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[508] fighting until cool reflection and the enormous cost of the struggle should calm or overbear the rage of extremists on both sides, and induce reunion on the basis, substantially, of the Crittenden Compromise. Whoever keeps this explanation in mind will be enabled by it to comprehend movements, delays, vacillations, obstinate torpors, and even whole abortive campaigns, which must otherwise seem utterly unaccountable.

XI. The Rebellion had, moreover, a decided advantage in the respect that all its partisans, civil as well as military, were thoroughly in earnest, and ready to prove their faith by their works. “You are a Unionist,” said a Baltimorean to a New York friend--“I don't doubt it. But are you ready fight for the Union? I am a Secessionist, and am going to fight for Secession.” There were few real Secessionists who shrank from this test of their sincerity. On the side of the Union were the calm calculations of interest, the clear suggestions of duty, the inspirations of a broad, benignant patriotism; but these were tame and feeble impulses when contrasted with the vengeful hate, the quivering, absorbing rage, the stormy wrath, which possessed the great body of the Secessionists, transforming even women into fiends. These impulses were sedulously cultivated and stimulated by the engineers of Disunion, through the uncontradicted diffusion by their journals of the most atrocious forgeries1 and the most shameless inventions.2 The North was habitually represented to the ignorant masses of the South as thirsting for their blood and bent on their extermination — as sending forth her armies instructed to ravish, kill, lay waste, and destroy; and the pulpit was not far behind the press in disseminating these atrocious falsehoods. Hence, the Southern militia, and even conscripts, were impelled by a hate or horror of their adversaries which rendered them valiant in their own despite, making them sometimes victors where the memories of their grandfathers at Charleston and at Guilford, and of their fathers at Bladensburg, had led their foes to greatly undervalue their prowess and their efficiency.

XII. Whether Slavery should prove an element of strength or of weakness to the Rebellion necessarily depended on the manner in which it should be

1 The Louisville (Ky.) Courier of June, 1861, published the following infamous fabrication as from The New York Tribune, and it immediately ran the rounds of the journals of the Confederacy:

From the New York Tribune. “do you hear? the beauty and the Booty shall be yours, only conquer these Rebels of the South before the next crop comes in. The next crop will be death to us! Let it be hewn down in the field, burned, trampled, lost; or, if you have tile opportunity, ship it to New York, and we will build up Gotham by the prices it must bring next season. We shall have the monopoly of the markets, having duly subjected our vassals in the South. Go ahead, brave fellows, Zouaves of New York, whom we were apt to spit upon, though you do the work at fires. Go ahead! Don't mind yellow fever; don't mind black vomit; don't mind bilious fever, or cholera, or measles, or small pox, or hot weather, or hard living, or cold steel, or hot shot! Go!”

2 The Norfolk (Va.) Herald of April 22d, said:

It is rumored that Lincoln has been drunk for three days, and that Capt. Lee has command at the Capitol; and also that Col. Lee, of Virginia, who lately resigned, is bombarding Washington from Arlington Hights. If so, it will account for his not having arrived here to take command, as was expected.

The New Orleans Picayune of about May 15th, 1861, said:

All the Massachusetts troops now in Washington are negroes, with the exception of two or three drummer boys. Gen. Butler, in command, is a native of Liberia. Our readers may recollect old Ben, the barber, who kept a shop in Poydras-street, and emigrated to Liberia with a small competence. Gen. Butler is his son.

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