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.

[299] in the North on the conduct of the war. That division was apparent in the Federal Congress, and marked by sharp lines of party conflict. The best portion of the Democratic party recognized the true proportions and character of the war; were for according all belligerent rights to the Confederates; and strenuously insisted that its objects should be limited to the restoration of the Union. They claimed that the war for the Union had been cheated of its due effect by the intrusion of sectional rancour and the injudicious or unfaithful acts of agents of the Government. They resisted the inauguration, now attempted at Washington, of a system of spoliation and disfranchisement in the invaded country of the South; they declared that such a system would rob the cause of its sanctity, and render success more difficult of attainment.

The Radical party, on the other hand, which controlled a majority of votes in Congress, were for extending the contest to the extinction of slavery, and punishing the “( rebels” with every conceivable means that the quick imagination of hate and revenge could suggest. They could not realize the fact that the contest had risen to the dignity of war. Their great mistake was that they habitually underrated the extent and strength of “the rebellion,” just as they had formerly underrated and contemned the grievances of the South and their hold on the Southern mind. They refused to apply even Vattel's test of a civil war, viz.: “that a considerable body of insurgents had risen against the sovereign ;” they repudiated all its appurtenances of a humane code of warfare, the exchange of prisoners, etc.; and the consequences of such a theory were constantly recurring difficulties about belligerent rights on sea and land, and inhumanities which would sicken the heart of a savage. In fact, this party cared nothing for the success of the war unless it could be used for purposes of revenge upon the Southern people, and embrace a design upon their institution of slavery. Wendell Phillips, a famous Radical orator in the North, had not hesitated to declare that he would deplore a victory of McClellan, because ( “the sore would be salved over,” and it would only be the victory of a slave Union; and that he thanked Beauregard for marshalling his army before Washington, because it had conferred upon Congress the constitutional power to abolish slavery.

The appointment of John Pope to what was now the most important command in Virginia was a triumph of the Radical party at Washington, and dated that system of spoliation and disfranchisement in the Southern States, now to be distinctly announced in forms of authority and in the text of official orders. Pope assumed his new command in the following address, which long amused the world as a curiosity in military literature and the braggart flourish of a man, whom the Richmond Examiner deascribed as “a compound of Bobadil and Munchausen:”