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social scale, with the great proprietors of lands and sinews.1 Every avenue through which truth might find its way to the popular understanding was quickly closed, and the people had no detecter of its counterfeits.
“Perhaps there never was a people,” wrote a Southern Unionist, in the third year of the war, “more bewitched, beguiled, and befooled than we were when we drifted into this rebellion.”
2
Commenting on these actions of the politicians, President Lincoln said:--“At the beginning, they knew they would never raise their treason to any respectable magnitude by any name which implies violation of law. They knew their people possessed as much moral sense, as much of devotion to law and order, and as much pride in, and reverence for, the history and Government of their common country, as any other civilized and patriotic people.
They knew they would make no advancement directly in the teeth of these strong and noble sentiments.
Accordingly, they commenced by an insidious debauching of the public mind.
They invented an ingenious sophism, which, if conceded, was followed by perfectly logical steps, through all the incidents, to the complete destruction of the Union.
The sophism itself is, that any State of the Union may, consistently with the National Constitution, and therefore lawfully and peacefully, withdraw from the Union, without the consent of the Union, or of any other State.
The little disguise that the supposed right is to be exercised only for just cause, themselves to be the judges of its justice, is too thin to merit any notice.
With rebellion thus sugarcoated, they have been drugging the public mind of their section for more than thirty years, until, at length, they have brought many good men to a willingness to take up arms against the Government, the day after some assemblage of men have enacted the farcical pretense of taking their State out of the Union, who could have been brought to no such thing the day before.”
3
1 There is ample evidence on record to show that Yancey, Davis, Stephens, and other leaders in the great rebellion were advocates of the foreign Slave-trade. Southern newspapers advocated it. The True Southron, of Mississippi, suggested the “propriety of stimulating the zeal of the pulpit by founding a prize for the best sermon in favor of free trade in negroes.” For the purpose of practically opening the horrible traffic, an “African labor-supply Association” was formed, of which De Bow, editor of the principal organ of the oligarchy, was made president. Southern legislatures discussed the question. John Slidell, in the United States Senate, urged the propriety of withdrawing American cruisers from the coast of Africa, that the slavers might not be molested; and the administration of Mr. Buchanan was made to favor this scheme of the great cotton-planters, by protesting against the visitation of suspected slave-bearing vessels, carrying the American flag, by British cruisers.
2 New York Daily Times, June 4, 1864.
3 Message to Congress, July 4, 1861. Mr. Carpenter, the artist who painted the picture of The Signig a the Emancipation Proclamation, relates the following anecdote concerning the last sentence in the above quotation from the Message:--“Mr. De Frees, the Government printer, told me that when the Message was being printed, he was a good deal disturbed by the use of the term ‘sugar-coated,’ and finally went to the President about it. Their relations to each other being of the most intimate character, he told Mr. Lincoln frankly that he ought to remember that a message to Congress was a different affair from a speech at a mast meeting in Illinois--that the messages became a part of history, and should be written accordingly. ‘ What Is the matter now?’ inquired the President. ‘Why,’ said Mr. De Frees, ‘you have used an undignified expression in the Message ;’ and then reading the paragraph aloud, he added, ‘ I would alter the structure of that, if I were you.’ ‘De Frees,’ replied Mr. Lincoln, ‘ that word expresses precisely my idea, and I am not going to change it. The time will never come, in this country, when the people won't know exactly what sugar. coated means!’ ”
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