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Victor Hugo, Ledru Rollin, Louis Blanc, Garibaldi, or any other of those who, defying the vengeance of despots, have consecrated their lives and sacrificed personal enjoyment to the championship of the Rights of Man.
III.
The Confederates had vastly the advantage in the familiarity of their people with the use of arms,1 and in their addiction to and genius for the art of war. The Northern youth of 1860 were not nearly so familiar with the use of the hunter's rifle or fowling-piece as were their ancestors of 1770.
The density of our population had expelled desirable game almost entirely from all the New-England States but Maine; in the prairie States, it rapidly disappears before the advancing wave of civilized settlement and cultivation.
Our Indian wars of the present century have nearly all been fought on our western and south-western borders; our last war with Great Britain was condemned as unwise and unnecessary by a large proportion of the Northern people; so was the war upon Mexico: so that it may be fairly said that, while the South and South-West had been repeatedly accustomed to hostilities during the present century, the North and East had known very little2 of war but by hearsay since the peace which secured our independence, eighty years ago.
IV.
The Rebels had a decided advantage in the fact that, on the main question underlying the great issue they had made up — the question of upholding, strengthening, extending, and perpetuating Slavery, or (on the other hand) restricting, confining, weakening it, with a view to its ultimate extinction — they had the active sympathy of a decided majority of the American people.
The vote for President in 18603 had shown that scarcely more than two-fifths of the American People were even so far hostile to Slavery to wish its farther diffusion arrested.
Had political action been free in the Slave States, they would probably have swelled Mr. Lincoln's poll to fully Two Millions; but, on the other hand, the hopeless distraction and discouragement of the pro-Slavery forces so paralyzed effort on that side, by demonstrating its futility, as seriously to diminish the anti-Lincoln vote.
Had there been but one instead of three pro-Slavery tickets in the field, its vote in Maine, New Hampshire,
1 A Southern gentleman, writing from Augusta, Ga., in February, 1861, said:
Nine-tenths of our youth go constantly armed; and the common use of deadly weapons is quite disregarded. No control can be exercised over a lad after he is fourteen or fifteen years of age. He then becomes “ Mr.” so-and-so, and acknowledges no master.The street-fights, duels, etc., so prominent among the ‘peculiar institutions’ of the South, doubtless conduced to the ready adaptation of her whites to a state of war.
2 Pollard, in his “Southern History” of our struggle, smartly, if not quite accurately, says:
In the war of 1812, the North furnished 58,552 soldiers; the South 96,812--making a majority of 37,030 in favor of the South. Of the number furnished by the North--While the State of South Carolina furnished 5,696. In the Mexican War,
Massachusetts furnished 3,110 New Hampshire furnished 897 Connecticut furnished 387 Rhode Island furnished 637 Vermont furnished 181 In all 5,162 The whole number of troops contributed by the North to the Mexican War was 23,054; while the South contributed 43,630-very nearly double-and, in proportion to her population, four times as many soldiers as the North.
Massachusetts furnished 1,047 New Hampshire furnished 1 The other New England States 0,000 In all 1,048
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