double- 
 headed monstrosity goes both ways at once. It might be 
 treated as a political farce were it not for some awfully serious 
 questions to which it gives rise. Among these there is none 
 of deeper interest, or more directly entering into the present 
 canvass, than that which rela'es to the future fate of the 
 Southern loyalists. They have been resisting mobs, for which, 
 it was supposed, they deserved the gratitude and protection of 
 the nation ; but, lo ! this mob suddenly presents itself as the 
 State, the strange ideal State which has been existing all the 
 time, and, now, according to the Philadelphia doctiine, comes 
 forth with all its rights unimpaired, among which is the abso- 
 lute right to legislate for all people within its territory,— to 
 punish, banish, ostracise, or disfranchise for any crime it may 
 invent, or any cause it may allege. This is one of its reserved 
 inherent sovereign rights. There is, indeed, an act of Con- 
 gress, called the Civil Rights Bill, which might seem to be in 
 the way, but that is everywhere pronounced unconstitutional 
 in Southern couits, and the Executive is in deadly hostility to 
 it. What is to piotect these men ? Their case is unex- 
 ampled. The nation has triumphed, it is said ; and yet they 
 are worse off than if they had been disloyal. There is some- 
 thing else in their condition more marvellous still. The com- 
 plication into which the President's policy has brought the 
 whole affair makes their situation actually more helpless and 
 deplorable than though the nation had beea defeated and the 
 rebellion had triumphed in the field. This may seem a 
 strange assertion, and we therefore proceed to prove it. In 
 doing so, let us call up a fact now fifty years past in the 
 history of our relations to a foreign Government. In the 
 negotiations between the United States and Great Britain, 
 at the close of the war of 1812, the latter made the protection 
 of their Indian allies a matter of most express stipulation. 
 Other things were earnestly insisted upon, offered and rejected, 
 pressed at one time and yielded at another by both parties, 
 but from this demand the British Government never would 
 
52 
 
 recede. It was with them more than a matter of interest or 
 policy. Their national honor was at stake ; the world's eye 
 was upon them ; they thought how they would look in his- 
 tory, and they made it a si7ie qua non. These Indian allies 
 lived in the then wilderness territories of Michigan and Wis- 
 consin. Our Government had claimed from them a quasi 
 allegiance, but this was certainly something far less than the 
 allegiance which bound to it Southern men, rebels or loyalist*, 
 in 1861.^ They had aided Britain in her war, and she would 
 not abandon them to our " unimpaired" jurisdiction without 
 the fullest assurance, accompanied by positive security for their 
 protection. Whatever we may think of that war, or however 
 we may dislike the English nation, their conduct in this re- 
 spect was just and noble. And now, how utterly reversed is 
 our course, if the Johnson policy is to prevail, and that, too, 
 not with Indians having, perhaps, a doubtful claim, but with 
 men, citizens of the United States, distinguished above all for 
 their loyalty and their suflferings. To make this clear let us 
 picture in imagination a state of things which, three or four 
 years ago, was far from being impossible, or even improbable. 
 There were times in our great struggle when the boldest 
 hearts grew faint. It did seem, sometimes, as though the 
 great point would have to be conceded, and the Southern 
 secession acknowledged. In such a case we could not have 
 abandoned these Southern loyalists. The world would have 
 cried out against us. Though yielding other things, here we must 
 have insisted to the last; and, for the sake of acknowledged 
 independence, the South would, doubtless, have accepted the 
 terms, and given such security, whether by way of territorial host- 
 age or otherwise, as would have been, by the law of nations, an 
 adequate protection against all liability or deprivation of 
 rights. Bitterness, it may be, would have existed against 
 them, but the dread of another war, which we could not have 
 refused to wage on violation of such a treaty, would have 
 secured quiet and'tolerance, even a tolerance which the trans- 
 actions at Memphis and New Orleans show to be now 
 
53 
 
 unTjnowD. How strange the spectacle! How astoundino- 
 the paradox which we now present, especially to the lovers 
 of freedom abroad, and which comes directly from this most 
 unheard-of "policy," and this most mysterious doctrine of 
 " unimpaired State rights." Our national armies triumphant, 
 rebellion subdued, the loyal North rejoicing, the loyal men 
 of the South expecting, beyond all others, to share in 
 that joy, and to partake of the benefit, even as beyond all 
 others they had shared in the suffering — the President of the 
 nation belonging to this very class — and yet, after all, left in 
 a worse condition than though the rebellion had been success- 
 ful — left in a position where every feeling is embittered 
 against them, and yet without the security that would have 
 come from a treaty, without the security that Great Britain 
 insisted upon for her Indian allies ! What the horrors of that 
 position actually are late events Lave shown beyond a doubt. 
 In Louisiana more union-men slain in one day of peace (so 
 called) than during the whole four years of unrelenting war! 
 And what is to come? What is to set any check upon this 
 Philadelphia doctrine of State rights unimpaired. They may 
 make any exclusions, any disfranchisements they please of 
 these suffering loyalists. They may interdict to them aay 
 social or political assemblings. They can persecute them in 
 innumerable ways. They can consign them to civil death, 
 and put it into their constitutions. They can banish them as 
 enemies of the State, and there is no power on earth that can 
 forbid any such proceedings. Citizenship of the United States 
 cannot protect them, for the President holds that there is no such 
 citizenship aside from that of the States ; and we are reasoning 
 now on the inevitable consequences of his policy if sanctioned 
 by the nation at the ballot-box. And here comes up another 
 monstrous anomaly, which is a legitimate result of that most 
 unheard-of policy. We fought four years, lost 250,000 
 lives, and incurred a burthen of 3,000,000,000 dollars of debt, 
 to vindicate our claim to be a nation ; and yet citizenship, 
 
 ever held to be inseparable from nationality, is declared by 
 5* 
 
54: 
 
 our Pres-ident not to belong to it. It pertains alone to the 
 States. A naiion without citizens, and without power to pro- 
 tect them if it had any ! Such are the doctrines of " the 
 pt'licy." Such is one of the momentous questions to be de- 
 cided by the present canvass. Can it be that any loyal man 
 at the North shall regard this as the true rec instruction of the 
 Union after such a war ? Can it be that the soldiers of our 
 noble armies, and to such throughout this appeal we have 
 es[ecially addressed ourselves — can it b* that any who fought 
 under Grant, and followed Sherman through the South, can 
 misunderstand an issue so nearly adecting the national honor 
 and their honor, knowing as they do what these Southern 
 allies of theirs endure.l, and at what a price their loyalty was 
 maintained ' It must not be, it cannot be, that a nation 
 which has lost 250,000 lives in maintaining its nationality 
 should be unable to protect its humblevt citizens, much less 
 those who are placed in positions of suffering and [ ersecution 
 from their devotion to it in its hour of sorest trial. 
 
 "Sneaks" is the name which the Johnson newspapers are 
 giving to these crushed men, and copperheads throughout the 
 land are reiterating it, "Recreants" Blair calls them — re- 
 creants to their own aide. Can you bear thi~, soldiers ? You 
 see in it the progress of the new idea the President has intro- 
 duced, and which becomes necessary for the support of his 
 policy. There might have been some plausibility in it if 
 indeed it had been a question of sides or localities instead of 
 that high issi:e which we have endeavored to keep prominent 
 in all that we have said — not a war of the Xorth against the 
 South, nor of factious " swinging round," nor a " civil war," as 
 Seward calls it, hut the nation against assassins that sought 
 its hfe — the whole nation, politically, against traitorous foes 
 more hostile and more alien to it than any foreign enemies. 
 This utter debasing of the whole matter to a thing of locality 
 casts dishonor upon you as ■well as upon the suffering men to 
 whom these epithets are applied. Your nationality was tkeir 
 nationauty. Your love of country, atul of her glorious insti- 
 
55 
 
 tutioDS of freedom, was their love of country, only the more 
 severely tested by the counter-strength of the narrower local 
 feeling, and of the persecutions to which they were exposed. 
 
 Thus, whatever view we take, whatever seemingly collateral 
 point may call attention, the same great issue is ever coming 
 up again. Through all complications it ever stands before us. 
 The conflict is not over, soldiers ! You conquered at Gettys- 
 burg, at Richmond, and New Orleans. There is yet to be 
 won another battle which is to prevent all your former tri- 
 umphs from having been in vain. The question now to be 
 decided is the glory of the cause in which you fought. A 
 mean reaction is seeking to lower it, in its attempts to rescue 
 from deserved odium the men who have caused all our 
 national woe. They are attempting to revive the old per- 
 nicious doctrines in which secession had its birth. A false 
 " policy " finds itself driven to such a course in its own 
 defense. A false demoralizing sentimentality is undermining 
 the higher and healthier ideas of truth and right. To the 
 same end, and with a similar demoralizing effect, an emblem- 
 atic loyalty is talking again of " chivalry," and "honorable 
 foes," whilst offending the moral sense of all Christendom in 
 its treachery to Southern loyalists, and its base abandonment 
 of that crushed race whose aid we sought in the hour of our 
 greatest danger. Influences like these may draw with them 
 some few who were once esteemed patriotic, but the masses in 
 the opposing ranks are still the same old elements of dis- 
 loyalty. They are the men who were the soldiers' foes, and 
 the foes of his cause, during all the anxious years of the con- 
 flict. 
 
 Not platforms then, as we have before remarked, but move- 
 ments, tendencies, and affinities, unerring and unmistakable, 
 are the things to which, as men of common sense, as wise 
 men, we are to look. A few questions, which it requires only 
 a moment's honest thinking to answer, settle all : What side 
 is sure to receive the vote of every warmest sympathizer with 
 
56 
 
 rebellion in our land .? On which side will be found the men 
 who rejoiced— and their name is legion— at defeats in our 
 armies ? In whose success will they feel deepest interest who 
 had no tears for our gallant dead, and who stigmatized then, 
 as some others are doiug now, the war in which they fell as 
 fanatical, false, and inglorious ? Where will they vote who 
 were ever against giving the right of voting to the absent 
 soldier in the camp ? Where will deserters vote, and they 
 who are striving to get repealed, or declared unconstitutional 
 by the courts, the laws by which such deserters were right- 
 eously disfranchised ? On which side will success give most 
 joy in Charleston and New Orleans ? Whose triumph will 
 cause mourning to every liberty-loving republican of Europe, 
 and rejoicing to every liberty-hating partisan of monarchy and 
 aristocracy. Soldiers of Grant and Sherman — if these ques- 
 tions can be answered in but one way — and you most surely 
 know what that is — how can any of you vote on a side which 
 will inevitably bring you into association with every one of 
 these. 
 
 Xever was issue more sharply joined. It is not so much 
 the particular names of candidates, or even the measures, how- 
 ever plausibly stated, of which they profess to be the advo- 
 cates, as the influences that support them, and which will be 
 the controlling power in spite of all professions. Via media 
 men, third party men, ever, with all their claims to conserva- 
 tism, the most factious, mischief-making men in a nation, may 
 profess what they please, but that which is most powerful and 
 most numerous in the voting ranks will not only be predomin- 
 ant, but claim full recognition of its predominance, in case of 
 success. And we all know what that ruling interest is, and of 
 what elements it is composed. All that is most hostile to our 
 true nationality, is there. All the most extreme advocates of 
 the baleful doctrine of State sovereignty are there. Every one 
 among us who was a member of a secret society in aid of 
 Southern treason is there. Every one who is engaged in the 
 
57 
 
 ineffably vile work of creating a new sectionalism between the 
 East and the West — every such man is there. All who are 
 distinguished by the most demoniac feeling toward a crushed 
 and disfranchised race are there. All who call the loyalists of 
 Louisiana and East Tennessee, •' sneaks " and " recreants " are 
 there. They are all there. Soldier, patriot, can you vote 
 with them ? 
 
 In order to Tift themselves out of the deserved degrada- 
 tion into which they have heretofore fallen, all these classes 
 are seeking to depreciate the character of our late war. They 
 would send it down in history^ inglorious and dishonored. 
 They would put a stigma upon those who have been its most 
 zealous supporters. In other words, they would in every way 
 lower the standard of the national cause. Soldiers, be it 
 yours to.M it high, to put the emblematic symbol of its honor 
 where no hand can ever " haul it down." Looking away then 
 from all complications, from all " policies " — keeping the eye 
 steadily fixed on unmistakable tendencies and results — make 
 to yourselves these'^rm resolves : This struggle shall not have 
 been in vain ; its deep grounds of righteousness shall not be 
 undervalued, and its most loyal supporters reviled, that rebels 
 may be relieved from deserved ignominy ; such an immense 
 sacrifice of life shall not have been made merely that they 
 may come back again to their abandoned seats in Congress, 
 and even with an increased representation ; such hosts of our 
 comrades shall not have fallen that there may be, in the re- 
 bellious States, less freedom of speech, less unhindered politi- 
 cal action, less protection to individual rights, than there was 
 before. It shall not be that the brave Southern loyalists, given 
 up to the " unimpaired rights " of such rebellious jurisdictions, 
 should be in a worse condition than though they had been 
 disloyal — in a worse condition even than if the rebellion had 
 never been subdued. Above all, soldiers — in no unchristian 
 temper of vain chivalrous boasting, but with a sober regard to 
 the future spiritual and political health of the land in which 
 
58 
 
 your children are to live— say with one voice : The standard 
 we have borne aloft through so many battle-fields, it shall not 
 be lowered-the historic glory of this our second heroic period, 
 of this our second great war for nationality— IT MUST TT 
 SHALL BE PRESERVED. ' 
 
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