s all that was necessary to enlist the people on their side.
Ridiculed, threatened, ostracised, and assaulted, they could not be
turned from their purpose, and their achievements constitute the
grandeur and glory of the Republican party. There were no apologists
for wrong-doers among those men, and there ought to be none in the
Republican party to-day. The South was the great disturbing element
then as it is now; and the causes which rendered it so are, in a
large measure, the same. The people were divided into three
classes--slave-holders, slaves, and poor whites, or "poor white trash"
as the latter were called by the colored people because of their utter
insignificance in that community. Its peculiar condition established in
the large land and slave-owning portion of the people a sort of
privileged class who claimed and exercised the right not only to rule
the South, but the nation; and for many years that class controlled
both. Gorged with wealth and drunk with power, considering themselves
born to command and govern, being undisputed rulers, almost by
inheritance in their States, the Southern politicians naturally became
aggressive, dictatorial, and determined to ruin the country and sever
the Union rather than consent to relinquish power, even though called
upon to do so by constituted methods. Hence it was that, when the people
of the great North and Northwest concluded to assert their rights and
choose a man from among themselves for President, they rebelled and
forced upon the country so far as they were concerned, the most
causeless and unnatural war recorded in history.

I shall not dwell upon the history of the war or attempt to detail its
horrors and sum up its cost. I leave that task to others. If the wounds
made by it have been healed, which I do not concede, far be it from my
purpose to re-open them. My sole reason for referring to the war at all
is to remind the Northern people of some of the agencies employed in its
successful prosecution. When it commenced, the principal labor element
of the South--the source of its production and wealth--was the colored
race. Four millions and a half of these unfortunate people were there,
slaves and property of the men who refused to submit to the will of the
people lawfully expressed through the ballot-box. They were the bone and
sinew of the Confederacy, tilling its fields and producing sustenance
for its armies, while many of the best men of the North were compelle