  INTRODUCTION CHARACTER OF WAR What was the character of the War? Though one of the greatest wars of modern times, having its rise and fall before the eyes of all the world, yet men are to-day in doubt as to the true term by which to describe it. Was it a Civil War? Such a conception omits the claim of the North that the Federal Government as such fought to maintain its constitutional supremacy, and the claim of the South that the seceding states but exercised their constitutional rights in seceding, and as states fought to maintain that principle. A civil war betokens one people, in the same country, subjects of the same power, at war among themselves. Here, though afore-time countrymen, when the battle was joined, there were two rival governments, and the territories of the contending parties Was it a Rebellion? Such a conflict indicates a revolt of citizens or subjects against their acknowledged sovereign. Whether in the United States the citizen owed allegiance to the Federal Government as against his State Government was a question upon which men had divided since the birth of the Republic. The men of the North responded to the call of the sovereign to whose allegiance they acknowledged fealty—the men of the South did the same. It was a battle between rival conceptions of sovereignty rather than one between a sovereign and its acknowledged citizens. Was it a Revolution? A revolution is a successful movement of citizens or subjects against their sovereign. Here the identity of the Sovereign was in dispute, and the effort, though of unexampled magnitude, was unsuccessful. In addition the parties to the conflict held irreconcilable conceptions as to what constituted the right of revolution—one insisting that it was a God-given right inherent in any people sufficiently numerous to maintain a National existence; the other, that it was a mere power to strike, dependent upon success to prove the legitimacy of the claim. PARTIES TO CONFLICT The parties to the Conflict were not rival nations, but compatriots of the same flag; joint inheritors of the English Common Law and the ideals of liberty consecrated by centuries of heroic struggle; descendants of an ancestry knit in political sympathy by their successful battle for independence from the Mother Country, and the achievements by which they made their new-born nation great; CAUSES OF WAR The causes of the War were deep-seated and complex. They were Old-World antagonisms, religious and political, antedating, and yet surviving, the settlements at Jamestown and Plymouth Rock, New Amsterdam, and New Orleans;— The early development in the two great divisions of the country, of diverse economic conditions—a land of small farms and multiplied industrial activities confronting one of large plantations and agricultural supremacy;— The Protective Tariff, at first enacted to secure for American manufactures a chance to compete successfully with those of the Old World, but, in its results, a burdensome system, under which the agriculturists of the South paid onerous tribute to the manufacturers of the North;— Slavery—an institution which specialized more and more the interests of the South in the great exporting staples of cotton, rice and tobacco, driving manufactures and mining into the more hospitable regions of the North;—an institution whose life or death was within the exclusive power of the separate states where it was legalized, and yet the manifold incidents of whose existence were the subject of frequent National legislation, and hence ever recurring occasions of sectional strife;—an institution which quickened in time among the people of the non-slaveholding states the conviction that it was a sin, with the consequent charge that all responsible for its existence were parties to a crime, thus arousing the bitter resentment of devout men in the slaveholding states, who, protesting their innocence of wrong, challenged the right of their Northern brethren to sit in judgment upon them;— The Immense Foreign Immigration into the North and West;—thus developing in those sections the strongest sentiments of Nationalism, while the South, unaffected by any such forces, adhered to the early ideals of state pride and state supremacy;— State Sovereignty versus National Supremacy;—the first, the shield behind which aggrieved minorities sought to curb arrogant majorities and safeguard the rights and interests of community life; the second, the ideal by which the preservation of the Union was to be assured and its dignity and power at home and abroad vindicated;— The Missouri Compromise—its enactment and repeal, the controversies as to the power of Congress to prohibit slaveholders from migrating with their slaves into the territories, the enactment by Congress of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and the attitude of certain Northern States in attempting to defeat its execution, the Underground Railroad, the decision in the Dred Scott case, the armed conflicts in Kansas, the John Brown Raid and the sympathy evinced at the North for the man and his venture; and finally: The asserted right of the Cotton States to withdraw from the Union, and the declared purpose of the Federal Government to defeat their aspiration by force of arms. Add to all the foregoing the vision of mighty armies struggling for mastery, the terrors and miseries of war—contrasted with the heroism and devotion which it aroused, and there results a combination of causes which will THE ISSUES INVOLVED If the causes of the war were manifold and perplexing, the exact object for which each of the contending parties did battle is only less difficult of precise definition. A brief consideration of some of the many forms in which the popular voice has sought to express the conception will serve to illustrate the truth of this suggestion. "The North fought to preserve the Union—the South, to destroy it." That one great element of the Northern people took up arms at the call of the Federal Government to prevent a dismemberment of the Union is undoubtedly true. That another element regarded the maintenance of the Union under the existing constitution as unworthy of effort is equally true. The first went forth at the earliest call to preserve the Union under the old constitution; the second came later to the battle to fight for a Union with a constitution which should decree the abolition of slavery. That the Southern people sought to establish the independence of their new Confederacy and to that extent a dismemberment of the Union is true, but that they desired the destruction of the Union and the principles of liberty and law which its establishment was designed to assure are conclusions not easily deducible from their aspirations or necessities. "The North fought for empire, the South for independence." That the North fought to keep within the limits of the Union the domain stretching from the Potomac to the Rio Grande is true, but that the great mass of her people were actuated by a desire to hold the land as tributary and its people as subjects is not true. The splendid ideal "The North fought to destroy slavery; the South, to extend and maintain it." That slavery was the most potent factor in developing the conditions which finally precipitated war is true. That the two parties to the conflict joined battle upon the issue of its maintenance or destruction seems inconsistent with their solemnly declared purposes and promises, made at the time. President Lincoln at his inauguration proclaimed: "I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so." This pledge of the President was but a reaffirmation of the platform of his party, and both were, in turn, confirmed by the declaration of Congress that the war was fought, "to defend and maintain the supremacy of the constitution and to preserve the Union with all the dignity, equality and rights of the several states unimpaired." President Davis presented the attitude of his people and government when he declared: "All we ask is to be let alone—that those who never held power over us shall "We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for independence.... Say to Mr. Lincoln for me that I shall at any time be pleased to receive proposals for peace, on the basis of our independence. It will be useless to approach me with any other." That the people of America in the nineteenth century of the Christian era should have resorted to war in order to settle questions of constitutional and moral right must forever constitute an impeachment of the capacity for self-government and the ethical standards of the men responsible for its occurrence. The charge that the people of twenty-three states in four of which slavery was legalized arose in arms against their fellow-citizens of the remaining eleven and, despite the constitutional safeguards with which the institution in the latter states was confessedly surrounded, invaded their land, burnt thousands of their homes and killed tens of thousands of their citizens in a desperate determination to destroy slavery, is as compromising to American character as the counter accusation that the people of eleven states, with no existing menace to their constitutional rights in regard to slavery, resorted to secession and aggressive war in order to secure new guarantees for the safety of the institution. Charges so dishonoring to the American people should not be made and above all should not be accepted as true—unless compelled by the inexorable facts of history. STATE RIGHTS vs. FEDERAL RIGHTS "The South fought for States' Rights—Home Rule; the North, for Federal rights—National Supremacy." Analysis is the foe of confusion and the friend of the light. Motives and methods, grouped and commingled, present difficulties of right appreciation which ofttimes vanish if separated into their component parts. The commonwealth of Virginia bore a not inconspicuous part in the Civil War. It will subserve the cause of truth and assist to a clearer understanding of the complex conditions referred to, if we endeavor to portray the motives which impelled the people of this one state during those fateful days of 1860-61.
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