ed (not seldom with intent to dispirit),
and the people believed on the authority of reliable gentlemen from
Richmond, or Union refugees whose information could be trusted. At one
time the Rebels had mined eleven acres in the neighborhood of Bull Bun;
at another, there were regiments of giants on their way from Texas,
who, first paralyzing our batteries by a yell, would rush unscathed
upon the guns, and rip up the unresisting artillerymen with
bowie-knives three feet long, made for that precise service, and the
only weapon to which these Berserkers would condescend; again, for the
fiftieth time, France and England had definitely agreed upon a forcible
intervention; finally, in order to sap the growing confidence of the
people in President Lincoln, one of his family was accused of
communicating our plans to the Rebels, and this at a time when the
favorite charge against his administration was the having no plan at
all. The public mind, as the public folly is generally called, was kept
in a fidget by these marvels and others like them. But the point to
which we would especially call attention is this: that while the war
slowly educated the North, it has had comparatively little effect in
shaking the old nonsense out of the South. Nothing is more striking, as
we trace Northern opinion through those four years that seemed so long
and seem so short, than to see how the minds of men were sobered,
braced, and matured as the greatness of the principles at stake became
more and more manifest; how their purpose, instead of relaxing, was
strained tighter by disappointment, and by the growing sense of a
guidance wiser than their own. Nor should we forget how slow the great
body of the people were in being persuaded of the expediency of
directly attacking slavery, and after that of enlisting colored troops;
of the fact, in short, that it must always be legal to preserve the
source of the law's authority, and constitutional to save the country.
The prudence of those measures is now acknowledged by all, and
justified by the result; but we must not be blind to the deeper moral,
that justice is always and only politic, that it needs no precedent,
and that we were prosperous in proportion as we were willing to be true
to our nobler judgment. In one respect only the popular understanding
seems always to have been, and still to remain, confused. Our notion of
treason is a purely traditional one, derived from countries where the
question at