FOUR YEARS WITH THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC.

CHAPTER I.

THE CAUSE OF THE WAR.

The question of slavery The Missouri Compromise - First attempt at secession by South Carolina - Abolition of slavery in the English colonies Its effect in the United States First Abolition candidate for the Presidency — Annexation of Texas - War with Mexico -Increased agitation - Wilmot Proviso Van Buren, the antislavery candidate Disorganization of the Whig party — Compromise of 1850 - Fugitive Slave Law - Kansas-Nebraska billCivil war in Kansas - Birth of the Republican party- Election of Buchanan Affair of Harper's Ferry-The irrepressible conflict.

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THE great American rebellion of 1861 had for its cause the maintenance and the perpetuation of slavery. From whatever point of view we study the development of the facts and the march of events which culminated in this great conflict, we find at bottom the question of slavery; all else is merely subsidiary.

This question, pregnant with storms, dated from the very establishment of the Republic. The wise men who drew up the Constitution were, in principle, opposed to slavery, and could not logically sanction a right of property of man over man, when they proclaimed 'Equality and the inalienable right to liberty" of all members of the human family. In their minds, slavery was condemned; but, constrained to respect great interests, they left to time, and to the progressive march of civilization, the care of adjusting these transitory interests to permanent principles.

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FOUR YEARS WITH THE POTOMAC ARMY.

Antagonism between freedom and slavery was developed rapidly by the voluntary extinction of slavery in the New England States, in New York, and in Pennsylvania. The opposing forces beginning at that time to be equalized, an active struggle began when the creation of new States and the expansion of free labor tended to cause the balance to fall on the side of emancipation.

The whole political history of the United States turns upon this strife, in which the statesmen of the country, for a half-century, expended their strength in vain. Their mistake consisted in believing in the efficacy of compromises, a poor expedient to reconcile irreconcilable differences; puerile efforts, which, in presence of the results, inevitably call to mind the image of the dikes of sand which children sometimes, for their amusement, raise along the shore, to stop the rising tide.

The most astonishing of these childish freaks was the invention of an imaginary line across the American continent, to limit forever the domain of liberty and the domain of slavery, to give to each its part: this to civilization, that to barbarism.

This compromise line was, as is well known, the result of the first great battle fought by the democratic and emancipating spirit of the North, against the oligarchic and pro-slavery principles of the South.

During the session of Congress in 1818 to 1819, Missouri had asked admission into the Union, but the House of Representatives attached to this admission the condition that slavery should cease to exist in the new State. The Senate refused to sanction this condition, and the unsettled question was reserved for the decision of the next Congress. By both sides, advantage was taken of this delay, to inflame the passions

and envenom the strife. The agitation, deep and violent, developed a startling difference between the North, which ardently sustained the condition imposed by the House of Representatives, and the South, which obstinately declared it unconstitutional. Matters had come to such a pass that Congress was frightened at probable consequences, and drew back before the responsibility of a solution by force of arms, in case a solution was not reached by ballot. Could the young Republic, which had existed less than half a century, stand the terrible ordeal of a civil war, and would not the dismemberment of the Union lead to such results that both parties would be engulfed in one common ruin?

Such was, in fact, the determining cause of the "Missouri Compromise," which was not, nor could be, a solution. The danger was postponed, slavery had ob tained a respite; the respite of the condemned.

It is difficult to suppose that the statesmen of that period could really have trusted in the permanency of their dike of sand, and that the American people could in good faith have believed in the efficacy of a geographic fiction to stop indefinitely the advance of liberty. But the hostile parties accepted the compromise as a truce by which each might profit in recuperating its strength and in subsequently resuming the contest. with greater advantage. As for the mass of the people, preoccupied by their material interests, absorbed in business, they would naturally favor every respite from those exciting agitations, which, to the loss of immediate profit, interrupted them in their commercial, industrial, and agricultural enterprises.

In democratic governments, the active minorities have, in all times, led in their train the passive majorities. So, in the "sphere militant" of the slavery ques

tion, from the instant the vanguard laid down its arms, the great bulk of the army celebrated the peace of the day, without troubling itself as to whether the war would not break out more furiously on the morrow. Thus slavery was tolerated in the new State, but forever forbidden north of the line of 36° 30′ north latitude, — and quiet was restored throughout the whole country by the adoption of the Missouri Compromise.

For ten years, nothing occurred to trouble this peaceful quiet except the temporary excitement incident to the two elections, which raised John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson to the Presidency. The question of slavery was not brought forward, and it still slept when, in 1830, South Carolina began to prepare for its awakening by a first aggression against the Federal Union.

Ever since the establishment of the Republic, the prosperous development of the Northern States, their rapid increase of population, their marvellous advance in the paths of commerce, of industry, of agriculture, left the Southern States more and more in the rear. The cause lay simply in the relative merits of free and slave labor. But the planters of the South would not see it, and their discontent sought for grievances in the tariff of 1828.

When a law wounds any one's prejudices, or conflicts with his interests, the most specious pretext with which to combat it is to represent it as unconstitutional. On this occasion, South Carolina did not fail in this particular. She found in Mr. Hayne, one of her representatives in the United States Senate, a strong and eloquent interpreter, and for the first time a voice was raised in Congress to proclaim the doctrine of Secession, to which Daniel Webster's political abilities and oratorical power soon rendered befitting justice.

The history of this dangerous conflict is well known.

Beaten in the arena of discussion, South Carolina wished to pass from theory to practice. In a convention assembled at Columbia, in November, 1832, she adopted and promulgated an act declaring null and void all the acts of Congress imposing duties on foreign importations, rejected the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court upon the constitutionality of these acts, and proclaimed that in case of an attempt at coercion, on the part of the United States, the State would withdraw from the Union and form an independent government.

This act was the supreme effort of the spirit of rebellion. President Jackson had just been reëlected. He replied to the ordinance of nullification, as it was called, by a proclamation which left no doubt as to his determination to resort to force if the rebels did not return promptly to duty. South Carolina, isolated in her attempt at revolt, opened her eyes at last to the urgent necessity of submission. Upon the proposition of Henry Clay, Congress adopted a modification of the tariff of 1828, and it was this plank of safety of which the rebellious State took advantage to repass its Rubicon.

But if the irritating question of slavery remained thus ostensibly foreign to the abortive attempt of South Carolina, on the other hand, the cause of emancipation, at precisely this epoch, made rapid progress in Virginia. After a general agitation amongst the people of the State, the question was brought out and spiritedly discussed in the Legislature. The measures proposed for arriving at the gradual abolition of slavery failed only by a trifling majority; a fatal check, which, thirty years later, was to precipitate the State into an abyss, from which the change of a few votes at that time would have sufficed to preserve her.

In 1834, England abolished slavery in its West Indian