ou will, call it what you will, umble-pie is
umble-pie, and nothing else. The people instinctively so understood it.
They rejected with disgust a plan whose mere proposal took their
pusillanimity for granted, and whose acceptance assured their
self-contempt. At a moment when the Rebels would be checkmated in
another move, we are advised to give them a knight and begin the game
over again. If they are not desperate, what chance of their accepting
offers which they rejected with scorn before the war began? If they are
not desperate, why is their interest more intense in the result of our
next Presidential election than even in the campaign at their very
door? If they were not desperate, would two respectable men like
Messrs. Clay and Holcomb endure the society of George Saunders? General
McClellan himself admitted the righteousness of the war by volunteering
in it, and, the war once begun, the only real question has been whether
the principle of legitimate authority or that of wanton insurrection
against it should prevail,--whether we should have for the future a
government of opinion or of brute force. When the rebellion began, its
leaders had no intention to dissolve the Union, but to reconstruct it,
to make the Montgomery Constitution and Jefferson Davis supreme over
the whole country, and not over a feeble fragment of it. They knew, as
we knew, the weakness of a divided country, and our experience of
foreign governments during the last four years has not been such as to
lessen the apprehension on that score, or to make the consciousness of
it less pungent in either of the contending sections. Even now,
Jefferson Davis is said to be in favor of a confederation between the
Free and the Slave States. But what confederation could give us back
the power and prestige of the old Union? The experience of Germany
surely does not tempt to imitation. And in making overtures for peace,
with whom are we to treat? Talking vaguely about "the South," "the
Confederate States," or "the Southern people," does not help the
matter; for the cat under all this meal is always the _government_
at Richmond, men with everything to expect from independence, with much
to hope from reconstruction, and sure of nothing but ruin from reunion.
And these men, who were arrogant as equals and partners, are to be
moderate in dictating terms as conquerors! If the people understood
less clearly the vital principle which is at hazard in this contest, if
they