Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field Book of the Civil War. Volume 1.

[260] and make commercial arrangements with, the leading governments there. These Commissioners were William L. Yancey, of Alabama; P. A. Rost<*> of Louisiana; A. Dudley Mann, of Virginia; and T. Butler King, of Georgia. Yancey was to operate in England, Rost in France, and Mann in Holland and Belgium. King seems to have had a sort of roving commission. Yancey had more real ability and force of character than either of the others. He was not a statesman, but a demagogue, and lacked almost every requisite for a diplomatist. He could fill with wild passion an excitable populace at home, but he utterly failed to impress the more sober English mind with a sense of his wisdom or the justice of his cause. Rost was a Frenchman, who emigrated to Louisiana in early life, married a woman of fortune, and finally reached a seat on the bench of the Supreme Court of that State. Mann was a dull statistician of very moderate ability; and King was an extensive farmer and slaveholder. These men so fitly represented their bad cause in Europe, that confidence in the justice or the ultimate success of that cause was speedily so impaired, that they went wandering about, seeking in vain for willing listeners among men of character in diplomatic circles; and, finally, they abandoned their missions in disgust, to the relief of statesmen who were wearied with their importunities and offended by their duplicity:

Mr. Stephens assumed the office of expounder of the principles upon which the new government was founded and was to be established. He made the occasion of a speech to the citizens of Savannah, Georgia,

March 21, 1861.

the opportunity for giving that exposition to the world. He declared that the immediate cause of the rebellion was African Slavery existing in the United States; and said that Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this as the “rock on which the Union would split.” He doubted whether Jefferson understood the truth on which that rock stood. He, and “most of the leaders at the time of the formation of the old Constitution,” entertained the erroneous idea that “the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically.” They erroneously believed “that in the order of Providence the institution would be evanescent and pass away.” That, he said, was “the prevailing idea of the fathers,” who rested upon the false assumption put forth in the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal.” ¹

“Our new government,” said the Expounder, “is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that Slavery-subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so, even among us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well that this truth was not generally admitted even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty ”