own terms. No party can get
possession of the government which is not in sympathy with the temper
of the people, and the people, forced into war against their will by
the unprovoked attack of pro-slavery bigotry, are resolved on pushing
it to its legitimate conclusion. War means now, consciously with many,
unconsciously with most, but inevitably, abolition. Nothing can save
slavery but peace. Let its doom be once accomplished, or its
reconstruction (for reconstruction means nothing more) clearly seen to
be an impossibility, and the bond between the men at the South who were
willing to destroy the Union, and those at the North who only wish to
save it, for the sake of slavery, will be broken. The ambitious in both
sections will prefer their chances as members of a mighty empire to
what would always be secondary places in two rival and hostile nations,
powerless to command respect abroad or secure prosperity at home. The
masses of the Southern people will not feel too keenly the loss of a
kind of property in which they had no share, while it made them
underlings, nor will they find it hard to reconcile themselves with a
government from which they had no real cause of estrangement. If the
war be waged manfully, as becomes a thoughtful people, without insult
or childish triumph in success, if we meet opinion with wiser opinion,
waste no time in badgering prejudice till it become hostility, and
attack slavery as a crime against the nation, and not as individual
sin, it will end, we believe, in making us the most powerful and
prosperous community the world ever saw. Our example and our ideas will
react more powerfully than ever on the Old World, and the consequence
of a rebellion, aimed at the natural equality of all men, will be to
hasten incalculably the progress of equalization over the whole earth.
Above all, Freedom will become the one absorbing interest of the whole
people, making us a nation alive from sea to sea with the consciousness
of a great purpose and a noble destiny, and uniting us as slavery has
hitherto combined and made powerful the most hateful aristocracy known
to man.

McCLELLAN OR LINCOLN?

1864

The spectacle of an opposition waiting patiently during several months
for its principles to turn up would be amusing in times less critical
than these. Nor was this the worst. If there might be persons malicious
enough to think that the Democratic party could get along very well
without principles,