Colonel William Preston Johnston, The Life of General Albert Sidney Johnston : His Service in the Armies of the United States, the Republic of Texas, and the Confederate States.

[258] United States. He had been the soldier of Anglo-Saxon freedom, the cabinet officer of a constitutional and independent republic, and a planter who had earned his bread in the sweat of his brow. He understood the delicate and complicated mechanism of our Government; and, much as he desired to see its hands strengthened within its legitimate sphere, he knew that the sovereignty of the States was the palladium of our liberties, and was to be respected and defended with jealous care. It is true that he thought that the rights of the States could be better secured by many concessions even than by arms; but he had no doubts as to which party was the aggressor, and his convictions, as well as his sympathies, were with his own State and section. Moreover, he had learned from the patriots of 1776 the inherent right of every people to select their own form of government, and to maintain their independence by revolution.

General Johnston's views in regard to slavery were those generally held in the South, where he was born and brought up, and with whose social structure he had been identified. Right or wrong, they were the beliefs of eight millions of people, who have shown as high traits, as pure a morality, as lofty a courage, and as intelligent a statesmanship, as any who ever lived. With no great respect for political abstractions, and perceiving clearly the differences that mark race and condition, he rejected with intellectual scorn the generalizations which overlook all existing facts, and confound all the relations of life. He recognized our common humanity, no man more distinctly; and acted upon it, no man no more fully. But he could not ignore that the manifest inferiority of the negro fitted him for the place he held, and that time alone could fit him for any other. The slaves had been bought with a price, under the strongest legal sanctions, and all arguments for their forcible emancipation applied equally well to the confiscation of every other species of wealth or property. The destructive consequences of the abolition of slavery had been proved in the West Indies, and were as certain as any future event could be. Hence he shared the resentment, though not the expression of it, universal in the South, against the domineering philanthropy that assailed its institutions. His views in regard to the nature and polity of the United States Government, on the whole, fairly represented the ideas of the army-officers as a class, but enlarged and modified by a wider experience. If they could be summed up in a single word, it would be-conservative.

General Johnston had been so long the stanch soldier of the United States that he was unwilling to contemplate the picture of its majestic fabric shattered and in ruins. If the States were to be severed, it mattered little to him under what class of rights the act was to be consummated. Whether called secession, or revolution, or rebellion, it was the prostration of that governmental ideal for whose exaltation