Edward Alfred Pollard, The lost cause; a new Southern history of the War of the Confederates ... Drawn from official sources and approved by the most distinguished Confederate leaders.

[560] men in the front rank of the Republican party, who have always brought their colleagues, when necessary, up to their own standard and position. It is not pretended, however, to deny that there were milder phases of opinion in the Republican party. There were those who aimed only at the abolition of slavery; on the idea expressed years before by Mr. Seward, and reiterated by Mr. Lincoln, that an irrepressible conflict existed in the Union between slave society and free society, which could only be allayed by making the Union all slave or all free. There were very few, if any, who were not determined to use the war as an instrument of abolition, and to prosecute it, not merely for restoring the authority of the Union, but also for securing the extinction of slavery in the South. No such purpose was responsibly avowed in the beginning; but it was fully developed by the summer of 1864, when it became, as we shall see, very soon a leading issue between the Lincoln and McClellan parties.

Such were the antecedents, character, and composition of the party which had succeeded in the Presidential election of 1860. The shock which the announcement of the result gave to the country was very great; but it was not greater than that which was felt by the successful party itself. Composed of extreme fanatical elements, and brought for the first time face to face with the serious and grave responsibilities of office, under that Union to which so many of them had avowed a bitter hostility, and under that Constitution to which they were obliged to swear support, and which they designed to subvert, they at once began to realize the serious difficulty of their position. That which most added to their embarrassment, however, was the fact that they had carried the election by only a plurality vote. They had received no support in one half of the Union; and in the other half, they had triumphed by only a majority of suffrages. They could not command a majority in either House of Congress; and they felt that if the election could be held over again, the classes which were esteemed to embrace the intelligence, worth, and patriotism of the country, would rally together, make common cause against them, and defeat their accession to power.

Thus circumstanced, it was the interest of the Republican party, as a party, that the secession movement should go on, and that the threatened dissolution of the Union should be consummated. We have already seen signs of their policy secretly to exasperate the feelings and confirm the purposes of the South; and, with professions of conservatism and devotion to the Union, to secure to themselves in administering the Government the support of the classes who had opposed them at the North.

We might make here a large accumulation of proofs of the fact that the Black Republican party, on its accession to power, wanted dissolution and wanted war; but we are not aware that it is now denied. It is a historical truth. It is a historical conviction, confirmed alike by the action