very of
men who have been trained under law, who are civilized and hate
personal brawls, who are so protected by society as to have
dismissed all thought of self-defense, the whole force of whose life
is turned to peaceful pursuits. These arrogant conspirators against
government, with Chinese vanity, believed that they could blow away
these self-respecting citizens as chaff from the battlefield. Few
of them are left alive to ponder their mistake! Here, then, are the
roots of this civil war. It was not a quarrel of wild beasts, it
was an inflection of the strife of ages, between power and right,
between ambition and equity. An armed band of pestilent
conspirators sought the nation's life. Her children rose up and
fought at every door and room and hall, to thrust out the murderers
and save the house and household. It was not legitimately a war
between the common people of the North and South. The war was set
on by the ruling class, the aristocratic conspirators of the South.
They suborned the common people with lies, with sophistries, with
cruel deceits and slanders, to fight for secret objects which they
abhorred, and against interests as dear to them as their own lives,
I charge the whole guilt of this war upon the ambitious, educated,
plotting, political leaders of the South. They have shed this ocean
of blood. They have desolated the South. They have poured poverty
through all her towns and cities. They have bewildered the
imagination of the people with phantasms, and led them to believe
that they were fighting for their homes and liberty, whose homes
were unthreatened, and whose liberty was in no jeopardy. These
arrogant instigators of civil war have renewed the plagues of Egypt,
not that the oppressed might go free, but that the free might be
oppressed. A day will come when God will reveal judgment, and
arraign at his bar these mighty miscreants; and then, every orphan
that their bloody game has made, and every widow that sits
sorrowing, and every maimed and wounded sufferer, and every bereaved
heart in all the wide regions of this land, will rise up and come
before the Lord to lay upon these chief culprits of modern history
their awful witness. And from a thousand battlefields shall rise up
armies of airy witnesses, who, with the memory of their awful
sufferings, shall confront the miscreants with shrieks of fierce
accusation; and every pale and starved prisoner shall raise his
skinny hand in judgme